Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine: B

From the front flap:
Ben Tanaka has problems. In addition to being rampantly critical, sarcastic, and insensitive, his long-term relationship is awash in turmoil. His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye, and more to the point, it’s wandering in the direction of white women. This accusation (and its various implications) becomes the […]

From the front flap:
Ben Tanaka has problems. In addition to being rampantly critical, sarcastic, and insensitive, his long-term relationship is awash in turmoil. His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye, and more to the point, it’s wandering in the direction of white women. This accusation (and its various implications) becomes the subject of heated, spiralling debate, setting in motion a story that pits California against New York, devotion against desire, and truth against truth.

Review:
Shortcomings is the story of Ben Tanaka, a guy with no career ambitions beyond managing a movie theater, who nonetheless thinks he knows everything, is always right, and that any kind of contrary opinion is a personal attack. He is relentlessly negative (a phrase I’d been thinking even before his girlfriend used it), insincere, shallow, judgmental, and so incredibly irritating that if I met him in real life I would leave tracks trying to get away from him. So, while I respect the vividness with which Tomine was able to evoke this character, I still pretty much hate him.

Ben’s girlfriend Miko has been putting up with his crap for a couple of years, but she’s not a blameless victim, either. She instigates arguments and goads him into anger, sometimes exaggerating things just to provoke a reaction. She’s often not wrong with what she says—he does have a thing for white women, for example—but the way she says it is guaranteed to lead to a fight. They are very, very bad for each other and their arguments are painful to read because it’s easy to imagine a real couple saying the same things.

The front flap promises a “brutal, funny, and insightful reflection of human shortcomings.” The brutal territory is covered pretty well. Ben is downright mean on occasions, but can’t take it when it’s dished back at him. One of the most memorable scenes is when, after his new white girlfriend has gotten to know him better, she breaks up with him. First, she tries to give an excuse about the return of an old flame, but then admits that he’s the problem. “I could be totally, brutally honest about why I’m doing this, but I’m not sure you’d ever recover.” I actually wish she would have elaborated and that he would’ve had a moment where he realized he was all those things, but it would’ve been unrealistic for him to ever be convinced he was wrong.

I suppose there’s some insight, too, even though Ben doesn’t experience a personality transplant. He does get what he deserves, though, and ends up alone and left behind. Will he learn? I sincerely doubt it. He’ll just go on blaming others for what they did to his life, never realizing all the crap he did to them in return.

What’s utterly missing is the promised funny. Looking back, I can’t remember a single thing that even made me smile, much less laugh. Depressing and cringe-inducing? Yes. Funny? No.

The art is pretty interesting. It’s nothing flashy, but there are some good subtle moments when Ben’s disgust or derision is well portrayed. It adheres rigidly to a rectangular panel shape throughout, and if I were writing this for English class, I’d postulate that this is a metaphor for Ben’s inflexible worldview. Some of the parts I like best use repeated panels to indicate the passage of time, such as the view of the parking lot while Ben is seeing Miko off on a trip to New York, or the last page, where he mulls over all that has happened while gazing out of an airplane window.

While I certainly didn’t like the characters or situations they put themselves in, I still must give Shortcomings kudos for invoking such a reaction. I’d be interested to read more from Tomine, but hopefully something with a slightly more sympathetic protagonist next time.

The material collected in Shortcomings was originally published as issues 9-11 of a comic series called Optic Nerve (Drawn & Quarterly). Issues 1-4 and 5-8 can be found in the collections Sleepwalk and Other Stories and Summer Blonde, respectively.

More reviews of Shortcomings can be found at Triple Take.

Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine)

The Plot
Ben Tanaka, 30, a movie theatre manager, is currently living with his girlfriend, Miko. Their relationship is not the best, but inertia is keeping them going for now. Miko announces that she’s moving to New York for an internship, and that the two of them should maybe take a break during that time. […]

The Plot
Ben Tanaka, 30, a movie theatre manager, is currently living with his girlfriend, Miko. Their relationship is not the best, but inertia is keeping them going for now. Miko announces that she’s moving to New York for an internship, and that the two of them should maybe take a break during that time. Ben’s friend Alice, a perpetual grad-student lesbian, eventually decides to head to New York as well, after the San Francisco area starts to wear on her.

My Thoughts
This 2007 graphic novel comes from author Adrian Tomine, who is apparently known more for short stories than longer fiction. This means little to me, since I had never heard of this person until now and have read nothing else written by them. [I had to stop here and look the author up, because the androgynous name made me uncertain of his gender. It’s a guy.] The subject matter is not really my cup of tea; I can’t say I’m a fan of whiny slackers, regardless of their race, gender or sexual orientation. If this hadn’t been a graphic novel, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to read this in the first place.

