Vacancies Available
Ghost World does for the graphic novel what Catcher in the Rye did for the coming-of-age book: it's a true portrait of adolescent alienation. The self-loathing Enid and complacent, blondish Becky are sunk in the ennui, idleness and perversity of a dead city. Daniel Clowes' panels have the same flat blue sameness; the effect is of that of Edward Hopper's studies in isolation. Clowes' streets are populated by Satanists, Don Knotts lookalikes, Catholic priest-pederasts, and the like. Yes, it's grotesque Jerryspringerland, but shifts into something more moving when Enid applies to college and the two ponder separation and a menage a trois with their friend Josh, who seems the only decent person besides Enid's father around them. There's both prankiness and pathos, a real yearning that seeps through when the two girls feud and Enid sobs on her bed. Clowes is a big fan of R. Crumb, but I wonder if his corner of the world isn't sadder and darker, because there are no big-legged girls in Clowes; sex isn't liberatory, it just happens while "The Jeffersons" blares on TV. In fact, it's vaguely anxious, repellent, empty even. Maybe Clowes is to Crumb what Beckett was to Joyce: after excess follows contraction, asceticism, an astringent Puritan retreat.
