Warren Lehrer

This book lives both on my top ten list of novels and as a very credible work of visual literature that broke through to a mass audience. The typography of this beautifully written book is used to distinguish the voices and emotional states of the three narrators: a nine-year-old boy devastated (in his own peculiar way) over the loss of his father on 9/11, and his two grandparents, also grieving over their loss (and a whole legacy of losses). In one climactic section, as the grandfather comes to realize—in a series of unparagraphed pages—that his son perished in a fiery hell, the interline spacing gets tighter and tighter, and the two towers of text on facing pages darken. This comes in stark contrast to an earlier section in which the grandfather is mute, marked by just a few words per page. And one of the most impactful endings I have ever read or seen in a novel (spoiler alert) is expressed only in pictures when the young Oskar Schell reverses the order of newspaper photos of a figure falling from one of the World Trade Towers. The man (perhaps Oskar’s father) rises up, defies gravity, reverses time, and undoes a tragedy, for a moment. Some notable literary critics (including one well-known novelist) have dismissed Foer’s typographic choices and use of images in this book as “gimmicks.”* (They also criticized the boy as being too smart for a nine-year-old, and the plot as being unrealistic.) Their loss. To me, this is a powerfully emotional yet joyfully playful book, and a fine example of typo/graphic form following the function of a text; not by being transparent and clean, but by being in tune with the characters’ inner rhythms and states of being.

*See Zoe Sadokierski’s word cloud analysis of the critical reviews of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in her excellent Ph.D. thesis on visual writing: epress.lib.uts.edu.au/research/handle/10453/20267

Like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the protagonist of this novel is a precocious kid (all of 12 years old). He is traumatized by the death of a family member, goes on a long journey, meets many interesting people, and discovers unexpected things along the way. The young T. S. Spivet travels solo by train from Montana to Washington, D.C. to receive a prestigious award from the Smithsonian given to him for his unusual brand of cartography. The squarish book pairs the primary narrative of the road trip with side columns that annotate Spivet’s inquisitive mind and his archaeological dig into his (heretofore secret) family history. His elaborate maps have little to do with geography and more with diagramming experience and speculation—from cross-talk at the dinner table, and the pleasures of McDonalds, to mythical wormholes in the Midwest. Sometimes the difference between the primary narrative and the marginalia seems arbitrary, but it is worth the trip.

If the term “graphic novel” wasn’t already taken, and very clearly defined, this could be a good example of what such a thing might look and read like. Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell’s 2003 novel situates the geometric protagonists of Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland in a 21st-century post-biological world. Father Square is considering whether to have a vasectomy, while mother Circle and daughter Oval want another child/sibling. The family story double-helixes down vertical staff lines, punctuated by genetic sequences, pedigree charts, and historical arguments for eugenics, cloning perfect babies, and denying “defective persons the right to reproduce. Farrell’s elastic and meticulously articulated design—which also references the language of comic books, big data, and a new-music score—could be accused of overpowering Tomasula’s writing. But no doubt, this is an interesting and ambitious example of an author and designer collaborating as co-equals on a fascinating read. Tomasula and Farrell’s next collaboration, TOC: A New Media Novel, is an interactive DVD that lives at the intersection of book, film, and game.