Woolf/Miller/Herriman/King
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927): For the first hundred pages I was worried that this would be a high-achieving precursor to the relations-between-the-sexes novels that litter bourgie lit. It wouldn’t be horrible to read that way — Woolf is the rare author who can write convincingly from both female and male perspectives. Soon, though, the modernism steps up a gear with one of the great terrible dinner parties in literature. Woolf doesn’t so much paint the partygoers’ thoughts as their experience of thoughts. Time passes, plot points are tossed off in square brackets, and Lily Briscoe offers a rejoinder to the male canon from Homer to Joyce.
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman (1949): The characters are in danger of turning into animated GIFs, and in the end Happy becomes an angry face infinitely cycling with his father’s. But to reduce Willy himself to a revelation scene is too lossy. Biff’s real but terminal schoolboy achievements aren’t stable grounds to build dreams on. Yet Willy keeps dreaming, since fulfilment, even as it becomes more and more unlikely, is necessary to compensate for dreams already lost. It’s a hope bubble that has to burst at some point. That’s what Willy should have been selling. He should’ve gone into banking — or politics.
George Herriman: Krazy & Ignatz: The Komplete Kat Komics 1919 and 1922: Though I’ve only read Krazy Kat haphazardly, I agree with the smark consensus that it’s the Greatest Comic Evah, though we’ll see if I sustain this belief as the Pogo reprints roll out. The ‘22 Eclipse reprint contains eleven Kats in kolour, which adds surprisingly little (this isn’t true of the return to colour in 1935).
Frank King: Walt & Skeezix 1921-1922: As a Garrison Keillor-hater I was skeptical, but Bogart is right, this is great. The humour is generally gentle, though the ones where Walt or his friends get riled up are the funniest, and only the gamophobic gags fall completely flat. But it’s the characters that make this. Skeezix aside, they don’t so much develop as sharpen here, with the Alley gang’s personalities becoming more cartoony, and Walt’s relationship to the non-automotive world becoming clearer. Must. Read. More.
