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Chris Ware "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" (Jonathan Cape)
I'm starting to get that the broken American family is really the Big Theme of a lot of contemporary, stylistically ambitious works by US authors. Chris Ware fits right in there with his logophilic brothers Mark Danielewski and David Foster Wallace; even though his narrative experimentation is done in the sequential art form of the comic, it's just as challenging in some ways, but the lonely-man-as-product-of-the-loveless-home is the old wine in his new bottle.
Ware is less scared of presenting pathos without smothering it in irony, which isn't to say that he doesn't use irony and pastiche, both visually and verbally, just as defensively as the other guys when he does employ it, which is still quite a lot. Another good thing about this book is that it understands how central race is to the great American social disaster, and does for race what does Alison Bechdel's Fun Home does for sexuality: show the repression and hypocrisy around it right at the centre of the dysfunctional family. But Ware takes that back through the generations, which makes this a great social and historical novel as well. And at the end of it, you muse on how little time it took to go so deep, instead of wondering where your life went as you as ploughed through page 974 of somebody else's great American novel. The story itself my major interest, but the art is crisp and clean and lovely in its precise depictions of unloveliness - that helps a lot.
In fact, this is an expertly written and illustrated work. Ware is an adept writer, but is equally skilled at letting a few frames fill up with oceans of philosophical and psychological depth. The story flows so seamlessly between the mundane and surreal that it becomes difficult at times to discern which are veridical events. Some themes are explored overtly while others are so subtle that they are easy to miss, and the format allows for subtly depicted revelations that might otherwise feel heavy handed if they were put to words.
Make sure to read the final insert by Ware, where he talks about the influences of the book and the entire works becomes even more eerie and surreal.
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I'm starting to get that the broken American family is really the Big Theme of a lot of contemporary, stylistically ambitious works by US authors. Chris Ware fits right in there with his logophilic brothers Mark Danielewski and David Foster Wallace; even though his narrative experimentation is done in the sequential art form of the comic, it's just as challenging in some ways, but the lonely-man-as-product-of-the-loveless-home is the old wine in his new bottle.
Ware is less scared of presenting pathos without smothering it in irony, which isn't to say that he doesn't use irony and pastiche, both visually and verbally, just as defensively as the other guys when he does employ it, which is still quite a lot. Another good thing about this book is that it understands how central race is to the great American social disaster, and does for race what does Alison Bechdel's Fun Home does for sexuality: show the repression and hypocrisy around it right at the centre of the dysfunctional family. But Ware takes that back through the generations, which makes this a great social and historical novel as well. And at the end of it, you muse on how little time it took to go so deep, instead of wondering where your life went as you as ploughed through page 974 of somebody else's great American novel. The story itself my major interest, but the art is crisp and clean and lovely in its precise depictions of unloveliness - that helps a lot.
In fact, this is an expertly written and illustrated work. Ware is an adept writer, but is equally skilled at letting a few frames fill up with oceans of philosophical and psychological depth. The story flows so seamlessly between the mundane and surreal that it becomes difficult at times to discern which are veridical events. Some themes are explored overtly while others are so subtle that they are easy to miss, and the format allows for subtly depicted revelations that might otherwise feel heavy handed if they were put to words.
Make sure to read the final insert by Ware, where he talks about the influences of the book and the entire works becomes even more eerie and surreal.
( )
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