Review: Only Revolutions

Yesterday, I finished (and for that matter, started) Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, Only Revolutions. I fell in love with his first and most popular work, House of Leaves, earlier this year for its atmospheric feel, innovative layout, and challenging text. Never before had a book made me feel so outright frightened or borderline insane. It was definitely a rush, but I could see how people would judge Danielewski as pretentious or gimmicky. In the end, though, it's the gimmick that made me latch onto the book as something genuinely unique.

Only Revolutions can be considered a mash up of quite a few things. Its writing style isn't quite poetry, isn't quite narrative, isn't quite jazz/hip-hop inspired rhyme. It's pretty much whatever the author felt like, with a few very strict rules to follow. For one, each page of text has one hundred and eighty words on it - ninety of them oriented one way and ninety the other. If one counts all words on both pages of the open book, then, it totals precisely three hundred and sixty.

The book, without spoiling, evokes in both its text and in its design the cyclical nature of everything in life. Periods of happiness and sorrow, the birth, rise, fall, and death of each generation and paradigm. What intrigued me most, though, were the changes that every object, person, and setting in the book seemed to undergo (references change the nature of bracelets the characters wear, the cars they drive, the scenery).

During a segment of the book, the lovers are stranded and work in a diner for money. Even their work shifts seemed to be in flux - with Sam and Hailey's shifts floating toward one another and then slowly moving away. When they escape this drudgery, they are off just as they had been before, without care or explanation, but it just makes sense in that way. No one wants to be imprisoned in their own boredom.

There were very few constants in the tale of Sam and Hailey. The American landscape was key, here, the roads they traversed and the vehicles they used to do the traversing. The fact that no matter what, the landscape, the stone, and the sky, would be there long after any insignificant reproach of our species had passed. One could say that love was constant throughout the majority of the book, but the progression of the love the two characters had for one another was also in flux. Sam would cheat, Hailey would be tempted, they would hardly see each other throughout some stints of their work. Their relationship grew until it became lifelong.

The ending changes everything, and then restarts it down the other side; it's perfectly feasible to read one side of the story and flip the book, then read the other as if it was a sequel. I found it to be as evocative as any piece of literature I'd read, particularly a portion dealing with the threat of the loss of a loved one:

"Butchering their prejudice. Patience. Their Value. Because I'm without value. I'm the coming of every holocaust. Turning no lost. Rending tissue, sinew and bone. Excepting no suffering. By me all levees will break. All silos heave. I will walk heavy. And I will walk strange. Because I am too soon. Because without Her, I am Only Revolutions of Ruin."

This in particular reminds me of a very child-like feeling, that feeling of tremendous loss that draws all your attention, forces you to focus. That kind of loss that turns you into a whirlwind of anger and misguided rage. We, as we grow, learn to shrug this feeling off in favor of doing something more productive, but as a child (sixteen and freeeeee), we would destroy the world to get back what we had lost.