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Summary
Summary
Patience is a psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially âeoeClowesianâe and utterly unique in the authorâe(tm)s body of work. This 180-page, full-color original graphic novel affords Clowes the opportunity to draw some of the most exuberant and breathtaking pages of his life, and to tell his most suspenseful, surprising and affecting story yet.
Author Notes
Daniel Clowes was born in Chicago in 1961. His comic-book series Eightball is in its tenth year, and his work has appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and Newsweek. A feature film based on Ghost World, his second book is currently in production in Hollywood.
He lives in Berkeley, California.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Clowes (Ghost World) plumbs the depths of science fiction in this intriguingly bizarre love story. Jack, torn apart by the mysterious murder of his wife, Patience, flings himself back and forth through time to discover and punish the real culprit. Not everything is at it seems, however-not even his beloved wife. This is a fascinating collage, repurposing elements from action thrillers, psychological horror, and romantic drama. Clowes skillfully anchors each psychedelic turn in human emotion. The SF elements here, as in his earlier The Death-Ray, are just vehicles for the dead-eyed cast to continue roaming through time for a happiness their own obsessions ensure they will never reach, and the future is no refuge from the cycles of abuse that Jack and Patience try to break out of. Patience herself is a wonderfully complicated character and the unraveling of her psyche is key to the story, as is the web of time travel that ensnares her husband. Another strong entry in an already stunning body of work, and one that will surely be hailed as one of the best releases of 2016. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Jack and his girlfriend, Patience, discover she's pregnant, and though they're sure parenting will be difficult, because of everything from money to emotional stability, they're too in love with their future baby to care. But not long after the discovery, Jack comes home to find Patience murdered. Decades later, in a psychedelic-hued future, Jack, now wrinkled and gray, is bitterly, furiously fixated on what he could have done to prevent Patience's death. An offhand If I could just go back . . . leads him to someone who can make that happen, and, from there, Jack tumbles down a trippy rabbit hole into Patience's past, trying to track down the old boyfriend he's convinced is her killer. This is no mere sci-fi romp, however; time travel becomes a poignant metaphor for wraithlike Jack's obsessive mourning, and, before long, his schemes become as destructive as his grief. Punctuated by meltingly grotesque evocations of Jack's time-shattering flashes of awareness, Clowes' brilliant artwork homes in on expressions of aching feeling, particularly in Patience, who, through Jack's observations, gradually becomes vividly, marvelously multifaceted. Though the going is bleak and heart-wrenching, Clowes still leaves readers with a golden glimmer of hope. This is incredibly captivating a stunning marriage of text, image, and design, and a demonstration of Clowes' sheer mastery of the art of sequential storytelling. A must-have for any graphic-novel section.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
After his pregnant wife, Patience, is killed, Jack lives in misery for decades until he discovers a way to travel through time in hopes of stopping the murder. When Jack visits the past, he learns things about his wife and her years as a young adult that she has kept from him, including several physically violent and emotionally damaging encounters with previous men. While some teens will empathize with the despondent Patience, who feels like she is trapped by her circumstances, others will get caught up in the time chase. Clowes uses time travel as a vehicle to create vivid, mind-blowing images with a bright and colorful palette. With a classic like Ghost World under his belt, Daniel Clowes already has a legion of graphic novel fans, and although the subject matter differs here, his signature drawing style is recognizable. VERDICT This time-travel love story will pick up fans of slow-burning thrillers and graphic novels, especially those already familiar with Clowes's work.-Carrie Shaurette, Dwight-Englewood School, Englewood, NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
