My favorite book of 2012 was Chris Ware’s Building Stories. Perhaps I should not even be calling it “a book” since Building Stories comes in a box and contains 14 different comic book artifacts — thin pamphlets and hardbound volumes, broadsheets and fold-out posters — but I like how calling such a treasure trove “a book” wonders at the edges of that word. What, exactly, is a book? This turns out to be a topic that I’m perennially fascinated with, and as I perused Ware’s amalgamation, I found myself reconsidering some of my basic assumptions about what constituted bookishness: was a book defined by its composition? By an expectation of narrative? By a currency of pages? By its singular thingness?
Indeed, Building Stories subverts more than a couple mainstays of the medium. There is no table of contents. No set of instructions. No “if this then that.” No beginning, middle, or end. You must pick up one of the objects (I went for one of the hardbound books first, as it somehow felt like a more legitimate starting point) and then simply launch into the ether. But gradually, through the slow, exquisite visual pacing that defines Ware’s storytelling, a narrative emerges, or not so much a narrative but a life. Or not so much a life but lives — interconnected by a slightly dilapidated three-story Chicago brownstone that occasionally offers its own silent advice to its resident cast of characters. The top floor apartment is occupied by our anti-heroine, an unnamed melancholic woman with a prosthetic leg who works in a flower shop and worries the days alone with her cat. The middle floor is haunted by a couple trapped in one of those restless equilibriums two clicks short of love, and on the ground floor we find the aging landlady, who has seen enough to know that loneliness is a gift.
As one booklet ended and I picked up the next, I found myself skipping back and forth through time, in a happenstance hopscotch of my own design. In one pamphlet, the woman was in art school, in another, she was married with a child, in still another she was just out of school and au pairing for a rich couple. Temporality was undermined, shorn, skirted. And yet the sum of such dislocation began to work its magic on me. The sequence of booklets was like one of Ware’s pages, where the panels are not always delivered in obvious sequence but rather in an orbiting constellation of possibility. At first, you want to know which is the right way to read a page, so that you can get it right, but once you give up this need for direction, the potential for multiple narratives frees you from the responsibility of linearity. You begin to read as one lives life — out of sequence, with stops and starts, with side plots that take all of our attention and then just as quickly evaporate into nothing.
What I find particularly effective about Building Stories is the combination of this narrative multiplicity with the beautifully rendered banality of Ware’s subject matter. Ware has such a gift for tracking the seductive rhythms of life’s more ordinary moments. A cat on a bed. A woman shifts positions. The cat, still on the bed. Snow falls. The woman shifts again. The cat shifts. It is no longer snowing. The medium of graphic novels — caught somewhere between the pacing of a movie and a book — is especially suited for clocking such passage of time. Each of Ware’s panels becomes a choice to capture a certain moment, but why capture the moment when nothing has seemingly happened? Yet the choice to do so, the choice to represent that moment, makes something happen. The cat shifting becomes all cats who have ever shifted, who will ever shift. It is why we love literature; it is why we love photographs; it is why we love to hear stories over a cup of coffee. Let me tell you this so we can make it realer than real.
In this regard, Ware’s onomatopoetics are deceivingly evocative. Here he uses a well-worn tool from the comic book artist’s cabinet — that is, the representation of an action sound through a word (kerplam!) — and lovingly reapplies it to his wheelhouse of his melancholic domestic oblivion. Set goes the tea kettle onto the countertop, plop goes a warm body into a couch, fff goes a pair of jeans as she pulls them up over the last inch of waistline flesh. This symphony of normalcy is composed of imperfect approximations, but their imperfections are what makes them so delicious because we know these gestures, this last inch of flesh. That fff is louder than any kerplam can hope to be.
Building Stories gives me hope for the future of storytelling. Our increasing reliance on visuals and our tendency to now digest, capture, and broadcast media in bite-sized chunks does not necessarily spell the end of nuance and pathos. Rather, faced with the splintering of old media, today’s storytellers must execute their craft with even more precision and restraint, even as the boundaries of the book become increasingly blurred.
More from A Year in Reading 2012
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: I wrestled a bit with putting this one on because he’s getting much respect from all over the place. But it’s well-deserved. This book sprawls, it brawls, it doesn’t apologize, it enlightens and delights. A welcome return from a major talent.
Halfway House by Katharine Noel: Remember not wanting to put a book down? Sometimes I forget the simple pleasure of a book that is so beautifully crafted, so alive, that I simply can’t do anything else until I’m done reading it. This first novel reminded me of what a great feeling that is. I loved it so much that I emailed the author – that’s when I know it’s love.
Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman: A really, really, really sexy book that is also an impressive work of literature. If you’ve ever been young and desperate to get your hands on the object of your desire (and lucky enough to find that he or she can’t keep his or her hands off of you either), you’ll vibe to this love story.
