Building Stories

Mr Kemp

Building Stories by Chris Ware is a jigsaw puzzle box filled with 14 various different types of comic (as in graphic novel) text: newspapers, clothbound books, flyers and pamphlets.

It tells the story of a Chicago house and the people who live in it, principally, a disabled and lonely florist. Other characters include the senescent landlady, and a youngish woman trapped in a rather miserable and antagonist relationship. Also a bee, called Branford, who has two comics devoted to him out of the fourteen. You can read the comics in any order.

Now, this may sound incredibly hip and obnoxiously ludic: a trite bit of formal rule-breaking and post-modern flim-flam. But it really really isn’t. Chris Ware’s great skill is combining a highly stylised visual sense with profound emotional depth. He’s a very sincere, serious genius masquerading as a mad one. His wit, sense of structure, and intelligence is phenomenal. His characters have all the heart and emotional complexity of a solid realist novel and the interpersonal relationships are spot on.

My favourite is the one between the main character and her mother: we hear the main character’s constant frustration and annoyance with her mother, but we also see how much she relies on her and loves her. That’s quite a key thing here: love. These are characters who love, have loved, will love, and want to love. They are deeply human and likeable. As the main character thinks at one point: “Why does every 'great book' have to always be about criminals or perverts? Can’t I just find one that’s about regular people living everyday life?”

Ware can be a bit bleak however, and his presentation of loneliness can be quite a lot to deal with. It’s accurate and heart-breaking, but can be a bit of a gut punch. That’s probably a good thing, but not say, on a wet Sunday afternoon in January.

I found it an incredibly moving book, building on the surprising punch of his previous novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (excellent book, bad title) which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001.

Compare it to BS Johnson, Joyce, Georges Perec or whatever you want, Building Stories is a masterpiece. Oh, and use a magnifying glass to read it. Ware’s slightly annoying habit is to draw incredibly small pictures, so without a magnifying glass you a) won’t get all the info out of the panels and b) will get horrific eye-strain headaches.