Notes towards an Understanding of Daniel Clowes’s Monica

(A Garland of Quotations has moved to Wednesday, perhaps permanently, as an experiment. As always, I encourage you, if you like my writing but wish an editor would “tone it down,” to indulge in some of my books, in which a sober editor has done just that.)

I love Daniel Clowes’s new graphic novel Monica, but I don’t understand all of it. In part, this is because I’ve only had a week or two with the book, and in part because some aspects may be literally ununderstandable. Clowes is on record (spea...