House of Leaves - more than just a gimmick?

[Carvill John]

Unlike Infinite Jest, which I resisted at the time largely becasuse I 
suspected it of excessive reliance on gimmick, I took a chance on House of 
Leaves when it came out. It was fun at first, but after a while it began to 
sag under the weight of its own gimmickiness, and I gave up depsite the fact 
that I was pretty close to finishing it.

Ultimately it just wasn't worth it, I came to think of it as a literary 
Blair Witch Project, with maybe a dash of Rodinsky's Room. With regard to 
the 'innovative' typographhy and layout, and the footnotes and mock academic 
references, I found a little goes a long way, and a lot becomes unbearable.

Incidentally, I read V. for the first time not long after HOL, and when I 
got to the Fausto Mistral section, where he's describing the room in terms 
of which parts face NW, NE etc., I thought this must surely have been an 
influence on Danielewski. In any case Pynchon achieves a lot more in a few 
pages than House of Leavse offers in its entirety.

Ah well, no doubt many will disagree.

Cheers
JC