The graphics of the graphic novel are not really that groundbreaking. The artist has chosen to stick strictly to panels and keep all of the art within each panel. The size shifted between a 1/6th size box and a 1/9th size box. Your average Calvin & Hobbes strip showed more dynamic art and experimentation with the form than you’re going to find here. There were, at least, no giant deformed hands showing up in the panels, and everyone was pretty much proportional.

I found the characters themselves as lackluster as the graphic depiction of them. Ben, the main character, always behaved and looked as if he was sleepwalking, no matter what the situation he found himself in. Everyone else generally sported a tired and slumped air as well. An aura of boredom with life just oozed from every situation and conversation.

There’s very little plot to support these situations and conversations, unfortunately, as we become spectators in a short period of the life of Ben. He drifts from home to work to hanging out with Alice and back again without really making any connection at all with the reader, either to engage their sympathy or to rile them or anything. He is as blah as his existance, and the only real emotion he can create is impatience with his passivity.

There were a couple of positive points amidst all this mediocrity, however. I like the author’s choice to include several conversations in non-English (one in Korean and a few bits in Japanese). I’m not crazy about the fact that translations don’t seem to be readily available, because though I was able to ferret out more or less what was going on in the Japanese, the Korean was beyond me, and I’d like to know what was said. Another choice I liked was the author’s tendency to skip through time without waiting for it to be a new page or creating a new chapter or even feeling the need to put up a little tag in the next panel stating “Later”, like so many others might have done. It was made clear through the conversation or the art that time had passed. There was also no forced exposition describing what we’d missed — everything was not spelled out, so the reader was left to draw their own conclusions about the resolution of several situations.

In Short
Overall, I didn’t find this graphic novel to be anything special. It was decidedly middle of the road in terms of the drawings and the plot. The artistic effort was adequate, but I don’t feel like it broke any new ground or dazzled me with its brilliance. The writing ditto. I find it ironic that the complaint of one of the characters — about bad movies being praised simply because they were created by an Asian American — may also apply to this graphic novel, because I don’t quite understand why it’s considered so great. The relationship issues explored here have been done before, if not with this particular cast of characters. I definitely would not call this a must read, but neither do I feel annoyed that I spent the time to read it.

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum: B-

From the book jacket:
Every child knows about Santa Claus, the jolly man who brings gifts to all on Christmas Eve. There are many stories that tell of his life, but the delightful version related in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus is by far the most charming and original. Only L. Frank Baum, the […]

From the book jacket:
Every child knows about Santa Claus, the jolly man who brings gifts to all on Christmas Eve. There are many stories that tell of his life, but the delightful version related in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus is by far the most charming and original. Only L. Frank Baum, the man who created the wonderful land of Oz, could have told Santa’s tale in such rich, imaginative detail.

Deep in the Forest of Burzee, a wood-nymph discovers an abandoned baby and raises him as her child. Young Claus is taught by the wise mythological creatures of the Forest, who love him as one of their own. Though he lives among magical beings, he comes to cherish his fellow humans, especially the children. When Santa Claus whittles his first toy, he knows he has found the way to bring happiness and love to children all over the world.

Review:
In The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, L. Frank Baum sets out to provide a complete story of Claus’s origins, from his idyllic childhood spent raised by immortal creatures in a secluded forest until the time when his life of good deeds earns him the precious Mantle of Immortality.

The story, as told, differs from the accepted legends about Santa Claus. For example, Claus (as he is called in the novel) does not live in the North Pole along with Mrs. Claus and a merry band of elves who toil cheerfully to craft toys for all the good little boys and girls of the world. Instead, he lives alone in a place called the Laughing Valley, with four immortal creatures who became his helpers only after the population boomed so much that he could no longer handle the task alone. This Claus also makes no distinctions between naughty and nice children, conceding that even naughty children can be good, and vice versa.

Throughout the story, explanations for various traditional Christmas beliefs and customs are provided, like stockings and Christmas trees and how Claus first came to employ a team of reindeer on his yearly errand (though none bears any familiar name). Baum also works in a rationalization for the involvement of parents, saying they’re Claus’s deputies, and that Claus even sends heaps of toys to stores so that the parents can acquire them for their kids. I wonder if parents point their kids to this book to explain why Santa left a tell-tale price tag on their present.

The edition that I read was published in 2003 and is illustrated by Michael Hague. While many are nice to look upon, I found them rather confusing at times. For instance, the size of the “newborn” Claus changes radically amongst illustrations; in one he looks at least two and very tubby indeed. Also, the immortal creatures from the story appear liberally, but I’m never sure which is supposed to be which, since the images don’t always illustrate a particular, recognizable scene.

