A timeless nugget of polished pulp.
Clowes’ latest graphic novel weaves nine interrelated stories into a tale of curiosity, corruption, and humanity’s addiction to significance.
The book opens with a two-page spread of the roiling waters, cratered land, and fiery skies of our primordial planet, then runs through snapshots of history: single-cell organisms, ancient Egyptians, the plague, Shakespeare, Hitler, The Beverly Hillbillies. It’s an ambitious opening that the book lives up to through its intersecting narratives of Vietnam soldiers, counterculture, horror, ambition, control, and mommy issues—all spinning around the orbit of a woman named Monica and her quest for her origins. Initially we meet Monica’s mother, Penny, as an art student in the 1960s, seduced away from her sedate life plans by the ideas of her new bohemian lover and his friends. As Penny delves deeper into free love and artistic pursuits, she soon finds herself a mother to young Monica and the subject of Monica’s observations as Penny cycles through men, eventually abandoning Monica to follow her own path—perhaps into the clutches of a desert-dwelling cult. After a macabre interlude about a young man’s return to his boyhood home only to find the town under a sinister influence, we catch up with Monica as an adult, dealing with her own loss and encounter with the uncanny. In pursuit of her long-gone mother, Monica peels back opulent and fantastical layers of her own life until she finds the haunting core. Clowes strikes an irresistible balance of cultural criticism, philosophy, and pulp. The pacing and interconnection of the stories tease the reader along as narration and dialogue pop with insight and humor. Clowes’ art retains a classic comics aesthetic while delivering a thoroughly modern vibe.
A timeless nugget of polished pulp.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781683968825
Page Count: 106
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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