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Bottomless Belly Button

By Henry Chamberlain
June 26, 2008 - 23:23

Bottomless Belly Button has been declared the best graphic novel of the year by New York magazine and helped move its creator, Dash Shaw, a little closer to rock star status, at least within the comics-reading community. It is a celebration of the banality of life with its desperate attempts at epiphanies that won't come. And yet it is a book with no real story to be read.

There is so much deliberately bad writing and bad drawing that you wonder if there is some underlying purpose. The fact that there is as much good writing and good drawing makes the case for this. This is an anti-book with anti-characters who say very little. It is a subversive form of story telling with a long tradition. If you're up for that type of exercise in style, then this is your book.  Shaw's subject is the dysfunctional family which has certainly been mined by many a great artist. So, he has his work cut out for him. For my taste, what Shaw seems to end up doing is giving the reader a double whammy feeling of not only expressing alienation but being alienated from the very tools being used to express it.

The actual story, characters and dialogue are mostly wooden, while also curious, making you feel as if you're drawn into a vortex you're willing to slip into. The premise of a gathering of the Loony family on the eve of the divorce of the matriarch and patriarch after forty years of marriage is at once fanciful and trite. That premise never picks up any steam so you have to look elsewhere to see what would make this 720 page book a page-turner.

For my money, this is a book that, with weird twists and turns, wants to keep reminding you it's just a book: all artifice, no reality here. It's an exercise that risks becoming tiresome and you'll run into some potentially rough patches. The prime example of this is the character of Jill, the teenage daughter to Claire, one of the three siblings at the family gathering. Jill is crudely drawn to be exceptionally annoying and repulsive. Her face is like a clump of clay with fried eggs for eyes and roadkill for hair. Jill never says or does anything interesting and yet she plays a critical role in keeping the story moving.



Jill's key role is in prompting Peter, the youngest of the three siblings, to jump start his life by approaching a woman he thinks is hot. He's 26 and a virgin so the stakes are high. After Jill, Peter is the next most annoying and repulsive character with a grossly "sweet" frog face instead of a human head. This pivotal scene plays out on the beach. Peter is wearing a swim suit from the '20s along with Mickey Mouse gloves he wears throughout the book. Jill has on a bikini to show off her lumpy body covered in hair. The whole time they're together, Peter is dealing with relentlessly watery eyes and snot pouring down his nose like a faucet. Then it happens and they both lock onto a hottie in a baseball cap:

Jill: "Go talk to her! This'll be so much fun for me!"

Peter: "I have no reason to talk to her. Just trying to talk to her would make me a creep pervert because I have no real reason to talk to her."

Jill: "Are you going to watch her prance out of your life?"

Peter: "She's not in my life! But I would love to watch her prance."

Jill: "Tell her you're a famous movie director! Girls love that stuff."

Peter: "I dunno."

In between those exchanges, we read a letter from a woman demanding that Peter come to his senses, realize that they only dated once and please stop stalking her. Then we read a harsh review of a film by Peter criticizing Peter for being so grossly out of touch.

Of all the subplots to Bottomless Belly Button, it is the story of Peter that is particularly engaging. The romance between Peter and Kat actually is interesting. It's as if Shaw lets up on the brakes and allows some old-fashioned naturalism to have its way. Despite the annoying frog head, Peter is the most developed character next to his sweetie, Kat, who is one of only two characters drawn somewhat realistically.

The stories related to the other two siblings, Dennis, the eldest, and Claire are not especially of interest although they certainly serve their structural roles and help maintain a moody vibe. Ultimately, they are characters we don't really care about and there are plenty of those here. If you read this as a conventional narrative, you'd be hard pressed to get caught up, for instance, in Dennis's search for the answers as to why his elderly parents have decided to divorce after forty years of marriage. It is not totally clear what Shaw's intent is but you'd have to think it's irony and it reads best that way. Whatever the case, the ambiguity is fascinating.



One of the most finely executed series of pages, of which there are many, is following the progress of one of the most thinly developed characters, Maggie, the matriarch, as she manages her way through a grocery store with all its rituals down to the neurotic need for some shoppers to rigidly adhere to positioning those plactic bar separators between purchases as they go down the conveyor belt to the cashier. And to top it all off, after buying groceries, Maggie drives her car through a car wash. "Fwoosh, whirr, flap, flap," goes the car wash.

As we reach the end of this 720 page book, there's no talking Maggie and David out of their divorce despite those forty years of marriage. They both look very reluctant to go through with it but are resigned to it nonetheless, still no clear answers as to why. As I see it, let the crocodile tears roll. I contend that you're not reading this for the story but you're there for the loopy ride and to enjoy this showcase of experimentation.

Taking the good with the "bad" art and writing, it all does add up to a haunting work. Stop at any given page and you're likely to lose patience as you are to marvel and linger. You stop at a scene from a scrapbook and you find a credible depiction of by-gone memories. You stop at that love scene between Jill and a wanna-be player and you will cringe. As the first page states: "Three Parts - Take breaks from reading between them." That certainly sounds like an artist's genuine cautionary plea. Shaw does seem to want to let you in on a joke and reward you for it.


   

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12