The stuff of legend
Chris Ware’s latest work comes in a sturdy box filled with goodies
Alot of people are going to be talking about Building Stories very soon, and all of them will be faced with a problem: What exactly do you say it is?
Graphic novelist Chris Ware’s first large-scale work since the American Book Award-winning Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth isn’t a “book” by any standard definition of the word. For example, keen-eyed readers may already have noticed the lack of the standard page count in the information with this review; that’s because what we have here, housed snugly in a sturdy box, are 14 discrete volumes of varying size and configuration, all printed on non-gloss white paper, ranging from large hardcovers to fold-out game-board style constructions to single narrow folded strips, with nary a page number in sight. You can almost hear the folks at Kindle gnashing their teeth.
All the formal variety is in aid of a narrative that’s actually classically simple in its overarching design. As the gentle wordplay in the title hints, Building Stories follows the lives of the residents of a century-old threestorey Chicago apartment block. On the ground floor is the building’s longtime landlord, a lonely spinster; on the second floor is a young couple locked in an abuse-torn relationship; on the top floor is a single woman who eventually marries an architect and moves to the suburbs. The closest thing to a protagonist, that woman’s biography traces a diminishing-expectations arc that will be familiar in tone to Ware readers: Once an idealistic young art student, she finds herself, through a series of decisions that somehow felt right at the time, in frustrated isolation, with a daughter she loves but can hardly handle and a husband who always seems otherwise occupied.
That husband can stand in basic type for Building Stories’ men, a group by turns distant, domineering, bullying and ineffectual. In a daring choice executed with great insight and nuance, Ware reserves the perspective almost exclusively for the female characters. The one exception is Branford, “the best bee in the world,” who lives in a hive outside the building and gets two volumes to himself. Consider the role played by males in a bee colony and you’ve got a conceptual prank that puts the lie to charges that Ware lacks a sense of humour.
Great as that joke is, though, don’t be fooled. It’s been suggested more than once that Jimmy Corrigan’s subtitle should have substituted “saddest” for “smartest,” and indeed the new work is drenched in Ware’s customary melancholia. In both his visuals and in his writing, Ware is a poet of thwarted lives, loneliness, urban anomie, disconnection.
With his comics colleague Seth, Ware shares a retro aesthetic that implies we’ve long passed our cultural peak and are heading collectively into a future both tawdry and frightening. The details are telling: the nearer the action approaches the present, the more everyone seems to be staring at their personal communication devices all the time. In one of the biggest panels in the whole work, a couple are shown naked in their bedroom, presumably pre-sex, their only light source the unearthly glow from the iPad perched on the husband’s chest.
For all the innovation on display in Building Stories, Ware’s greatest coup is in his treatment of time. The 14 parts, each encompassing their own narrative, can be read with equal effect in any order. Sometimes separate strands overlap, sometimes the same incidents and scenarios are told from different perspectives, Rashomon-style. You could think of it as a storytelling Rubik’s Cube, except that you’re spared the chore of “solving” it; the open-ended order forces us out of ingrained linear reading habits, wrong-foots us in a way that ultimately serves to keep us on our toes. Even the extreme smallness of some of the lettering, a device that has irked more than a few Ware readers in the past, has a point: it brings you closer to the work, literally, and the closer you get, the more you’ll see.
In the end, then, we’re back to the beginning. With Ware, the work’s impact is ultimately inseparable from its physical reality. There will probably be a certain amount of pressure to make Building Stories eventually available in more conventional form, and that’s all the more reason to grab this unique experience with both hands while you can. At a time when technology conspires to render the reading experience ever less tactile and immersive, Building Stories is a resounding and righteous blow for the opposite, a thing of multifarious wonder to be lived in as much as lived with. A building in itself, you could say.