I also hoped to induce that brief vertigo in the reader when one gets so deeply lost in a recollection that present seems to all but disappear and the past almost seems more real." He said one inspiration was Canadian short story master Alice Munro, who "links together brief moments of detail and texture with quick, broad passages indicating time's passage." There are no acts, no chapters. "I was hoping to get at how memory actually seems to work, which isn't always chronological. Ware told me there's no order to the books in the box, no correct way to read through them. As soon as I stopped worrying about the order of the stories and just read them, it was fine." There's not a lot of guidance on what you should read next, and yet the emotional effect is extraordinary. I also wondered if anyone was doing anything like this in prose. Novelist Zadie Smith, a friend of Ware, told me, "When I read it, I kept thinking how sophisticated and unusual the rhythms were, and how fragmented it felt but fluid at the same time. Another book shows cutaways of apartments and unfolds like a board game. There's a copy of "The Daily Bee," the newspaper ("God Save the Queen") put out by the neighborhood hive. Another book (its gold spine, a nod to classic Golden Books) is narrated by the building itself, which, in one sequence, tallies up every pregnancy, water drip, suicide note, cat, television and spiritual crisis that's passed though it in 104 years. (Needless to say, there will not be a Kindle version.) The top book in the stack is rectangular and wordless, the story of a woman who, more or less, exists - she pushes her child in the stroller, seasons pass, the child grows older, the woman lonelier. You'd understand too if your latest book wasn't a book at all but 14 individual books full of ennui, stacked inside a box - 14 books that tell the interlocking stories of the residents of a Chicago apartment building. I gave the valentine to my mother and asked her to send it to Charlie Brown and she said OK then probably put it in the place where all the letters to Santa Claus went." So I felt truly sorry for Charlie Brown, which is an amazing thing to produce using just four little pictures. A comic strip is good for telling jokes and for looking down (on characters), but in Charles Schulz's work, you always felt through his characters. "'Peanuts' was the first comic strip with a truly empathetic cartoon character, and Charlie Brown was the first character who grabbed you by the heart. He remembers connecting so deeply that he sent Charlie Brown a valentine. When he was a child, Ware connected deeply with Charlie Brown, he said. His wife, Marnie, told me he gets upset when people bring this up: "But many of us always feel 11, and no matter how much Chris accomplishes or how many people tell him he's a genius, a piece of him will probably always feel like that kid in the lunchroom who sits by himself, lonely."
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