A Bible for Wigging Out
Roz Chast’s fed up with her fed-up comics comic.
I depend on the mood of the patient to dictate my own mood. It is hard to lurch into heightened worry or cross the threshold into freaking out when on the other end of the phone my dad is so cool, grateful, and calm. But of course I see myself as split in two when we talk: the one I am reads the signs and mimics back, while the other I am raises a fiery fuss and punches through pasteboard masks. Yet the split is benign: the one realm isn’t infiltrating or rattling the other. I take every new bit of information about my dad’s cancer treatment nonchalantly: his casual use of the militaristic word “regime”; a downplayed tale of red-faced reaction to radiation; the realities of exhaustion, downsizing, and acceptance.
The language of wonder and surprise is also welcome in these conversations. All red? My gosh! But then I’m back to treading water.
Roz Chast does not have this problem: against the stoicism of her parents, she busts out. If her father acts crazy, she goes over the top.
My one concern about picking up her new memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury) was that there would be far too much wigging out in it. Hundreds of faces and mouths would twitch and screech. Whole heads of hair electrocuted. Chast needs no introductions—from me, anyways—so I’ll let Douglas Wolk sum up her style and niche: “Chast’s cartoons are among the reliable pleasures of the New Yorker: jittery, acerbic and finely observed, they slice to the bone of a certain kind of high-strung East Coaster.” Her frazzled zap seem so out of place sometimes, and better suited to the pages of an alternative weekly than to the formulae of the New Yorker.
I was right about the wigging out. In this one book, she has assembled every brand of it imaginable—frustration, shock, incredulity, rage, wits-end desperation and madness—but instead of one-off grotesqueries about 21st century fads and anxieties, here we see the consistent face of Roz Chast getting pushed to the limits of integrity. Prepare yourself for page after page of outsized emotion. You are in for a test.
Thankfully, the emotions evolve, and the actors of wigging out change, too. It begins with Roz versus the Chasts’ indifference to the subject of death: Elizabeth and George are true Montaignians, not worried in the least. As Chast tells it, both laughter and frustration can contort the mouth and balloon the face, and it is clear that both mom and daughter are affected. Roz, however, appears stretched out of proportion by the effort: that dip down on the left is meant to be her neck, I think, but it is also a form of disfiguration.
She gives up, and everyone cools down. When the book ends, Roz is left with no one to react to, no one to wig out to. As her parents’ pass away, Chast emphasizes the stillness of objects instead of the dynamic distortions of conversation.
The pivotal event in the middle of the book is Elizabeth’s “bad fall” (52), which puts her in the hospital (and offstage) for a few chapters. The straight-up saddest scenes involve Roz spending time alone with her father. When Roz goes to stay with George, she admits, “I had had no idea that my father was so far gone. When he was living with my take-charge mother in familiar, never-changing surroundings, his symptoms of senility had seemed pretty low-key. Certainly not this level of confusion” (65). Earlier in the book, Chast gives us a feel for her father with a comedic example of him fretting over a toaster: “Do you put the bread in first?? Or do you press this little lever down first???” (28).
But now that Elizabeth is seriously hurt and not by his side, George is without a companion and counselor. Roz keeps having to remind him that mom is in the hospital. In one four-panel sequence, panels one to three are middle shots: the environment and characters are established in a silent panel (1), moving to George’s question (2), and then to Roz’s answer (3). Panel four, however, is a close-up of googly-eyed George bellowing WWHAT??!?? beyond the frame (64). This happens again ten pages later.
No longer is the wigging out person just a Roz Chast stand-in. After all is said and done, her father seems to be the source of all of Chast’s verklempt city dwellers. In her New Yorker cartoons, the quivering anonymous urbanite is isolated on the empty streets as if forced to confront his or her demon in a vacuum. The city is always represented iconically: a shaded background grid of squares with slants to indicate window sheen, which belong to the same milieu as the silhouetted, staggered steps of buildings in R. Crumb’s “Keep on Truckin’” and other sundry strips.
In Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Chast doesn’t abandon the format of her famous cartoons, but when her father is the one who occupies those streets, front and center, the fit between a random stranger in New York and a father who is estranged from himself is absolutely perfect. He lives his life like a dancer onstage:
Chast’s focus on George leads to two revelations, the first a rite of passage for the child, the second a stylistic triumph for the cartoonist. Both are earned moments. First, Roz swears at her father for the first time: “I am going to FREAK THE FUCK OUT!!!” (75). Second, when Chast depicts her parents’ reunion, she does so from Elizabeth’s point of view (but filtered through Chast’s deep attentiveness to the dynamic of her parents) with a full page, watery-eyed drawing of her father crying ELIZABETH!!! (88). Many of her single images are held together by the vague bubble of the cartoon space, while this surprising page has no border. I won’t scan it to spoil it, but you should know that it is 3-D sweetness.
Reading:
Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? excerpt
Roz Chast, New Yorker Mother’s Day cover
Douglas Wolk, Review of Can’t We in Jacket Copy
Tom Hart, About section of Shit My New Yorker Cartoons:
Then there are the cartoonists who directly from their nervous systems, as I’ve said before discussing Maselin. This would certainly describe Booth and Wilson, as well as Koren, Lorenz, Roz Chast. These cartoonists are the equivalent of those singers who you say could “sing the phone book” and you would still listen. Their unique and genuine visual intonations give their cartoons a leg up on the merely verbal ones or the stylistically heightened ones—you engage with these drawings on a physical level.
