A Brief Review of
Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli.
Hardcover: Pantheon Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Reviewed by Joshua Neds-Fox.
[ This review originally appeared on Joshua’s website,
and is reprinted here with his kind permission. ]
As with The Last Lonely Saturday, I read this graphic novel at the general urging of Ian Sampson via Readernaut. Apparently, Mazzucchelli is something of a touchstone for the indie cartoon movement of the 90s/00s, and hasn’t published anything for 15 years (the Terence Malick of cartooning?). This has been ten years in the making; New York calls it “a cartoonist’s cartoonist’s masterpiece,” and even a patzer like me can clearly see that they’re right. The story follows the missteps of the titular character, a prominent ‘paper architect’ (meaning he’s celebrated entirely for his theory; nothing he’s designed has ever been built) and self-involved prig who marries his opposite and ultimately loses her. We follow his journey to a healthier understanding of himself, his life, his regrets, and the things he might do to begin to make reparation.
Much of the communication is done with the art and the form — characters are stylized according to their character, as it were, speaking in different fonts and occasionally revealing their inner selves by their rendering. Mazzacchelli wants to say something about either/or thinking vs. a more life-affirming complexity, that we’re all both deeply convicted about certain things and deeply contradictory in our expression of those convictions. Mazzacchelli tempts you to sum up characters on first glance — assign them merely two dimensions — and then reveals that you were too quick to judge by adding a third, a fourth dimension a few pages later. And the story swirls through modes of art, myth and legend with dizzying virtuosity and a Pynchonesque flair for character names.
Mazzacchelli also has something to say about how brief this life is, and how comparatively important it is to get over yourself, quickly. He does so by making a connection to elements of his earlier ‘Rubber Blanket’ trilogy, and I won’t spoil the almost-doesn’t-work-but-then-yeah-it-does ending by revealing more. But I will say that, although he’s merciless with his characters, he ultimately shows them great compassion, and he does so without sacrificing the complexity of his narrative.
I imagine this will assume its place in whatever cartoonist’s canon there is, alongside Maus and Blankets and [I’m already out of my depth]. I liked it better than Blankets, I’ll say that. You might, too.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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