Wilson

Writer/Artist - Daniel Clowes

Publisher - Drawn & Quarterly. $21.95 USD

Hi, brother, how’s it hanging?

You like the internet, huh? Ha ha. Maybe it really can bring humanity together, a world community, our bonds intangible and yet as strong and real as the wireless signals used to create them.

Jesus, your skin is ghastly. Do you ever fucking go outside?

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I have an old friend whom I’ll call Ken. He was my boss when we first got to know each other. Very funny, charming man. Looked like ’80s Elton John and would dress up in a white dinner jacket, sunglasses and boater hat on Halloween sometimes. He also had a Rolls Royce convertible but managed the mail room at our company. Ken had been divorced a couple years when I met him, and lived at home with his mom and one of the most extensive collections of celebrity autographs on the West Coast. 

Ken had stopped drinking, but liked to enjoy it vicariously through me, so in those days we’d hit happy hours and strip clubs, or hang out at his house and make fun of bad movies. Good times. The thing was, Ken was really broken up over his ex-wife. While he was still obviously horny and flirty, he really did for the most part seem resigned to bachelorhood, and he is still on his own.

Each on of us is the hero and villain of our own stories, and the engines of our own happiness or unhappiness. I left Dan up there in the previous paragraph alone, but to be honest, I’ve only seen him once in the past several years and the subject didn’t come up. And when I say, “to be honest,” you don’t really know that, do you? Would it change the story to mention I, too, am divorced, and have been for five years? Or that Ken had such a great personality, I swear he really did charm a stripper into being sincerely into him, just for him. I saw that look in her face. And besides the joking and heavy tipping, he never took it to the next level by asking her out, and if he had I’m sure he would have been successful. 

I could have made myself look more heroic by writing about the times I spent with him, making him laugh and not be so alone for a few hours, or more villainous by revealing how often I drove home drunk on those nights. It’s impossible to write about yourself and not try to cast yourself in a certain light, revealing this facet and obscuring these others. Humans have a need to connect with other humans at various levels, and when we make these attempts to do so, we rarely reveal everything. It would be overwhelming. Do you have any friends with traits you’ve come to accept that, if you knew about those traits when the friendship began, you would cut off ties? 

The more time we spend with people, the more we reveal, intentionally or not, and if the good stuff outweighs the bad, the stronger and deeper the connection becomes. Daniel Clowes’ Wilson deals primarily with the title character’s attempts at human connection and how difficult it can be. I was going to write, how difficult it can be, even under the best of circumstances, but the thing is, with Wilson the circumstances are always the worst. That is, he makes them that way. As the back cover copy informs us, Wilson is, “a big-hearted slob, a devoted father and husband, an idiot, a sociopath, a delusional blowhard, a delicate flower.” I can’t say that any of those descriptions don’t apply to me at various times. I found a three year old email to a former coworker today that was an appallingly unhinged come-on…or maybe it was just sweetly awkward. It didn’t work, either way. And hey, I’ve let air out of someone’s tires, eaten cheese left out on the counter overnight, and helped a buddy move across three states. So based on the descriptions, there’s some Wilson in me.

That said, I don’t think Clowes is asking the reader to identify with Wilson so much as accept that Wilson’s needs are not so different from our own or anyone else’s. Wilson is an asshole. My intro above mimics a typical one page gag early on in the book, Wilson starting a conversation with a stranger but quickly shutting them off or otherwise offending them, breaking that connection, curdling that opportunity for human interaction, a friendly exchange of information or views. It doesn’t take more than a few pages to realize Wilson is a pretty loathsome being. 

Clowes has long worked with unappealing characters. Sometimes he finds their humanity and sometimes, as with one of his fairly recent short stories, “Justin M. Damiano,” a weaponized satire of a delusional film critic, he’s just out for blood. The challenge with Wilson is just how much bad behavior can Clowes saddle Wilson with before the reader says no, this guy doesn’t deserve any happiness or companionship. 

I was quite enjoying the initial routine of the one-page gags that always ended with Wilson saying something asinine, as they’re very funny in a kind of middle ground between Ivan Brunetti blackout humor and the social discomfort comedy of Larry David and Ricky Gervais. But they’re sort of the amuse-bouche Clowes offers before the main course, bite-sized hints of flavors that will resonate more deeply as the meal progresses. 

