Review of "Our Cancer Year"

By: Aaron Barnhart

Harvey Pekar, who co-wrote Our Cancer Year with his wife Joyce Brabner, has for two decades been chronicling his life in the reality comic book series American Splendor. Each issue features one episode after another from the seemingly ordinary life of a diligent file clerk at a VA Hospital in Cleveland who moonlights as a writer. If you are accustomed to Hollywood amplifications of people's mundane existences, American Splendor will throw you for a loop. Stories such as "Short Changed" (Harvey almost gets charged too much for grapes) and "Lost And Found" (Harvey and Joyce keep forgetting where they have put down their books) are carefully retold in all their real-life uneventfulness. The enchantment comes in discovering the complexity of even "ordinary" life through Harvey's compulsive, hyperanalytical muse. Unlike entertainment vehicles that wisecrack their way to a happy ending, Pekar's vignettes are as often about what isn't said than what is, and like much of everyday life, they peter out or are frozen in their tracks without needing to be steered toward resolution.

American Splendor embodies Scott Fitzgerald's axiom that the sign of true intelligence is to live peaceably with deep inward contradictions. The pessimism and vulnerability of Harvey's thought balloons, his quarrels with his wife Joyce, and painful biographical details that are allowed to surface coexist with sitcommy plotlines and the inherent goofiness of the medium. (Harvey only scripts his comics and vendors out the illustrations to various artists, including Robert Crumb and Drew Friedman.) The brooder turns out to also be personable and popular at the governmental melting pot where he works, while at home he and Joyce welcome a steady stream of counter-cultural friends, ethnic neighbors, and fans who think it's cool to just drop in.

In 1990 a lump in Harvey's groin was removed and diagnosed as lymphoma, the central event of Our Cancer Year (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 224 pp. pbk.), an unapologetically frank and harrowing account of its treatment. American Splendor readers will be in for a shock: this full-length "comic" has been built on several layers of narrative and a complex of illustration styles to match (by the masterful Frank Stack). The twin premises of the book are hardly trivial, either. Besides the cancer, the narrative also incorporates Joyce's long-distance relationships with a gaggle of teenagers she met at an international peace conference. War survivors all, they provide an unexpected moment of grace and a chance for the recuperating couple to get their minds off their own troubles.

Gone, too, is the me-and-the-boys motif at the heart of many Splendor episodes; for a portion of the book Harvey is incapacitated, either too feeble or drugged-up to think lucidly, so Joyce takes up the burden of the narrative, much as she shoulders the exhausting chore of tending to her emaciated husband and exhorting -- berating -- him not to give up. (Harvey's cancer is highly curable, but characteristically he opts for the harshest regimen of chemotherapy while continuing to work full-time, a sure prescription for physical breakdown.) Yet Joyce's dedication belies more than a childhood urge to take care of people. Through all the bickering one can see Harvey's feminine counterpart, in her own way literary, idealistic, and convinced the cure for depression is pushing harder against the grindstone.

Our Cancer Year is a collaborative testimony to perseverance, hope, and in its kvetchy way, love.

Click here to see the excerpt from Our Cancer Year.