“Assuming people are dumb asks them to be dumb,” says Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of Only Revolutions, a careening, joyful, sometimes mystical, sometimes confounding tale of two young lovers on a road trip across the United States. “Only complex fiction asks us to discover ourselves and therefore enact ourselves,” he says. And Only Revolutions, like Danielewski’s first novel, House of Leaves, a so-called “difficult” book lauded by critics—and a surprise bestseller that has sold more than 151,000 copies in paperback since 2000, according to Nielsen BookScan —is indeed complex. The book, narrated by teenagers Hailey and Sam, has two beginnings—one at each end of the book—and the text from each of their stories overlaps. Parts of Hailey’s story are printed upside-down on Sam’s pages, and vice-versa. Text appears in four colors and in different fonts and sizes. And that’s just the book’s design. The story itself ranges across the country and across time, as befits the continent-sized passion Hailey and Sam have for one another. His gorgeous, playful writing may occasionally stymie readers, but the author says that, though the book is “complex and challenging in its approach,” it is “at the heart a very simple story about two kids, perpetually 16, who give up everything around them except each other.”
While he was writing Only Revolutions, Danielewski says, “I grew a horn. It started out grain-of-sand size but kept getting larger and larger. I had to get tests. After my second MRI, the doctor… gave me a diagnosis along the lines of ‘You have a somethingsomething ‘osteoma’ below the somethingsomething on the ‘frontal bone’ abovethe ‘right supercilliary arches.’ ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. She replied: ‘You’re a unicorn. Maybe a little off center. Definitely off center.’”