Lamenting the absence of qualities in contemporary novelists basically amounts to lamenting the lack of ideas, and, more importantly, the lack of ideas expressed as emotions. These are just what you find in Chris Ware’s Acme Library of Novelty, an anthology of comic strips that was the best fiction of the season. His ideas are all about the way technology is alienating us not only from our own potential but from our ability to imagine it—the major subject of our time. While the emotional range of his work is in some ways limited, mainly playing variations on a few themes of aching emptiness, regret, shame, cruelty and remorse, that’s fitting given his themes and the contours of his medium. (It also exceeds the range of most novelists working in prose, who display little beyond a smug, preening vanity.)
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