Home/World

Tell me, O Muse, of the complicated man, of the man of many ways, of the many-sided hero, of the man by long-experience tried. Tell of the man who left his home and tried to return through the back door. Tell me of the distance between home and the world and home again.

Home is (obviously) where the heart is, but hearts are homes to such variance of motive, desire, ideology, mood, and composure that Home can be a tricky thing to pin down. At base, I think we'd want to speak of home as the seat of our comfort, the place that offers us ease and safety and protection foremost. But very often too our homes feature some element or another than push us out, that push us to see what is to be seen. Put positively, we read this as the call to adventure. Put otherwise, flight.

Ben Hatke's new book is most properly the former, an answer to his decades-old affection for Nelly Bly's global circumnavigation and Verne's Around The World In 80 Days, which inspired Bly and others; but we'd be poor readers if we didn't also catch the forthright hints of the latter, an escape that gradually unveils across the course of the book.

The conceit here is that Hatke's kitchen has two doors, one facing east and one facing west. He would, very reasonably one day leave through one and, using only earthbound travel, return through the other. "I am just going outside and may be some time, only I'll really come back, I promise, and this isn't some euphemism to amplify my bravery in niceties, I hope." It is not likely a spoiler, since he's drawn this book, to reveal that he does in fact survive, though I think everyone was on tenterhooks as he passed through less certain portions of his trail.

If this book were mere travelogue, that would be one thing but it's better than that. I'm a firm believer in the idea that all biography (and especially autobiography) is a kind of fiction but that we call it nonfiction to emphasize that we hope to convey, in some manner or another, True Things that line up with life as it happened. Because of that, I'm always delighted by authors who embrace their subject with a freedom to allow more fantastical elements in. Hatke accomplishes this by liberally sprinkling appearances and conversations with spirits both historical and fictional; we take pleasure in conversations with Fogg and Passepartout, Nellie Bly, Bill Bryson, Leonardo da Vinci, Francis of Assisi, and Kenneth Graham's Sea Rat, among others. These even take part in their own conversations outside Hatke's hearing, omen of What's To Come.

One of my favorite reads last year was Rodrigo Fresán's Melvill, a kind of eschatalogical biography of Allan Melvill (father of the father of Moby-Dick) and it throws in Melvill's deathbed swoon conversations with ghosts and imaginations and fictional future histories (there is mention of a book on glaciology by Leonard Snart, whom we know as Captain Cold). In playing with these elements, Fresán takes what we know and extrapolates a True picture of Allan and breathes life into the man's life, character, and relationship to Herman. Melvill is yards better for breaking the veil, and Home/World elevates similarly. Anyone can pen a travelogue, but to be buoyed along the way by St Francis and the Sea Rat? That's the stuff. That's the ticket.

While we see Hatke's often harrowing journey buoyed by friendly ghosts made solid by his narrative imagination, even to the point of a gragantuan beautiful kaiju of a woman representing the spirit of The Trip, there is another spirit that haunts the text, this one without whimsical form. A little under five years before setting out through his kitchen door, Hatke's youngest daughter at the time was lost in a terrible accident at 4 years old.¹1Michelle and I burst with grief on the news of the accident, sitting vigil while we waited on news, bursting again when news of her passing struck. We'd lost a child ourselves several years earlier and were still grieving our own loss, but ours was still in-womb when we lost them. The comparison is nearly tawdry for although we held hopes and dreams and love, we'd never met our child. A four-year-old though, that's a fully-fledged person, someone emerged from the oblivion of infancy. A dear relationship. It may be hard for those without children to understand just what a four-year-old is. Our eldest daughter excitedly learned to read at age four so that she could read the third book of Zita The Spacegirl when it came out. My son beat Breath Of The Wild when he was four. The wonderful Japanese comic Yotsuba&! conveys what your typical four-year-old is like, and she is a joy to encounter. The loss of such a soul is incalculable to those who love her. By the time of his trip, Hatke is still weighed by unresolved grief (as if such things can find resolution). Ida doesn't get a conversational ghost—she's too important—but her presence is all throughout the book. Her grave is outside Hatke's home in Virginia, and he visits it physically at both the open and close of his adventure, but visits in other ways so much more often throughout the journey. Her presence felt throughout is both a terror and a balm and gives the book much of its weight.

This is a book about many things. It's about the size of the world, both in how it's smaller than it once was but also in how its recent fragmentation discourages exploring that size. It's about the privilege some of us swim in, unconsciously forgetting that water is wet because it's all that we know, and how good it can be to even just temporarily be stripped of those things that ease our movement through the world. It's about some of what makes Hatke mad: a) authoritarian structures and accoutrements and b) those who cannot take joy in the world around them, fearing it and retreating from it. It's about adventure and joy and uncertainty and hope.

But more than anything, Home/World is about two things:

• Weathering grief and the undercurrent of unexamined trauma that changes what living means.
• The constant presence of the people who love you.

Throughout the majority of Hatke's travels, he is cared for by friends and friends of friends, both present and distant. That love is overwhelming and is more striking than near any technological innovation making travel more convenient (and some of those like translation apps, online banking solutions, travel timetables, GPS and maps, etc are truly astounding additions and would have made my travels in the '90s and Aughts not nearly as horrible as they were). Seeing Hatke run into friends is a delight. Seeing him get set up by friends to meet with friendly strangers who enrich his trip is like watching the god of serendipity weave her magic.

When Hatke returns home at last, there are no suitors imposing on his hospitality, wooing his wife. There is no slaughter. Just a return to a wife and family who cherish him and have missed him. He does string a bow, though. He is home, where the love is. He is home, where he sheds at least a little of the weight at Ida's grave. He is home, where the heart is. Or at least the part of the heart that isn't The Trip, and is not the wanderer, the troubador, the scamp, the adventurer.

Home/World continues Hatke's trend toward work that features more grown-up thoughts. Those who read Reynard's Tale and Things In The Basement will be better prepared to encounter some of the hard things than those whose last encounter with Hatke was in the Zita and Mighty Jack trilogies. For my part, as much as my family values his middle grade adventures, I think this is the best we've seen from him, and I would be glad to see much more directed at this audience.

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NOTE: I'd first encountered Hatke's work in the first Flight anthology (or was it the second? I'd have to get them out but I'm not gonna), then later in Zita The Space Girl. In 2014, I met him briefly in an SPX autograph line (his, not mine), and since then we've gradually become friends as people do in this age of digital correspndances. I am enthusiastic for his work, in part because it kicks ass but in part because how can you not cheer on someone who means something to you? Take that as you want. Comics is small and everyone eventually gets to know everybody in some capacity, but I figured I should underscore this connection because I received a mention in the book's thanks, which was a warm surprise.

 

 

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