Chastizement

Roz Chast is the only NEW YORKER cartoonist I don’t like. Of all cartoonists I’m NOT likely to meet, Roz Chast would be the exception. It’s because I don’t like her. Fate works that way: I don’t like her, so, by some strange coincidence, I’m bound to meet her. I don’t like her so much, that she’s the only cartoonist I can remember by name. I keep her name at handy index in my brain for cocktail conversation, when I can smile and nod over mention of her and know that I am being false, not just ignorant. A lot of people do like her. Someone in my family likes her, but I can’t remember who it is right now. Forgive me, family, a lot of people like Roz Chast, but I do not.

I only read THE NEW YORKER for the cartoons. It’s like the converse opposite of having a PLAYBOY subscription. I look at the pictures, not the articles. A lot of you do that, you just don’t admit it. The other NEW YORKER cartoonists draw a simple, compelling image, then a brief caption. I consume them like eating popcorn, then go on to the next handful. It’s delicious. But Roz Chast’s cartoons read like a trifocal nightmare. There is no negative space in her drawings. The images are frenetic with scribbling congestion. The characters are always hunched and have bulging eyes, as if they drank one too many four-packs of Red Bull. It’s not the calm, classy clean lines of the rest of the magazine. Roz makes a four by six block of space into a comic book style crowdedness. New York itself isn’t that jammed at rush hour.

Plus also she commits double redundancy: she draws a picture AND says a thousand words. The feature articles of the magazine don’t use up that much text, which she prints in little tiny writing. What is smaller than Elite type? Why it’s Super-Elite—AKA Roz Chast! My brain sees that and my eyes automatically say, “Pass.” There are plenty of other good cartoonists in THE NEW YORKER, artists who can convey a simple point with humor and I don’t have to work and squint to understand. Furthermore, I don’t think Roz’s cartoons are funny. They’re certainly not worth squinting that hard over.

And now she’s illustrated a children’s book for Steve Martin (THE ALPHABET FROM A TO Y WITH BONUS LETTER Z!). Yippee. Okay, so I admit it, it’s the only Steve Martin book I’ve read. For children’s level, it’s a decent book, mostly; although any time you single out the planet Uranus to the exclusion of the other planets, the material becomes suspect. Still, he manages to get on a page words and combinations of words that appeal to the under-four-foot set. Roz’s accompanying illustrations are typical of what you see in the NEW YORKER. They are too busy, too complicated, too esoteric. Even Steve Martin, in a recent interview on National Public Radio, mis-identified a figure she had drawn and she had to correct him on the air. HE didn’t understand her illustration either.

Ouch.

Her only noteworthy accomplishment in Martin’s book is on the front and back inside covers. The book is about the alphabet, and groups words starting with the same letter. However, the inside covers depict alphabetic letters omitted in the English language, and thus left out of the book. Letters with umlauts and conjoined consonants and other symbols that I can’t find on my keyboard. These foreign letters stand around and make comments about not being in the book. It’s fun and clever, and, after all, it’s on the inside covers, so you won’t really miss anything if you skip them. Except they’re the best cartooning I’ve seen from Roz Chast.


Dear Roz, I don’t care for your style. I wanted to say that before we meet so that I’m not forced into being fakely complimentary, and so you know that I have paid attention to your work, which is the best compliment anyone can pay.