Anyone who read House of Leaves, either in its original, somewhat ad hoc internet incarnation or in its printed version, harkened to Mark Z. Danielewski's imbricative impulse, his tegument of concrete poetry, frame narratives, re-mediations of hypertext (back into print), typology, modernism-post-modernism, deconstructivism, narrative interruptus, spatial tropes, and pre-post-proto-neuro-Freudianism. He drew upon a rich history of works that, in their essence, attempted to escape conventional textual limits--prefiguring new media.

His ancestors ranged from Sterne (the black and marbleized pages in Tristram Shandy) to Flann O'Brien (the footnotes that ate the text in The Third Policeman) to Barthelme (the black squares of "The Genius" to the remixed etchings in The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine; or the Hithering, Thithering Djinn); from Joyce (who wanted to mount Finnegan's Wake on a spindle) to Cortazar (whose Hopscotch was originally meant to be published as unbound pages that could be rearranged by readers).

Danielewski's new novel, Only Revolutions, both expands upon and delimits those experiments. The book as object has two covers (two iris scans in different hues), a spine with horizontally bisymmetrical images and text, and two sets of flap copy (each slightly different textually, albeit rotated 180 degrees with respect to each other, but with author photos that are identical, including down to eye color). There is even an identical message on each flap (except for the order of the characters' narratives):

The publisher suggests alternating between Sam & Hailey, reading eight pages at a time.

On the other flap, Hailey takes precedence. To aid in the eight pages at a time rubric, there are two ribbons--as in cookbooks, to mark recipes--provided.

The two narratives, themselves, are upside down with respect to each other, although, on each page, there is also an inverted subtext, and a side column akin to a lefthand navigation menu on a web page.

As with House of Leaves, Danielewski asks of readers a kind of gymnastics that is a physical analog to the sorts of dislocations those of us who grew up in the print age faced when we first encountered the computer screen. The "noise" of having to turn and flip the text is simultaneously a satire on literary status and a claim for same.

Not long ago, I merely showed Danielewski's first novel to a fan of Joyce and scholar of Beckett and said fan nearly leapt from said fan's skin. Interestingly, this person was also quite technophobic. Yet Danielewski is reterritorializing the page with the aid of technology--not for the first time. Weirdly, he is also challenging those who compose in truly hpertextual realms to rethink and retool, to usher in the many chambered mansion that is certainly hypermedia's to claim.