The Last Book I Read

I don't know if there is anyone working in any branch of the arts right now who is better at evoking such a powerful, yearning nostalgia for the mundane than the cartoonist "Seth." To be clear, I don't mean to imply this is some kind of trick (artistic or otherwise) or that Seth has somehow exaggerated the ordinary to make you forget how insignificant it ultimately is. No, his particular genius is to quietly uncover and unleash the truly sublime nature of all the ephemera that colors our daily existence. In Clyde Fans, it's the routines and architecture of a small-scale industrial/commercial enterprise revolving around a slightly archaic product, tied closely to a mildly tragic family history; in George Sprott it's late-night local TV, and the quaint modernism of the medium's early days. In The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, its the throw away literature of big little books, bubblegum wrappers and Saturday evening newspaper inserts-- along with lapsed rituals and again the singular architecture of half-forgotten spaces. Though it has no obvious similarity, reading this book took me back to the days when I went with my Dad to his work-- a small factory that my brother and I explored while waiting for Dad to complete whatever errand brought us there. The headquarters of the G.N.B. and C.C. hall in fictional Dominion looks nothing like Niagara Straw on the west side of Buffalo, but Seth's exploration of the former's nooks and crannies (mostly visually) strongly reminded me of poking around in the dark corners of the latter. Another off-the-wall connection I couldn't shake was to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and feeling like Seth has totally embraced the notion that there are greater worlds of wonder in the smallest things we take for granted than in those that seem more consequential at any given moment-- something that I took from the Kerouac novel. Superficially, Seth hardly seems to fit the "beat" stereotype, even as his evident idiosyncrasy, as well as the presumed spontaneity of a work drawn from his sketchbooks, place him squarely in that tradition. What else can I say except that I really liked this book a lot, and look forward to rereading it-- which doesn't happen very often to me any more.