I bought a copy of “The Funnies,” a novel by J. Robert Lennon, at a dollar store. The jacket had good reviews from Time and The New Yorker of his first novel, “The Light of Falling Stars.” I’d never heard of him before.
The novel was good, I enjoyed it, but it raised a lot of questions in my mind. It’s about a family that is featured in a newspaper comic strip drawn by the father, a nasty piece of work who has just died when the book begins. The family is terribly disfunctional, yet is obviously the family from the real strip “The Family Circus.” Detailed descriptions of the children & parents, the jokes, the drawing style, all indicate this.
Tim, the book’s narrator, decides to take on drawing the strip. He trashes a number of other strips, very thinly veiled, along the way. “Whiskers” is one of them – a strip about a fat cat who won’t chase mice, his bug-eyed owner who can’t get a date, etc. “Sybil” is another – a strip about a thirtyish woman who works in an office, complains about food, clothes, men, etc. The cartoonist who draws “Sybil” is also named Sybil, and is depicted as a heavy-drinking man-eater.
Other strips and cartoonists are skewered as well. It makes for an interesting read, with so many details about cartooning that it seems clear Lennon knows his subject well. The loony family is well-depicted. I liked the book enough to want to read “The Light of Falling Stars,” (which is referred to as “award-winning” without naming the award). But I do wonder if Lennon has been sued by any cartoonists, and if anyone knows anything about him. The jacket has a cartoon of him at a typewriter instead of a photo, and gives little information. The publisher is Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, and the pub. date is 1999. Anybody?