There are also a couple of inconsistencies in the story that bother me. In the beginning of the book, there is a line that reads “All the immortals are full-grown; there are no children among them.” This was used to explain why they felt such fascination when Claus was brought into the forest and allowed to be raised in their midst. Yet later, when Claus is outfitting his sledge, he reaches an agreement with the Gnome King (clearly shown as immortal by his presence at the council which grants Claus his immortality) to trade him toys FOR HIS CHILDREN in exchange for sleigh bells.

The second inconsistency involves Claus’s decision to leave the forest and live among mankind. Until his youth, he had known nothing of the existence of other members of his race, and after finally witnessing their suffering, he resolved to quit the forest. The book says that “he went forth bravely to meet his doom—the doom of the race of man—the necessity to worry and work.” Except that he doesn’t. Once he gets to the Laughing Valley, immortals pop up and build his house, promise to keep his cupboards stocked, and essentially take care of his every need.

Despite some grumblings I might have about certain particulars, I found the story to be decently entertaining, especially some turns of phrase. There’s one scene where a lioness called Shiegra is waiting in Claus’s house when he returns from an outing, while his pet cat cowers in the corner. Baum simply writes, “She did not care to associate with Shiegra.” I love that line, as it perfectly evokes a cat’s offended dignity.

I don’t know that I’d care to read this again, or any other Santa origin tales for that matter, but I think The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus would probably be fun to read aloud to a kid, particularly one who was open to embracing differences from the established legend.

Additional reviews of The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus can be found at Triple Take.

J’s Take on The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum

I started reading this book from an edition borrowed from the library. Published in 1983 and illustrated by Mary Cowles Clark (ISBN 0517420627). Because I didn’t want to lug the book with me to my parents’ house, I finished reading it online at Page by Page Books.
I have vague memories of watching the cartoon of […]

I started reading this book from an edition borrowed from the library. Published in 1983 and illustrated by Mary Cowles Clark (ISBN 0517420627). Because I didn’t want to lug the book with me to my parents’ house, I finished reading it online at Page by Page Books.

I have vague memories of watching the cartoon of this on television. As I recall, I found it odd and boring. The book isn’t quite so boring, but it’s still odd. As a child, it seemed to me there should only be one story of Santa Claus. Oh, I suppose it could vary a little, as people tell stories differently, and some could get certain facts wrong — adults are frequently fallible this way — but the story should be essentially the same. And this one just falls far outside what I knew to be true about Santa Claus.

This Santa doesn’t have 9 reindeer, and their names are all wrong. He doesn’t have any elves. He doesn’t even live at the North Pole as far as I can tell!

I suppose I should give a summary before I continue. A nymph is bored one day and discovers and abandoned child and ask the great Ak if she can keep him and raise him as her own. Thus is born Santa Claus, an orphan raised in the woods by a bunch of Immortal creatures. When he’s older, he gets his first glimpse of mankind and decides the children need his help. So he slowly sets about his life’s work of making toys and delivering them to the kids. And this story relates how he gradually accrues various things he needs to help him.. mostly involving deer and a sledge.

This story just has the wrong feel to it. It may be a fantasy story, but it’s a fantasy mythos that doesn’t fit in with the Santa Claus one. At least not the Santa universe that I know. His reindeer don’t even fly!

Sometimes it also felt like the author was going out of his way to explain this or that inconsistency. Like, oh yea, and sometimes when the parents are kind and loving, Santa just drops the toys down in a heap and lets the parents arrange them nicely. Or, if the kids aren’t satisfied by what they got on Christmas, then Santa’s left some toys in toy stores so they can go and buy them(!).

I know this is an older story, and maybe he shouldn’t be expected to have the names of the reindeer ‘right’, and Rudolph’s absence is understandable, but.. where’d Mrs. Claus go? There’s not even any room for her in this story, because Santa uses up the only chance of any mortal becoming immortal.

Throughout the story, he’s known as Claus, which I had a lot of trouble getting over. In my head, I kept pronouncing it Klaus. Which just conjures up the image of a fish in a bowl.

The illustrations in the edition I started reading were rather annoying. There were spoilers! There’d be a picture of a cat with a bow, before the toy cat ever got a bow. There’d be pictures of dolls before Santa had ever made a doll. And there’s even a picture of a toy soldier. It doesn’t seem to fit with the text to me. I don’t think this Santa would be making toy soldiers for the kiddies. Especially ones that looked 18th century European. So bad marks on the illustrations all around.

