Winner: Chris Ware for Building Stories (Pantheon)
Judges' Comments:
Chris Ware's brilliant, understated Building Stories peels back the façade of a non-descript, three-story walk-up in a tired Chicago neighborhood, exposing and empathetically deconstructing the quietly desperate lives of a thin parade of tenants who have come to call the building "home." These lives are constellated across fourteen narrative artifacts, to be unpacked and encountered in an undetermined order, from faux newspapers and stapled minicomics to a Little Golden Book and a four-panel accordion-folded building map resembling a board game. The "building" of the title is of course both noun and verb, locale and process, stories of a building and the building of stories. But more than that, Ware's do-it-yourself storytelling kit collapses the binary between the two: every edifice, every home, every life is an ad hoc assembly process of moments and memories, usually without much in the way of instructions. Ware's astute and precise renderings, composed with a tender yet unblinkingly clinical eye and fleshed out with pristine and evocative coloring, trace the mundane routines and moments of small crisis that his characters inhabit. In so doing, he produces not a document but a monument, a work whose narrative logic is architectural rather than chronological: a set of lives to be encountered, traversed, and returned to as the rooms and floors of a building might be over the years, still sequentially but not in a limited or decided-upon sequence. Stories, here, are meant not to be told but to be built, explored, inhabited—not merely visited but lived in.
But for all its aesthetic precision and its formal and mediatic innovation, Building Stories is far from cold or unaffecting. Its experimental form is a mode of generosity to its characters, whose struggles with the quiet humiliations and unnoticed heartbreaks of day-to-day life take on significance not because they are the stuff of heroic epic or grand tragedy, but because in the aggregate they make up the lives of people (and of one Branford the bee) worthy of generosity, dignity, and empathy. When the narrative comforts of plot chronology and prescribed character development are stripped away, we have no choice but to engage with Ware's characters empathetically, as individuals whose experiences matter not because they are embedded moments in a larger narrative arc but because they are moments of import to those characters. To live in these built stories is to feel deeply and generously for their inhabitants, to unpack the subtle connections between moments across a life, and to appreciate both the gentle beauty and the inestimable challenges of the mundane. The impressive power of Building Stories resides in the cooperation between its virtuoso experimental artistry and its dedicated humanism, out of which emerges one of the most accomplished, moving, compelling pieces of fiction in recent memory.
2013 Advisory Board:
- Catherine Grigor
- Steven Herb
- Wilson Hutton
- John Meier
- Scott Thompson Smith
- Loanne Snavely
- Sandra Stelts