Building Stories

Ostensibly, Chris Ware's Building Stories is a graphic novel, but really it's more like a collection. It comes in a box about the size of a breakfast tray, and has 14 distinct items: a standard graphic novel, a few cardboard strips, a newspaper, booklets, pamphlets, what looks like a board game, etc. They can be read in any order, and thus each person, depending on the order they choose, will have a different experience with it.

Mostly the "book" is about a woman, who I think is not given a name. She has one leg, the result of a childhood accident. Throughout the timeline of the story presented here we see her from her teenage years to approaching middle age. She has a boyfriend, who impregnates her, gets her an abortion, and dumps her. She then lives in the top floor of a three-floor apartment building in Chicago, where she lives a lonely existence working in a flower shop. Then she finds love, marries, and has a daughter.

Throughout the pieces of the book we hear her experience a variety of stories--the time she was an au pair for a rich couple; her relationship with her first boyfriend; her father dying of cancer; when she and her husband move to the suburbs; and when her best friend commits suicide.

There are also peripheral stories concerning the other occupants of the building: a feuding couple on the second floor, and the landlady, an elderly woman on the first floor. I read a few pieces early on that dealt more with these people, but as I read on they faded from view and it all focused on the one-legged woman.

There are also a couple of pieces that deal cartoonishly (not a pejorative here) about an anthropomorphic bee named Brandon. I didn't quite get the parallel, although he is picked on and eventually becomes trapped in a basement, his fate unknown.

As interesting as the construction of the set is, it's kind of hard to get one's mind around it. Reading this woman's story in bits and pieces, and not in a pre-set order, is a bold choice, but at times disorienting. Also, Ware's illustrations are at times hard to follow, as they don't follow a strictly left-to-right, top-to-bottom pattern, and even with arrows pointing us along the way, I got confused.

The main character can also be very self-pitying. She's a former art student with thin skin, and abandons her artistic ambitions and then regrets it. The main graphic novel opens with a spread that has her thoughts when she's at her lowest: "I just want to fall asleep and never wake up again. Is it possible to hate yourself to death?"

But her story is fairly absorbing. I liked some of Ware's touches, such as having the building itself as a character, counting up all the events: "501 tenants. 3 births. 2 deaths. 29 marriages. 178 trysts. 171 cats. 14 diaries. 886 screams. 217 punches. 106,323 breakfasts...68, 418 orgasms...469 feelings of 'being watched'...3,312 dreams of dismemberment...11,627 lost childhood memories...this building now has to admit to feeling a little bit grateful for the arrival each day of 24 more hours yet to come."

I also found his representation of marriage to be eerily accurate, especially when he depicts them sitting in the living room, each on their own laptop.

Building Stories is a fascinating work, mostly intriguing if at times too overwhelming. It might be useful to return to it someday and try to tackle it all in one long sitting.