Written by Steve Higgins Friday, 11 September 2009 01:38
Reviewer Steve Higgins returns after almost a year with an extensive critique of the book that nearly broke him, a graphic memoir by Alissa Torres on life after the loss of her husband on 9/11.
210 pgs. Black & White, with hints of color throughout; $22.00 HC
(W: Alissa Torres; A: Sungyoon Choi)
Published in September of last year in conjunction with the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, American Widow by Alissa Torres portrays a side of September 11th that few have seen. In the novel, we are given an insider's perspective into what was going on behind-the-scenes on that fateful day and in its aftermath, the weeks and months following that terrible tragedy. Torres's husband Eddie was in his second day of work in the towers when they were attacked and he was killed, making her uniquely qualified to document these trials and tribulations as she has attempted to do with this book.
I say "attempted" by design, because those who read my top ten graphic novel list for 2008 will know that this book earned a spot on it, but not in a good way. In fact, I haven't written a review for this website in the year since this book was released, because I didn't know how to approach just how utterly awful I found this book to be. On every conceivable level it is atrocious, earning its place as the worst graphic novel I read in 2008, if not my entire life. But how do you give such a scathingly negative review to an autobiographical book about a horrendous national tragedy? It is nearly impossible to criticize the story that is being told here without condemning her as a person to a small degree, and that kind of behavior, when masked by the anonymity of the Internet, is the very definition of troll-ism. It is especially difficult to be critical when the book's central concept involves the worst tragedy our country has faced in my lifetime. Who am I to pass judgment on her reactions to this horrible event in her life when I don't know what she went through?
Essentially this book is so bad that it broke me. For literally months, I've been unable to figure out how to write this review and still avoid being labeled sexist or anti-American. I have spent that time rereading the book over and over again to try to find a way to approach it without offending. I subjected friends and family to it, not only discussing it with them but even forcing a few to read it so I could talk about its problems with them in the hopes of making this review easier to write. In the end, now that an entire year has passed and we are at the eighth anniversary of that tragic day, I've come to terms with the fact that no matter what I do, people will be upset at me by this review. So I'm going to bite the bullet and speak my mind about it anyway.
Part of the reason why it will be easy for people to argue against my critique of the book is that Torres wrote her defense of those who are critical of her into the book itself. She discusses in the graphic novel how many people had resentment towards her and saw her as profiting from her husband's death by seeking out aid in the aftermath of the attack. When they refer to her as greedy or selfish, her response is that this was not a role she sought out; it is one that was thrust upon her and that she did her best to survive with. She was just playing the hand she was dealt. The reality is that aid was offered and she took it. She knew she would have to hustle to get what she felt was entitled to her. She had to cut through scores of red tape in order to get anything. Much of the book deals with her fighting with the Red Cross, her husband's former employers, or various government programs to get the relief they have promised her.
At the same time that she is scrambling to get the money that was pledged to her, many people are looking to take advantage of her, to use her and her son for photo ops, which she bitterly resents and sees as an exploitation of herself, her son, and their difficult circumstances. Yet there is a slight disparity in her actions here, in that she seems more than willing to take the money these people offer while simultaneously reluctant to have her family's tragic conditions put on display. At times it felt as if she expected help from everyone, as if she was completely helpless, but she seemed appalled at the idea that this assistance might come with strings attached.
And yet in spite of all of that she releases this book, which places her and her son at center stage and publicizes her grief. It reminds me of Kate Gosselin, arguing vehemently that she wants to protect her children and that no one is allowed to profit from her kids, only to market her family aggressively herself, publishing books, filming television shows, and booking appearances on The View and other daytime talk shows. Torres does something similar here. In the end of the book, one organization provides her with a check for three thousand dollars to attend a luncheon, but when the press try to take pictures of her baby at this function, she refuses and leaves. Yet she puts her story and her child's in this book and allows Villard to publish it. There is something about that which seems to be a great inconsistency to me, and it really rubs me the wrong way.