The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter. Full disclosure: I am lucky enough to count Charlie Baxter as a friend, which is how I came by an ARC of this novel, to be published by Pantheon in February 2008. But just ’cause he’s my bud doesn’t mean I don’t know a hell of a book when I read one. Both a meditation on identity and on the nature of love, The Soul Thief is sexy, funny, romantic (without being sentimental) and strange (in the best of ways). It’s both a return to Baxter’s deepest preoccupations as a writer and an exhilarating departure from them. We already know he’s one of our best fiction writers. Don’t miss this one when it comes out.
Surprising for her omission of "Man Gone Down" by Michael Thomas, probably my favorite novel of the year and one of the New York Times editors' 10 Best Books of 2007. Maybe she doesn't want to appear too biased because she mentioned it in her NY Times editorial last July.
In last week's review of Faint Praise by Gail Pool, James Wolcott quotes Pool on the positive influence that book reviewers can have: "Their commentary influences not only literary standards but also cultural attitudes, helping to shape what we think about many issues and whether we think about certain issues at all."
Man Gone Down received no publicity and was published only in paperback by Grove, so I think the NY Times editors made a good call in giving this book some well-deserved attention.
Ooh, I can't wait for that new Charles Baxter!
Man Gone Down is an extremely fine novel but it wasn't one of my *very* favorites that I read in 2007. As I made clear in my initial comments, I used my level of immediate personal excitement in making this very idiosyncratic short list. This is not the "best" of anything.
I'm a little disturbed by the use of the word "surprising" about its absence from my list for two reasons: first, because the piece I wrote for the NYTBR was a reported essay, not an editorial, in which I spoke to Morgan Entrekin, an editor from Grove (not Michael's editor) and made no particular mention of Man Gone Down except as a book they had published this year that was prominently reviewed in the NYTBR (which, as I pointed out, hadn't prominently reviewed a work of fiction by a black man in some time)
Two: I hope, hope, hope this isn't true and it may be a bit of the racial discomfort/paranoia that comes with being a black person in America but I really hope that the commenter isn't surprised I didn't mention Thomas because he and I are the same race. This crossed my mind because…well, why isn't it "surprising" that none of the other posters (none of whom are black) mentioned it. All of our lists are idiosyncratic and highly personal. It would really sadden me if race is expected, by anyone, to be part of my criteria. It certainly isn't part of the critieria if you're not black.
Regardless of what "Steve" intended with his comment, there is no paranoia in Martha's tentative response to his words. The fact remains that writers of color have been, and still are, marginalized and isolated into our own special sections of this literary world we work within and outside of. The mainstream voice of the dominant white male has begun to lose its edge in this diversifying world, and what can white writers do now but step into the world people of color inhabit, and how can they truly inhabit what isn't their world but in the one way they can, by creating and controlling the very forums we are allowed to speak in and through. Dave Eggers co-opted the story of a Sudanese man and called it an "autobiography" and failed to let this man's voice, his African voice, live through his own story. The fact that 100% of proceeds went to a non-profit seems to have dulled any real resistance to what Eggers actually has done in taking this story and this man's history and creating a "composite" and slapping the gimmicky "autobiography" title on the front and then letting his own imagination dictate what we know of this Sudanese man's story. Ask any African whether it is an African story and you will hear at best, confusion, and most likely a 'no', and therein lies the truth of what happened to this man's story.
Martha, your hesitation to see what this comment by Steve represents is commendable, but we write in a world that cannot seem to see us outside of race. This is why you will have readings given by so-called progressive hosts that pair African-American writers together when it would be more daring, more in tune with the world we all interact and live in, if different races and varied voices were allowed to live and breathe and expand in the same space.
I was once asked to take part in a reading organized by a writer who prided himself on his progressive politics. I found out he'd paired me with another African-American writer. (And it wasn't even Black History Month) I was unable to take part, it turned out, so declined the invitation. This host could not think outside the racially confining box he'd established for the night and asked ANOTHER African-American writer to read with the already scheduled headlining African-American writer. That second writer also respectfully declined. We will continue to be marginalized until we refuse to let our voices and words be co-opted and pigeonholed by the very same people who feel they're doing us a favor by giving us a forum. The fact is that after all these hip, gimmicky literary works have run their course, people, a la Eggers, will realize that they need to find a story to tell, that they've relied on slick mental somersaults and called it literature and they will look to us and our stories to give their words weight and heart, and my hope is that we will deny them this right to our stories and we will continue to fight for the right to speak and read alongside writers who balance and challenge and create a dialogue with our words, regardless of color.
Thanks Anonymous, for your support. I'm glad I said something. I appreciate your comments as well.