Review - Little Things

Little Things: A Memoir in Slices
By Jeffrey Brown
Published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. $14.00 USD

The prolific Jeffrey Brown returns with another thick collection of endearingly imprecise slice of life stories and vignettes. That this is for a large "real" (i.e. not comics) publisher like Simon & Schuster is no cause for alarm, nor should one expect a leap forward in artistic growth or ambition. It's just more of the same, with one exception, and that's just fine. The stories do benefit from the fact that many of them document travel experiences by Brown, so he's not always in the same Chicago haunts, and a couple of health issues don't hurt, either, though Brown laudably doesn't mine them for sympathy.

The exception here is the last story, which finds Brown with a partner and infant son. Even if this is your first Brown book, it's bound to be jarring, because the stories preceding it dealt with Brown in and out of relationships; nothing steady or long-lasting and no extended romantic bliss or this-is-the-one moments. In a way, it short-changes this current relationship, which the credits indicate is very real and ongoing. Of course, it's not the reader's business whether Brown wants to chronicle this relationship in comics as he has with so many others before, but it does feel like a very separate piece from the others in this book, enough so that I'm surprised that the editor didn't exclude it. At any rate, this is another winning compilation from Brown, who seems to effortlessly make even the most mundane incidents entertaining.