One final thing that stood out to me, which isn’t unimportant, is that there is never any mention of what Christmas is. This head of all Rhyls guy just decides he’ll only loan his deer out to Santa on one night a year and that night will be Christmas Eve. And I’m wondering at this point, does Santa even know what Christmas celebrates? He wasn’t exactly raised by wolves, but almost may have well have been.

There is mention of a being who created all the Immortals, so God is definitely mentioned, if not by that particular name. You’d think there’d be some nod to Jesus. Some link between Christmas Eve and Santa other than it being a conveniently close date for the Rhyl King dude to be a jerk about. I mean, if I wanted to be a jerk about granting the request for the use of my deer, I’d pick the shortest night of the year, not close to the longest. (Being northern hemisphere-centric in that remark, yes.)

So, all in all, eh.

Was I still giving out stars? He almost doesn’t deserve a Christmas star for this, but I’ll give him 2. Okay story, but it’s not Santa, I don’t feel any Christmas magic, and it’s not a light-hearted romp or anything particularly enjoyable or amusing.

Sixpence House by Paul Collins: B+

From the book jacket:
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside—to move, in fact, to the little cobblestone village of Hay-on-Wye, the “Town of Books,” boasting 1,500 inhabitants… and forty bookstores. Antiquarian bookstores, no less.
Inviting readers into a sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through […]

From the book jacket:
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countryside—to move, in fact, to the little cobblestone village of Hay-on-Wye, the “Town of Books,” boasting 1,500 inhabitants… and forty bookstores. Antiquarian bookstores, no less.

Inviting readers into a sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the production of the author’s own first book, Sixpence House is a wonderfully engaging meditation on what books mean to us, and how their meaning can resonate long after they have been abandoned by their public.

Review:
Books, Britain, and buildings are three of my favorite topics, and when one tosses them together in one book, odds are that I’m going to like it. Even if, as in the case of Sixpence House, there is no real plot to speak of. Seriously, this family moves to Wales, tries to buy a house, fails, then moves back to the United States. Despite the title making one think that they’ll be buying and renovating a particular house, that never actually comes to pass.

I couldn’t really get into the book at first, because the style of writing is incredibly tangential. Collins will be relating a story in which he has just gotten off the Tube in London, and will suddenly switch to a description of a rotunda built in San Francisco in 1915. He never really stops doing things like this, but I got used to the side trips and even came to enjoy them.

On books—Collins very clearly loves them, and delights in quoting passages from obscure publications. I enjoyed all of the excerpts from these forgotten tomes and felt a momentary stirring of desire to hunt for such abandoned treasures myself. He also talks a good deal about the capacity of books to live on far beyond the span of their author, leading to different reflections upon mortality. That’s not a subject I prefer to dwell on, but he handles the topic thoughtfully, and with a practical bent seemingly influenced by the practices of the Brits themselves.

On Britain—More than any other source, Sixpence House has provided me a good idea of what life in Britain can really be like to one coming from an American perspective. Some things are better—television and print media assume a far greater level of consumer intellect than their American equivalents, for example—and some worse, like the lack of right to privacy laws in the UK. My one complaint is that sometimes I couldn’t be sure what was actually true and what was just dry humor. For instance, when I looked up a thoroughly silly-sounding practice called gazumping, I found that it was genuine, but I’m still about 95% sure that a comment about Welsh pronunciation isn’t.

On buildings—now I understand why some people I have known who tried to move to the UK have ended up returning to America! I could never grasp it before; it seemed such a wonderful place! But it turns out there are no agents to look after the buyer during the sale of a property, no contract to keep all of your work from being for naught, and no requirement for the seller to share information about the property, forcing the seller to pay for an expensive survey for any house in which they might be interested. To an American, this seems crazy!

Collins does an excellent job in describing all of the quaint old buildings around Hay, as well as the village and its denizens. I appreciated that he and his wife wanted a home with a lot of history, but understood completely when they eventually gave up their search after being stymied by outrageous asking prices, weird stipulations about proceeds from land sales, and daunting renovations. My desire to visit the UK is as strong as it ever was, but I’m also left with the impression that I really wouldn’t want to live there. Even if their TV is awesome.

Collins has written several other works of nonfiction, including one called Banvard’s Folly (subtitled Thirteen Tales of People That Didn’t Change the World) that gets mentioned a good bit in this narrative. It seems he also is instrumental in bringing forth some of the lost gems that he loves so much, like English as She is Spoke, a phrasebook written by men who didn’t actually speak English. I hope to read both of these at some point, if the library is successful in acquiring them on my behalf.

Additional reviews of Sixpence House can be found at Triple Take.