Lint

Jordan Wellington Lint, the eponymous protagonist of Lint, Chris Ware's latest entry in his "Rusty Brown" serialized graphic novel, is given numerous opportunities to overcome emotional traumas from his youth and make peace with himself and his past—and he squanders each one. A physically abusive, racist father, a mother who dies when Jordan is a child and is quickly replaced by a woman who remains mostly blank to him, and a high-school friend killed in a car accident while Jordan is driving all contribute to make him into the angry, selfish teenager who grows into the failed musician, lapsed man of faith, sleazy philanderer and slumlord he winds up becoming. But as bleak as this sounds, Lint is more than a lesson in misanthropy. It delves into the psychological legacies of families: the passing down of racism and sexism, and the justifications and denials that people use to gratify longings whose origins are lost to the accretions of time. Ware pushes at the clean lines and tidy surfaces one usually associates with his work, occasionally mucking up the pages with blood, sputum, and semen; in one inspired section, he abandons his signature style to recount a lost episode of abuse in a bold, decidedly unsubtle manner. Dark and unforgiving, Lint is proof that Ware is determined to push his work to new levels of artistic exploration and emotional insight.