One is struck by the different art styles Clowes employs for each page. It doesn’t seem meant to show off, as it’s actually a fairly narrow range. From squat little bignose Wilson to heavily lined, more realistic Wilson, it’s still generally about the same sort of backgrounds, the same indistinct cars and bland shops. One style or coloring effect may evoke some comparisons to Brunetti, another to Seth, but nothing is close enough to count as parody nor is there any stylistic shift in the writing to signify that, either. I think Clowes’ reasons are at least twofold: 1) it just may be less boring than drawing 77 pages in one style, or a rewarding creative challenge, and 2) to make clear to the reader that each page is a different glimpse of Wilson, perhaps viewed by a different person each time. 

All together, they form a picture of Wilson, but whether it’s a complete or true picture is open to interpretation. Some seemingly stand-alone gags are deeper on reflection (his equation of heavyset women as maternal may explain his attraction to Pippi AND something about missing his mother, while the line about Pippi escaping her harrowing call girl life “without a scratch” is paid off double with the joke about her tattoo). He seems to have a friend or two, but they’re only on the phone. Is he confiding to them or to other strangers? He jokes about being rich, but if he isn’t, how does he make a living?

These little mysteries and the game of trying to figure out if this style is used for this type of emotion are kind of fun (I tend to think his use of a less cartoony style for the more emotional scenes is pragmatic—he can get better emotional effects with heavier shading and more realistic facial expressions), but the book takes off into more interesting—and pretty new for Clowes—territory as Wilson leaves behind his unconditional friend, his dog, and heads back to the old neighborhood to visit his dying father and then search for his ex-wife. 

Clowes uses the death of Wilson’s mother (which takes place before the book begins but is recalled in a rare moment of regret by Wilson) and death of his father (with no closure and only a condescending outburst by Wilson towards his father’s nurse as a typically inappropriate show of respect towards the old man) to raise the stakes for Wilson reconnecting with his ex-wife and the teenaged daughter he didn’t know he had. There’s a kind of desperation to it—is this Wilson’s last chance for connection? for family?—that adds savor to his overblown attempts at instant parenting. In a different context, it might have been fine for Wilson to be distressed that their daughter Claire’s adoptive parents might not share his and ex-wife Tippi’s values, but what values do either never-had-a-job sociopath Wilson and ex-hooker Tippi have? It’s nice for him to defend Claire’s honor from some ill-mannered teen boys, but Wilson regularly says foul things to strangers and got a blowjob from a prostitute not much older than Claire a few days earlier. 

It’s easy to dismiss Wilson as irredeemable based on so many examples of hypocrisy, cruelty, arrogance, vindictiveness and self-delusion. Oddly enough, I was reminded reading the book of the film, Up in the Air, which also featured a detached character trying to connect with someone and having the tables turned when the other person didn’t behave according to plan. That film got its juice from one scene, where the detached George Clooney character tried to open up, only to find the woman he was opening up to wasn’t really interested in that. She had a whole other life she wanted to keep to herself and his jumping out of the compartment she had for him was a deep offense to her. And you feel for him because, hey, who wants handsome George Clooney to look so forlorn? It’s harder with Wilson. George Clooney may have fired people for a living and given talks about keeping one’s emotional backpack light, but he didn’t send dog shit to his ex-wife’s family. He didn’t scream in selfish rage at his silent, dying father. He didn’t kidnap his biological daughter to try to form an instant family.

And yet, I did feel for Wilson. Not so much for the easy stuff, like his fairly uncomplicated love for his dog. The handful of contemplative moments he spends (centered on water, symbol of so many things but chiefly here probably humanity, since we are mostly water, and eternity) show a man who does want to figure life out, who isn’t satisfied with being a friendless, unloved know-it-all. It’s not so much about accepting Wilson’s desire for love and communion as no different from what all humans desire, but to also own up to these desires as being selfish. Creating life, having someone around to feel close to, having friends to kick back with—these are all good things and they make us and others feel good. At the same time, feeling good is selfish. It’s hard to say that Wilson’s quest brought any positive to Pippi’s or Claire’s lives; easier to say quite the opposite. That doesn’t make the intention wrong. Wanting a family is a good thing; Wilson just happens to be incapable of making it happen at the time. Later, he does seem to have found some small measure of happiness borne of compromises many of us make. Maybe he even finds enlightenment near the end, or he’s just senile. Would that we all at least get the benefit of the doubt as our own stories end.

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Hey pal, you really read this the whole way through?

Holy shit, the way people spend their time.

—Christopher Allen