Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
McGuffins abound in this tour de force . . .
🤮
[So I think what I'm trying to do is review the books I've recently read, but in a way that isn't reviewing? Or at least said reviews aren't shaped like reviews as we generally know them?]
Sidebar
On the penultimate page of Alice Notley's epic poem Disobedience, she writes,
"Engaging" is an asshole word, / not quite as obnoxious a cliché as "ground-breaking."
The first sentence of the blurb on the back of Notley's book reads,
Paris-based Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging poets at work today [emphasis mine]
I think I hate the word "abound."
Continuation
The phrase "tour de force" appears on the back of Dash Shaw's 2008 book Bottomless Belly Button, and maybe it is that. I know what the French means, but I don't really know what any words in blurbs actually mean; blurbs are a kind of purely superficial language: they make the sounds we expect them to make, but mean nothing. Nobody buys a book based on the blurb?
The word "McGuffin" appears nowhere either in or on the book, but the story is full of them:
- the three keys (unless the fourth key gives the first three meaning)
- the drawing of the stairs
- the secret passageways
- the balloon chair
- the tooth
- the divorce itself (?)
If a McGuffin is a device that serves merely as a trigger for the plot, what is the plot of Bottomless Belly Button? What are all these McGuffins triggering?
Very quotidian, very normal, very very beautiful insight and change. That's all.
Bottomless Belly Button is the story of a family falling apart.
- All families are falling apart.
- All stories are about families falling apart.
- "Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again."
I think my favorite panel was the one toward the end of part 2, where the reader finally sees what Peter actually looks like instead of what Peter thinks he looks like.
I think I like Peter's story best. But I liked all the characters and their stories.
Ultimately, I found Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button highly engaging.