Lee Henderson manages levity whilst storm clouds amass.
One February day in 1968, young Robert Crumb and his wife pushed a baby carriage through the crowds of tuned-in drop-outs partying on San Francisco's Haight Street, hawking copies of his first comic book, Zap #1, out of the bassinet. Crumb's flimsy pamphlet, with its gaudy cover and subversive bent – "For adult intellectuals only!" we're warned – would kickstart the underground comix movement, and help turn the city by the bay into a mecca for long-haired, unorthodox cartoonists.
Or so the story goes, anyway: Crumb's baby buggy is now less anecdote than myth, the kind of heady comic-book lore that Lee Henderson draws from and doodles mustaches on in his expansive new novel. So it makes sense that Henderson's tale of Wendy Ashbubble, an enterprising cartoonist, and her coterie of oddball friends and lovers, should take place in San Francisco. But The Road Narrows as You Go doesn't set down in the storied era of Crumb: that's almost too easy. Instead, the book's milieu is comics in the early- to mid-eighties, when Crumb's underground had fizzled out, graphic novels like Maus had not yet caught on, and the medium was at its absolute nadir, with "comics shrinking on the page and in the brain," and Garfield reigning supreme.
Though it centres around the sometimes insular world of comics, Henderson's novel opens outward to portray an entire culture teetering between the halcyon days of the past, and the future's precarious uncertainty. From the moment that Wendy's struggling comic strip, Strays, gets roped into a merchandising deal dreamed up by a junk-bond investor, her success seems limitless from her perspective, and foredoomed from ours. She dreams of getting her strip in 2,000 papers, of airing an animated Christmas special on network TV, of seeing balloons in the Macy's Parade of her motherless funny animal characters (my favourite: a Prince-inspired, gender-ambiguous, purple-plumed parrot named Nicki [sic]). Meanwhile, the SEC follows her every move, her circle of friends thins out thanks to the onset of AIDS, and spurious Satanists loom larger as bogeymen in the public's mind than the wolves prowling Wall Street, preying on debt.
These stormclouds gather throughout the book, lending sombre weight to the manic sense of levity and fun that Henderson generates in spite of it all. His whims seem more assured, here, than they were in The Man Game, his debut novel; his inventions have become unlikely in more credible ways. Wendy's hilltop headquarters, a kind of utopian flophouse dubbed No Manors, plays host to a mob of cartoonists as unruly and uncouth as the lumberjacks and drunkards in the previous book's fledgling Vancouver. And the fanciful, sought-after pastries cooked up in The Man Game are bested, here, by the massive amounts of weed that Wendy's assistants infuse with the spirit of a genius friend who died too young, steeping the sweet stinky stuff in a hamper of his noxious unwashed laundry.
Wafting an air of outlandish inspiration throughout the proceedings, the funky smell from that hamper originates in a boisterous wake that kicks off the book. This is the first of Henderson's many set pieces in Road, each of them bravura performances in prose. Following that occult vigil for the boy wonder cartoonist, there is a drag performance that combines TV's Dallas and Greek myth, or a devastating description of the symptoms that scourge a hospital overrun by AIDS, or a work-out show filmed on cast-off Blade Runner sets and choreographed to the sound of Afrika Bambaataa. Most impressively, there are Henderson's glosses on the art-world projects of Wendy's unrequited love, Jonjay, who moves with ease between the realms of video art, performance, cartooning, and earthworks.
With all this convincing evocation of setting and zeitgeist, however, the book runs the risk of occluding its characters. Wendy, in particular, rarely seems to exist beyond the page. Henderson narrates her story in the first person plural voice of her four assistants, a gambit that's intriguing – what more suitable way to tell the story of a corporate cartoonist, than through the anonymous words of her uncredited underlings? – but which leaves Wendy stranded outside that collective "we." Still, it's as though she is nondescript by design. The Americans around her view her origins in Canada as "intensely remote and unattainable," just as there remains some secret to her being that even Wendy believes she can't access, convinced she's repressed crucial memories (chief among which, she's sure, is the fact that President Reagan's her father).
Wendy's also uncertain of her skill as an artist. Henderson himself charmingly draws the Strays strips throughout, about which the best and the worst one can say is they wouldn't look out of place in today's funny pages. But the author's achievement is precisely that he doesn't make genius or self-assured talent the locus of his story, as Michael Chabon did kitschily in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, that other big comic-book novel. Instead, Henderson focuses on someone whose "talent exists in the tumultuous now" – and it's this sense of past tumult he succeeds in reanimating. Put Kavalier & Clay to one side, and Crumb, and Calvin & Hobbes (a strip whose debut ends The Road's era). Henderson has contributed his own, outsized, rambunctious myth to the annals of comics, and of our literature.
Sean Rogers is The Globe and Mail's comics reviewer.