So despite the defense of her actions Torres lays out in the book, it is still hard to shake the feeling that she can occasionally be opportunistic. She takes advantage of her position as a pregnant widow in the early days after the tragedy so that she may cut to the front of lines, and she says that later she longed for the days the lines would part for her. One other such scene in particular troubled me, a couple of pages on which she goes to Motherhood Maternity to find a dress to wear to her husband's funeral. It's hard to tell what the point of the scene is. When her friend who came shopping with her as moral support tells a complete stranger working there about her husband's death, is she shocked that her friend would put her pain on display like that? Is she upset that the clerk doesn't offer her instant sympathy and go out of her way to put her ahead of other customers? Is she bitter that those other customers are mothers or couples not touched by tragedy? The point of the entire scene is very uncertain.
In fact, the book as a whole is incredibly unclear. I asked the rhetorical question earlier, "Who am I to pass judgment on her reactions to this horrible event in her life when I don't know what she went through?" But that's just it. I wouldn't pass judgment if I did know what Torres was going through. But despite the fact that she wrote a book about the situations she encountered after her husband died, I still can't say I comprehend her perspective. She never fully illuminates the reasoning behind her actions. For example, the response I mentioned above in which she defends the measures she took to ensure her family's financial future-that defense is something the readers have to infer by reading between the lines. Her actual argument is never stated, only hinted at.
Even details of the plot are only vaguely sketched out. Torres says at one point that her husband jumped out of the burning towers to his death, but it's not clear if she knows this for a fact (as it is stated at first) or if this is merely supposition. If it is something she knows for certain, how does she know for sure? If it's something she only believes to be true, why does she think that? On the morning of her husband's death it is implied that the two of them had a fight of some kind the night before, but we're never told what it was about. Whatever the reason, the fight was apparently so bad that she was thinking of leaving him, but after his death she seems like she might regret these thoughts (although even that conclusion is supposition on my part because it's never fully explained). It begs the question of why she brought up the fight at all if she was not going to fully clarify it. In a graphic novel, readers need to be shown the background of situations if they are to then make inferences about them, but this book leaves out any such context.
Perhaps this scattered narrative was designed to reflect her confused mental state, as she went from anger to depression and back again. These kinds of inconsistencies of character would be acceptable if written well, because human beings are inconsistent and it would make us see her character as more real. But in order for that technique to work, the story has to be told to us in such a way that we buy into her emotional fragmentation. Instead Torres uses so few words to convey what she's feeling, and she leaves out so much of the framework that these feelings come from, that she's impossible to connect with. It's not enough that she tell us vaguely about the tragedy she went through; she needed to describe it to us in gritty and horrifying detail so we could feel what she felt and learn something about both that day and her in the process. This book was ostensibly written to give us insight into her as a person and humanize the tragedy she experienced. But she doesn't include the details that shape that experience, so the unexplained shifts in her behavior come across as completely irrational.
Even that lack of detail in the writing would be acceptable if the art carried some of the burden, but the art seems to be a complete afterthought, down to the artist Sungyoon Choi not even being given billing on the spine of the book. Torres is the book's focus and driving creative force, and when her storytelling falls short unfortunately Choi doesn't pick up the slack. Her work is rendered well; the drawings look pretty enough. But there's no real storytelling substance to the artwork, almost to an amateurish degree. There are many pages and panels in which most of the background is empty white or black space. Sometimes this technique is obviously used for an effect, to elicit in the reader the sense of isolation Torres is feeling at one point or another. But this technique is applied inconsistently, and when pages are virtually empty for no real reason, it comes across as sloppy, like Choi couldn't be bothered to fill in the details.
The blocking and angles of certain scenes seem very odd from a storytelling perspective. For example there are times when Choi devotes a full page to the most insignificant of acts, as if she is unaware that highlighting an image as a full-page illustration gives the event more weight. But again it's really about the inconsistency. On occasion she uses a splash page to great effect, powerfully emphasizing a moment of importance (as when Torres visits the empty space that once was where the World Trade Center stood midway through the book), but at other times a full page is given to a tiny incident (like an attempt Torres makes to hail a cab on the morning of September 11) that then highly overdramatizes the moment.
