Tim Lane, Abandoned Cars (Fantagraphics, 2008), $22.99, hardcover.
If I were ten years younger I would love
this book. No, if I were more like 18 years younger, and
still smoked two packs a day and drank whiskey out of big
gallon jugs, and still drove around in that old 1962 Dart
with the metal dashboard and no seatbelts, and still lived
in Baltimore on an annual salary of 12K. Of course, I
wasn’t reading books like this back then: $22.99 was a
week’s worth of cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon. And even then I
found the blue-color chic of a Chuck Bukowski tedious and
pretentious (and vaguely exploitative). No, truth be told,
I suspect I like this book much more now, nicotine-free and
relatively sober (except when I am writing these reviews,
of course) in my two-story Columbus home, than I would have
then. But what would make me really like these stories, I must confess, would
be if someone else was writing them. Because this guy can
draw! He is, in fact, every bit as talented and startling
an artist as, unfortunately, he thinks he is as a writer. But the truth is, he
clearly wants to be a writer first, and his deep love
affair with the American visionary writers of days gone by
makes this a very writerly book, so much so that his
brilliant artwork ends up serving a decidedly supporting
role to the very wordy narration that accompanies each
story.
I don’t mean to be overly harsh here: there are some
splendid writerly touches. The continuing story of the end
of John’s marriage (which gives us at least one of the
abandoned cars referred to in the title) is effective. And
in truth the writers Lane so greatly admires—Kerouac, Henry
Miller, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway—are not in
my
bedside bookshelf: along with
Bukowski, they all rub the wrong way in precisely the ways
that Lane’s prose gets under my skin--macho, egomaniacal,
self-pitying martyrdom narratives. Since that is Lane’s
bookshelf, I must give him credit: he channels them well.
But I believe that no one who draws like this can for long
take pleasure in allowing his panels to serve primarily as
a second-tier visual track supporting a heavy-handed,
purple narration. He is going to grow and mature, maybe
collaborate, and emerge in five years or so with a
masterpiece. This is not it. This feels like juvenilia in
the hands of a fully realized artist, like Charles Burns
and Phoebe Gloeckner illustrating some self-styled
prophet’s undergraduate creative writing assignments. I
would have certainly warmed to this material more had I
encountered it in an anthology, or spread out in small
doses in a serialized comic. Over-packed and over-packaged
in this high-end hardcover edition I just found myself
wanting to shout: “You are too talented to take yourself so
seriously!” I suspect such advice would sound absurd or
contradictory to Mr. Lane at the moment, which is fine. But
when he is ready to crack and smile and realize that, in
fact, Jack London and Henry Miller are two of the worst
things that ever happened to American literature, then
he’ll have something to write about. And I’ll be the first
in line to sing his praises.
