| June
2008 |
By Matt Dube
If there
is a haunting taking place in Jeff Lemire’s
Ghost
Stories, it is
the influence of literary fiction more than it is graphic
novels, even those, like Daniel Clowes’ Ghost
World, Chris
Ware’s Jimmy
Corrigan, or
Nick Abizadis’ Laika,
to give only a few prominent examples. The kind of story
Lemire is telling here is most shocking in its decision to
eschew the elements that tied those books to their genre
roots, either the inwardness of their social portraits or
(the debunking of) adventure stories. In place of the
trappings of genre, Lemire substitutes an interest in more
traditionally literary thematic material: the lure of home,
the difficulty of accepting change, the need to live with
and through your decisions, good or bad, that is in solidly
part of tradition of realist short story writers like Alice
Munro and William Trevor. In fact, the title
Ghost
Stories is
probably the most pulp genre element of this graphic novel,
and if there are ghosts in this story, they are purely
metaphorical, as LeBouef struggles in his later years to
make sense out of where life has taken him, how he has, as
he has occasion to repeat in the course of the graphic
novel, experienced both of the ways to be lonely, and
perhaps even found a third.
The heart of the novel pivots between what LeBouef would
like to tell us, about his relationship with his brother
Vince, the lovable member of the family, and Lemire’s own
interest, to show us a character who works to understand if
it is really a problem to be so alone. It’s hard to suggest
the way these two stories interact, but it’s a testament to
Lemire’s skill that LeBoeuf’s recollections serve one
purpose for the character who is having them and another
for the overall arc of the graphic novel. In the story
LeBouef tells of his life, there is him, his brother, and
hockey: for LeBouef hockey was a way to get away from the
farm, and he tries to use it to lure his brother to a
different kind of life as well, but the more grounded Vince
sees the sport for the distraction it is, plays for a
season and then returns to the farm to marry and raise a
baby that either of the brothers might have fathered. Lou
might try to convince us, and himself, that it was that
trauma, of bedding his brother’s wife and possibly
fathering a child with her, that keeps him away from the
farm, but Lemire shows us this is all rationalization: Lou
is not a nice person, he doesn’t like life on the farm and
doesn’t really have room for many people in his life.
Though he thinks he struggles to make something of his
failed relationship with his brother, now deceased, his
real story is to come to peace with who he is, regardless
of what he has done wrong and what is now beyond repair.
The graphic novel ends as it begins, with Lou on the porch
of his house, alone and probably in need of someone to take
care of him, but there is an element of
“same-but-with-a-difference” which Peter Brooks identifies
as the necessary element of change to bind the narrative
energies into a successful conclusion: we know why Lou is
alone, and it is appropriate, perhaps, to think that we
also think that Lou will be okay, that he does not need to
kind of sharing and caring relationships that he seems to
be lacking from at the beginning of the novel. What sets
out as a narrative of rehabilitation instead digs deeper
into the character, helping us to understand that there was
nothing wrong with Lou in the first place, nothing beyond
the physical that even a well-intentioned and long
suffering nurse can do for him. Maybe its the role that
secret origins play in the history of comics, the
transformation of Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne into
something other, that makes it feel so unlikely that Lou is
unchanged by his experiences in this graphic novel, but it
also makes the story feel more serious and substantial,
more successful at expanding the boundaries of what kinds
of stories graphic novels can tell than I think I can
remember seeing so clearly before.
None of this is meant to suggest that this is a book
without flaws: if the peers for this kind of work are
literary more than pulp, most of them are notable short
story writers and not novelists; this is a nice way of
saying that Lemire’s book is long for what it takes on, and
at times, for all its sumptuous open skies and landscapes,
it can kind of drag. Also, for a book that has some
strikingly beautiful images, it has some that I find
frankly ugly, like this one, which is unfortunately also
reproduced on the back cover; maybe someone finds it
attractive, but to me, it represents everything that scared
me about old people when I was younger.
Yuck!
Finally, there is a section of the book that covers the
single season when Lou and Vince played hockey together in
Toronto that comes close to clichéd film montage of the
whirling headlines and torn-off calendar pages. Lemire
seems at a loss for how to convey that season with
appropriate gravitas, and so far I don’t think he’s found
the right way. I don’t think this is a perfect book, but it
is one that I think is really very accomplished, and one
that asks to be judged against a different set of standards
than any other comic that I can readily think of. In the
fall, Top Shelf will bring out the third volume in the
Essex County trilogy, The
Country Nurse, with
its frankly Chekhovian title, and then Lemire will publish
some work through DC’s Vertigo. Those works will tell us if
this volume is an aberration that somehow fell outside the
lines of Lemire’s work or if he is blazing a new path in
comics-as-literature.
