[backlog] House of Leaves (cont'd) & Green Girl
an old post from 2021 about the joy of giving up
This is an edited version of a post that previously appeared on the Bad Books, Good Times Patreon. It’s no longer accessible, and in retrospect the style turned out rather similar to what I’m going for with ReadOnly, so it felt worth giving it a little reincarnation. So unless otherwise indicated, this is 2-years-ago Matthew talking.
I gave up on reading House of Leaves and I love it and I feel so free.
Despite adding it to my to-read list 10 years ago because a friend recommended it, I asked said friend, hey, did you ever finish reading House of Leaves and it turned out she hadn't. And we both felt pretty similarly about it: liking the premise of the layers of narratives, but just finding them tedious and exhausting. At one point in our chat, we described House of Leaves as a book with some real "I started reading it 8 different times but never finished it" energy. I wound up giving up on the book around page 380 (realizing I had probably enjoyed, like, three of those previous three hundred pages), which is absolutely not the kind of thing I'd have done while setting a GoodReads reading goal, which I intentionally opted out of doing this year! It's such a small thing, but it has made such a difference in how I look at my reading lists. This still feels like I ticked something off the list, like I tried it and I got the idea and decided I was content with that. This newsletter about reading is less about what I am reading and more about rejecting the idea of quantifying your interests.
Instead I woke up one day and realized I had no enthusiasm to continue reading House of Leaves and picked up Green Girl, a novel my girlfriend lent me months ago after I made a comment about how much I liked Frances Ha. And I finished it and it is good and indeed feels like a more adrift, postmodern version of Frances Ha. It's one of those delightfully ambiguous stories about someone who doesn't have any direction in life and it's unclear what their Deal is but perhaps the problem is actually our society and how it has shaped them into the person they are.
It does an interesting postmodern thing where it takes tons of pull quotes from other sources of media, sort of like an epigraph except they're throughout the whole thing. And while it has less "clear" purpose, I'd argue it's more successful (2023 Matthew: although certainly less ambitious – clearly 2021 Matthew was just very relieved to have stopped trying to get into a 20-pound book) than anything House of Leaves was doing because it actually feels like it's tying into the same story, whereas House of Leaves never* made it clear why these were all in the same book.
(*I mean I never finished it but again if it isn't clear on a thematic or conceptual level ~400 pages in, then that's close enough to never.)