Building Stories: Choose Your Own Adventure for Adults

Towards the end of last year, I started to hear about a new "graphic novel" called Building Stories. The basic description is that it's about the lives of the residents in an apartment complex in Chicago, a seemingly straight forward work of literary fiction with pictures. However, Building Stories isn't quite so simple; it features not only a non-traditional narrative structure but a non-traditional physical one as well. The reason why I'm hesitant to classify Building Stories as simply a novel (graphic or otherwise) is because it's not just a single object that you can hold in one hand and read from cover to cover. There are a lot of covers, and lot of things without covers, in Building Stories. Author Chris Ware has put together his narrative through fourteen separate items contained in a larger, sturdy box rather than between two pieces of cardboard.

Some of the items in Building Stories are definitely books, but others are pamphlets, newspapers, posters, and even something that resembles a board game board. There is no set order to read them; the back cover of the box suggests places to lose the pieces around one's house but gives no hints on where the story might begin or end. And that doesn't really seem to be the point with this particular story.

The box cover of Building Stories by Chris Ware. Image via Wikipedia.

I wrote a little bit about the way an author can lead us into developing a relationship with his or her character while I was thinking about Roxane Gay's "North Country," and Ware's decision to make this a collection of pieces housed together in a big box has a similar effect. His story has several characters, but one in particular emerges as the protagonist and features most heavily in the stories. Instead of taking us through her life in a preconceived order, dictating how we end up knowing her, Ware lets us pick and choose and find out about her a little at a time. It's a bit like finding a box of memorabilia in an attic and piecing through it, reading diaries or letters in random order. My impulse was to unpack the entire box and then read one of the largest components first since it would be easiest to put it away on the bottom of the box--so I ended up reading something that came later chronologically first, and then finding out how earlier events in the protagonist's life unfolded after I already knew what their eventual consequences would be. In some ways this was also like making a new and intimate friend; you might find out a lot about a person's life in the moment, down to things they are struggling with, but their history can come much more slowly.

My curiosity over piecing together this narrative and finding out what made the characters tick was on of the most exciting parts of Building Stories, but the sheer physicality of the book was also fantastic. I caved and got a Kindle a year ago; I'm currently still about 50/50 with ebooks and physical books, but the Kindle is starting to win out because of the instant gratification factor--whenever I see a new book that looks interesting, I can buy it immediately if I'm having a low-willpower kind of day. Obviously there's no ebook for Building Stories, and the nature of the book forced me to interact with it on multiple levels. There's of course the text, and the visual imagery that already adds another level to a graphic novel, but the various sizes and structures of pieces also dictated the way in which they needed to be absorbed. I found myself reading some of the pieces on the couch like regular books, but also spending a lot of time on the floor spreading out posters or large newspaper-like sections. I thought my cat would be more involved in the process than he was.

One of my favorite formats was the piece that looked like a Little Golden Book. Such an iconic presentation really messes with the reader's expectations--while Building Stories might have pictures, it is no way a kid's book. The book deals with themes involving depression, loneliness, sexuality, and the general struggle to find belonging or a sense of purpose in the world. Ware shows the characters' highs and lows--and the way that memory can change these moments over time.

It would be easy to dismiss a book that's basically about the minutiae of life as a bit dull, but Ware's characters, voice, and imatery are strong enough to be poignant on their own. His play with format and physicality pushes the book even further, taking an already excellent and nuanced narrative to the next level. With all of the distractions available in our increasingly attention-deficit world, I love finding a book that can keep me engaged on so many levels.