House Of Leaves

It took me a couple years to discover Danielewski's novel, and here, on page 35, I feel I am deeply into it, yet I have a good 600-some to go. It already feels like the house of the novel: larger on the inside than the outside. There is, we readers are to believe, a house that harbors something dark, transmitted to those who inhabit it and visited upon those who read about it. Were it not for unusual coincidences, I might not be writing this, but coincidences make me smile.

On our drive up from Los Angeles to San Francisco earlier today, we say a sign mentioning Utica (not New York, of course—a school, I believe, in some town before we got from the 580 to the 80), and then I ran across mention in the novel of a chest made in Utica, NY. Worse, Sunshine was calling out clues to a crossword in People magazine. One was a three-letter word for a wing constructed at right angles to a building, and the novel's house was almost updated in 1981 with an ell.

Now I ask you, how odd is it to encounter two such coincidences in short a space, both physically and temporally? I must confess I am intrigued by Danielewski's novel, and to a degree newer novels rarely achieve. Never mind the humor, he subtle errors, and the author's mastery of differing voices.