A Contract with God and other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner | 1978 | W.W. Norton & Co. | Hardcover $ 25.95
A revolutionary novel, A Contract with God re-creates the neighborhood of Will Eisner’s youth. A mesmerizing fictional chronicle of a universal American experience, it inspired a generation of sequential artists. Through a quartet of four interwoven stories, A Contract With God expresses the joy, exuberance, tragedy, and drama of life on the mythical Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx.
I wanted to have at least one graphic novel on my list for Classics Club. A lot of folks don’t consider comics “literature”, so they often get left out of discussions on or lists of so-called classics. I happen to think that if you can count other non-prose things like works of poetry or play scripts as classic lit, you can count graphic novels just as well.
Will Eisner is one of the big granddaddies of comics in America, and is one of the originators of the graphic novel format (basically, a book-length work of sequential art, as opposed to a serial magazine style or newspaper comic). One of the big annual prizes in the comics world, kind of like the equivalent of the National Book Award, is named after him — the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award. He was kind of a big deal. So, it made sense to me to add one of his works to my list.
No big traditional book publisher was willing to take on the risk of publishing A Contract With God, both because comics were still very much seen as brainless little entertainments, and because they were usually marketed to children — and the subject matter of this book is definitely not brainless and definitely not for children. The first edition had a small print run out of an indie publisher; the book’s popularity grew slowly over the years as the graphic novel format became more common.
Likewise, bookshops apparently didn’t know how to sell it. It didn’t seem to fit in any particular genre. Graphic novels and related types of works like manga are now usually all shelved together, but they’re formats, not genres. Comics can come in any genre, just like plain ol’ novels do. And yet bookshops felt like they couldn’t sell this title alongside the other novels because it was just so radically different from anything else in inventory.
I took a comics + graphic novels course in library school; it was one of the most memorable classes from my entire run through both undergrad and grad school. I’m still far more likely to pick up a regular print paperback than a work of sequential art, just for preference, but I have a healthy respect for the form. When I worked at the public library, I used to love both recommending graphic novels to teens and defending them to teens’ parents.
This is one of those books that isn’t really for me, but I can still be impressed by it and see why lots of other readers think it is interesting. Both the art and the storylines tend a little towards the grotesque and include very in-your-face ugly stereotypes of poor tenement Jews. Of course, Eisner himself grew up as a poor tenement Jew, and it’s clear that he’s playing up those stereotypes on purpose. It’s just a little jarring for a goy reader almost half a century later.
I think this is well worth tracking down for anyone who is interested in adding an atypical classic work to their to-read list, but especially for modern comic readers who want to get a taste of what the form was like at its inception.
Links:
- Biography of Will Eisner from the official website of Will Eisner
- Biography of Will Eisner from Comic-Con International
- Obituary for Will Eisner in the New York Times
- The Will Eisner Collection from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University
Publication information: Eisner, Will. A contract with God and other tenement stories. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2017. Print.
Source: Public library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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