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Asterios Polyp
by David Mazzucchelli
(Pantheon, $29.95)
The term "graphic novel" is a misnomer for many reasons. Besides the fact that some of the best examples of the form, like Maus and Palestine, aren't even fiction and so therefore can't technically be called novels, the term also sounds condescending, like a politically correct sop to a medium that can't quite muster the intelligence and artistic weight of a real novel. Even worse, it's inexact: "Graphic novels" are almost never novels. They are ordinarily short stories (Dan Clowes's Ghost World has about as much weight and narrative thrust as one of Salinger's Nine Stories, but we're supposed to compare it with The Catcher in the Rye?) or, at most, novellas (even Craig Thompson's enormous romance, Blankets, reads too quickly, like a prose book a fifth of its size).
Until this month, the only American comic book that successfully achieved the depth and complexity of a novel was Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Now, David Mazzucchelli's beautiful new novel, Asterios Polyp, is a second book to place on that shelf. If Ware is a Dickensian author, dutifully sketching in every square inch of every page with idiosyncrasy, Mazzucchelli is pure Dostoevsky, an interior-minded writer of huge ideas.
Stranger Personals
When we first meet Asterios Polyp, he is sitting in a New York apartment on his 50th birthday, apparently watching pornography. A lightning bolt strikes the building ("KKLAPP!"), and Polyp only has time to grab a few personal effects—a Zippo lighter, a watch, and a Swiss Army Knife—before he runs to the street to watch his entire life turn to black smoke. We learn about Polyp (he's a renowned professor of architecture admired for his artful building designs, none of which have actually been built), and we watch him as he drifts away from the city and begins a new life as an auto mechanic in a small town named Apogee.
It's impossible to describe the story without praising Mazzucchelli's art: He uses color, text, and innovative page layouts with mod flourishes to push the story forward and backward in time. Polyp and several other characters, most notably his nemesis, choreographer Willy Illium, are usually viewed, Dick Tracy–like, in profile, to indicate their single-minded view of the world. Mazzucchelli illustrates concepts with the natural ease that other masters of the form use to draw action: A conversation about duality is as engaging and dynamic as any epic Jack Kirby superhero battle (even as the narrator notes that duality "is best suited to children's stories, or comic books"), and a dream sequence about the Orpheus myth—Polyp bursts with references to art and literature, from Calvino to Aristophanes to Rothko to Mies to Francis of Assisi—is drawn in a primal, scratchboard style that brings the raw emotional center of the book right up to the surface for one melodramatic moment.
Polyp reportedly took 10 years to make, and the book is so
layered with bold artistic choices that it will create students as much
as readers. Why does a rearview mirror block Polyp's eyes in the scene
where his (future ex-) wife asks him if he'll look after her when she's
old? Is the narrator—Polyp's twin brother, who died in the
womb—completely unreliable? The more you study Polyp, the
more there is to discover. This is a book that stands with works by
Updike, Roth, and other giants of American literature. It is
undoubtedly one of the best novels of the year. 
1
-This is such a self-evidently moronic statement that I just needed to repeat it so that people could stand and bask in its ignorance one more time.
I suggest you pick up "Stuck Rubber Baby," "From Inside," and "Black Hole," if you haven't already. The latter two have as much narrative depth as any novel, if you're willing to linger on each page. The former is a better example of the kind of dense illustration you seem to prefer, and came out many years ago.
You should go to a bookstore and pick up a copy of Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw along with about ten other books I could recommend that would put your ridiculous claim to rest.
You are right about one thing though. Asterios Polyp is a great graphic novel. And by that measure, deserves far more informed criticism than this.
They are two completely different mediums, with their own virtues, tropes, and narrative tricks. Why not just judge comics based on their worth as COMICS?
If any film critic repeatedly said "this film lacks the staging and the expression of a play," or "this film is so close to being a play, how wonderful!" they'd be fired for showing that they don't know what they are talking about.
Learn what you are supposed to be talking about before your next review, ok?
6
AlexaD and others on this thread: I wasn't saying that other comics (like Bottomless Belly Button, which I reviewed positively in The Stranger when it was released) aren't great. I was saying calling them "novels" is a misnomer. To use your example, AlexaD, I'm saying that it would be like calling movies "picto-plays" or television shows "mini-movies." The terminology needs to change.
It fascinates me how comics fans never fail to get upset if a critic tries to write a review for a broader audience that perhaps doesn't read comics all the time.
You made a bold, sweeping claim in order to praise on Mazzucheli. Three people, including myself, presented challenges to your sweeping claim, including counterexamples. Two of them used pejorative language, and so you dismiss us all as angry comics fans that didn't read your article.
Well, that's disappointing. I'd still be glad to read a response that indicates that you actually read what I wrote.
It seems to me, on further reflection, that Graphic Novel is perfectly apt as a descriptor for a hefty story that can be read over the course of one or two evenings. Is Beloved more of a novel than Old Man and the Sea, because Morrison's writing requires more attention to decipher? I would think that's one (but not the only) legitimate measure of literary value... but not a defining feature of "novelness."
To me, the term graphic novel suggests a work that should be read in about the time it would take to read a novel, that is to say, a short book. Now, there's obviously a problem when so many single issue collections go under the same title, instead of "trade paperback," and I don't know a good term at the moment for extended works like Cerebus or Sandman that stretch across several volumes. But Graphic Novel serves well for all the examples I named above, plus Watchmen, Sin City, A History of Violence...
It seems to me that you could hold up Asterios Polyp for high praise, even put it on a pedestal, without knocking many other worthy works right off the stage.
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