An attempt to journey through time goes spectacularly wrong in Clowes's visually intricate tale of love, murder and revenge Would you go anywhere near a book described on its back cover as "a cosmic timewarp deathtrip to the primordial infinite of everlasting love"? Yet, while it may have its tongue firmly in its cheek, the blurb is not an inaccurate precis of Daniel Clowes 's latest graphic novel. The book opens in 2012, with its eponymous heroine discovering that she is pregnant. Patience, who thinks of herself as a "white-trash piece of shit", has had a rough life, marked by abuse, neglect, poverty. Her relationship with Jack Barlow, the only man who has ever been nice to her, and the pregnancy, are her lifelines. Jack, too, thinks of their love as his salvation, but very soon inside this threshold of a new, better life, he comes home to find Patience dead, apparently killed by an intruder. His life goes into freefall: he is first accused of her murder but released after a year, whereupon he becomes obsessionally focused on finding out who killed Patience. The second act, set in 2029, changes the game entirely: Jack, now a jittery, combustible monomaniac bent on revenge, discovers a man called Bernie, who may have invented a form of time-travel. He transports himself to 2006, his future self eavesdropping on Patience's life before she met him, convinced that her convict ex, a thug called Adam, is her killer. The idea is to intervene in the inexorable flow of time and kill him so that he doesn't exist by the time she meets Jack. Things go spectacularly wrong and Jack finds himself in 1985. And with each leap back, the reader will learn things about Patience's past, and about Jack's attempts, in the "present", to refine the time-travelling, that will spin the story into wholly unexpected places. At certain points, the narrative may remind you of the film Looper, at other times, of that old counterfactual question, "If you could go back in time and kill Hitler's mother, would you do it?" There is no strand or element in the tight weave that is superfluous or casual, but particularly crucial to the story is Jack's encounter in 1985 with a suave scientist, Wolfe, who he thinks can manufacture more of the "juice" that is essential to time travel. The final section, set in 2012 again, adds information to the first 2012 section in a way that can only be called cinematic. So much has been withheld from us, and so many new twists now happen, that you'll have to take these pages in one sitting then reread instantly. Clowes does realism impeccably -- think of the pitch-perfect depiction of adolescent ennui in Ghost World, or the psychological and emotional truthfulness of Mister Wonderful -- but he is also fond of letting the irruption of the hyperreal or fantastical not so much shift gears as change the entire vehicle. His most complex book, David Boring, places effortless forays into the surreal in the middle of what is essentially a psychosexual Hitchcockian narrative. In Patience, a love story like many of Clowes's novels, the incursion of sci-fi is at first delightfully surprising and thereafter modulated so effortlessly that you see behind the irony of that self-consciously purple-prose blurb to the truth it encapsulates. Jack remains ambivalent throughout about whether he is seeking revenge or looking to make Patience's life follow a different trajectory, this time a happier one; the cloudiness imbues the work with nuance and moral complexity. Patience, the virtue, is a simple function of time, and the ramifications of the book's title -- both the name of its heroine and the quality that most marks Jack, who waits out decades and bends and breaks time to do the one right thing in his life at unimaginable cost to himself -- are devastating, especially when you reach the final pages. I prefer the artwork of Ghost World, with its dominant pastel green, or, even better, the austerely beautiful black-white-and-grey chamber music of David Boring, to the occasionally eye-hurting full-colour extravaganza that is Patience, but this is a Clowes novel, constructed with rigorous narrative and visual intricacy, so you need to pay attention to every single panel. An example: that bearded man sounding off on the TV whom Jack and Patience watch nightly with horrified fascination might seem like a background detail, thrown in for verisimilitude, but you'll discover his shattering consequences for the story towards the end. This is a deeply affecting book, and despite its gritty prose, colourful language and hardboiled trappings, a tender one, its sustained undertow of tenderness and melancholy giving it a surprising delicacy. * Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others is published by Vintage. To order Patience for [pound]12.99 ([pound]16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Neel Mukherjee.
Library Journal Review
Patience and Jack are happily married and expecting a baby. But both have secrets-she has a dysfunctional past they haven't discussed, and he's not the office worker he claims. Then Patience turns up dead, apparently murdered by a former boyfriend. Devastated, Jack wonders if he can do anything now for his wife and child. And years later when he happens on someone with a time-travel device, he does do something. The award-winning Clowes (Mister Wonderful) sets his cast of unsophisticated characters into a high-tech premise but keeps the focus on the people rather than the science. Indeed, the contrast among the characters, their deep and universal emotions, and the sf trappings is jarring. Clowes's stolid, almost frozen drawing style captures a humanity caught in its unmet needs, powerless to understand or find satisfaction. The full coloring recalls classic superhero comics, edging over into psychedelic hues for futuristic sections. -VERDICT This parable of enduring love, leavened with noir-tinged humor and quirky dialog about existential dilemmas, will appeal to aficionados of literary graphic novels and those who enjoyed Bryan Lee O'Malley's Seconds.-MC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.