One particularly sloppy and confusing bit of storytelling comes when Torres is organizing her husband's funeral. She mentions needing to get her husband's family in Colombia visas so they can come to the US and attend the funeral. Shortly after that caption, we are presented with the uncaptioned image of a young Colombian man sitting alone in an airport with a suitcase. This image then recurs over the next few pages, interspersed several times with the actual funeral scene. It left me imagining that someone forgot to pick up a member of her husband's family at the airport, and it had me very befuddled. It wasn't until later in the book that Torres and Choi reveal that these images were apparently a flashback to an event in her husband's life, an event that is related to us but has absolutely no bearing on anything in the story whatsoever. Its presence is perplexing for the simple fact that we have no clue why the image is there at first, and when the story behind the image is revealed, its juxtaposition with the funeral scene is shown to be utterly pointless.
Choi is at her best when she uses facial expressions to convey the turmoil and angst of the characters, in particular of the main character Torres. But often there is not enough emotion shown, and what emotion Torres is feeling isn't always clear. At certain points, like in the aforementioned Motherhood Maternity scene, we don't know if a key facial expression is supposed to denote shock, surprise, or anger, and it makes it impossible to read the scene's mood accurately.
In the end this book offends my sensibilities as a comic fan, because it very much reads as if it is a graphic novel created by people who have never even read a comic. As I read the interview with Torres provided as a promotional tool by the book's publishers, I was struck by the attitude Torres seemed to have towards comics. First of all, she never gave any feeling as to why this story was told in the medium of comics, why she took essays she had written for magazine publications and adapted them to this format. In fact, she seemed pretty ignorant of how a comic script worked. It makes me wonder if the choice to tell her story as a graphic novel was hers or if it was an editorial decision, because graphic memoirs seem to be selling these days. It's like she didn't have enough book for a straight memoir, like the choice to tell this story in this medium was not borne out of a love for comics or because the narrative demanded it, but because she didn't have enough material for a "real" book, which is vaguely insulting to comics as a whole.
Now perhaps I'm reading too much into this one-page promo interview, projecting an ignorance of the medium and editorial interference that isn't actually there onto the work. But this interview mentions that Torres "originally conceived the book from my perspective but without me actually in it" (however that would work), and an editor had to coax her into including herself in the book (which explains why the book has so few details of her experiences in it-the editor needed to coax her a little more, it seems). Torres states that she came up with the layout of the book and made Choi follow her concepts for the art. So despite the fact that she admits she has no artistic skill, she also doesn't trust the artist to truly contribute to the creative process and seems surprised towards the end of the interview that making a graphic novel is as collaborative as making a film even though "a graphic novel is, of course, ultimately a book." Finally Torres refers to other comic art as "cluttered, making it a battle to get through each page" and praises Choi's art for having "a lot of white space and great composition," when that lack of detail and poor layout is the very root of the problem with this book's art. All of these things add up to make me question the logic of Torres producing a comic when she doesn't seem to know that much about them.
The book offends me as a feminist as well, for in my opinion Torres is all-too-willing to define herself in terms of her now-dead husband, with no identity of her own. Her job is poorly defined in the beginning of the book and nonexistent thereafter. She mentions at one point during a phone conversation with her mother that she refuses to move in with her family in New Jersey, but it's simply because she thinks of herself as a New Yorker not because of her proximity to work. In fact, no references are made to her even having a job after September 11th itself, so how she can afford to live in New York City (and why she refuses help from family living in New Jersey) is a bit of a mystery, unless we infer that she is living off the kindness of strangers. Even the very title of the book, American Widow, shows that Torres seems to only be identifying herself in terms of her husband, casting herself in the role of victim and demanding sympathy. Meanwhile Torres asserts in the promo interview that "a female artist was what the project needed," as if a man's art would never have the same gravitas in this situation as a woman's, which strikes me as both incredibly sexist and again terribly ignorant of the work of many of the great artists working in the field right now.
Add to that the very simple fact that the book is poorly edited, down to captions on two or three different pages ending mid-sentence, and you end up with a book that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and that is bad to an almost insulting degree. The plot details are too vague and the art is too inconsistent for American Widow to give us any kind of insight into either September 11th as a national tragedy or the death of Eddie Torres as a personal tragedy. To me the book read as poorly constructed yet entirely calculated opportunism, and I am glad that this review is finished so that I can finally be rid of this book both physically and mentally. | Steve Higgins
Click here to read a brief excerpt of American Widow, courtesy of Villard