strong language, throughout; time travel, murder mystery ( )

I picked up this book while browsing in Amazon Bookstore (Seattle's University Village!), and I decided to read the first 20 pages or so before actually purchasing it. Having read Ghost World and finding it disappointing... the movie WAS better, I honestly did not expect it to grip me enough to buy it, but I was wrong.
And wow, this did not disappoint. I loved it. Very well-written story and character development, interesting premise, and overall enjoyable. Recommended.
I'll give other books by Daniel Clowes a shot!
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You could argue about whether this book is science fiction, or a case of a "literary" author dabbling in genre from an ironic distance— especially since the main character repeatedly mocks the premise of his story as "sci-fi bullshit," and that premise is time travel— but what matters to me is that this is fantasy being used to do what it can do: make the emotional level of a story literal. Time travel is about bringing stages of life and points of view together that can't meet in reality. There's a man plagued by loss and regret, he badly needs to know things there's no way to know, and a device he doesn't understand allows him to stalk his wife in her past— with sort of good intentions, but this isn't a stable person, and not surprisingly things go wrong.

Clowes is a biting caricaturist, and many of the people in this are pretty awful, but he inhabits them fully and gets a lot of emotional mileage out of the juxtaposition of the past/present/future versions of even the minor characters. The settings are similarly both stylized and textured: a crappy depressed town in the 2000s, the suburban Midwest in the 1980s, and a hilariously garish future that's only 13 years away but looks straight out of the louchest dreams of a '40s pulp writer. In a way it's funny that Clowes, who's always been pretty observant about how most things don't change over time, would choose to draw 2029 this way (I mean, besides that it's fun to draw— it's the goofiest he's been since the early issues of Eightball), but it fits with what we learn about the narrator of that section, because this is a person who's just not interested in the future and doesn't want to be there: we're seeing these ridiculous fashions and blobby furniture and disturbing body modifications from the point of view of a guy who, like many of us, thinks of the "normal" world as just how things were when he was between, say, 18 and 26 years old. He's gotten used to the future gradually as we all do, so now he takes it for granted and won't bother explaining anything (*), but all he wants is to start over in what he still thinks of as the present. Meanwhile, the other narrator— his past/future wife, Patience— is someone who's fully engaged with the world she lives in, for better or for worse, and the transitions between their points of view give a book a lot of its strength.

(* There's a running gag throughout the book of a horrifyingly powerful device the guy carries on his travels, which does everything from remote audio surveillance to disintegrating people— Clowes draws it with as little detail as possible and only reveals what it is near the end in a very funny throwaway joke.)

The art took some getting used to for me, because Clowes has become such a precise draftsman and colorist over the years, and made such strong use of confined layouts, that the looser drawing and less dense pages in this at first felt awkward. But I think he had to loosen up to go to some of the truly wild places this goes and still be able to dial it back for a tender moment. ( )

Weird but always compelling. ( )

My favourite of all the Clowes books I've read. I didn't mean to read the whole thing in one sitting but once it gets going...damn. Lot of unexpected twists and his take on time travel works well. ( )