Book of the week: Building Stories by Chris Ware

(Pantheon, $50)

By design, Chris Ware’s “magnificent” new graphic novel will never be read on a Kindle, said Douglas Wolk in The New York Times. “It is a physical object, printed on wood pulp, darn it,” and if you purchase it, you’ll find yourself the owner of a box filled with 14 motley printed pieces—hardbound volumes, pamphlets, a “monstrously huge” broadsheet, even a loose facsimile of a 1940s children’s book. Most feature the dialog boxes you’d expect in a comic book, and each uses Ware’s machine-like drawings to peer into the quiet lives of the residents of one small Chicago apartment building. Designed to be read in any order a reader chooses, this epic group portrait shouldn’t work, and yet it does. Indeed, “it’s so far ahead of the game that it tempts you to find fault just to prove that a human made it.”

“Occasionally, a writer or artist—or both in one—emerges who is so astoundingly original” that they change the rules of what’s possible, said Jake Wallis Simons in The Telegraph (U.K.). Ware has not only “elevated the graphic novel to new heights,” he may be giving us a glimpse into the future of print books. It’s not just the inventiveness of its format but the experience of reading its stories that makes Building Stories a work of genius. We’re allowed to see, in “exquisitely intimate detail,” inside the everyday existences of a florist with a prosthetic leg, her spinster landlady, an acrimonious young couple, an anthropomorphized bee; even the building itself gets a voice. “The result is a startlingly moving impression of a multifaceted and thoroughly absorbing world, rounded with a Chekhovian open-endedness.”

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It’s not a happy world, said Sam Leith in The Guardian (U.K.). As with Ware’s previous book, 2000’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, chances are “you’ll end up suicidal from the worldview,” and yet “he’s so damn good” that you’ll read it anyway. Though his drawing style is sparsely diagrammatic, his characters “always on the verge of being potato heads with dots for eyes,” he “manages to achieve something like documentary realism.” Note the precision with which he captures “the exact way a cat curls up on a bed” or “the weight in people’s bodies and how they carry it.” He’s “so attuned to the possibilities” of his medium “that he finds expressive potential in it that you simply couldn’t have anticipated.” Like the greatest of our novels, Building Stories is “crammed with everyday truth.”