Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels [Hardcover]

Jay Cantor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 12, 1987

Krazy Kat adores Ignatz Mouse. She sees the bricks he hurls at her head as tokens of love, and each day Ignatz arranges a cunningly different method of delivery for his missile. But when Ignatz and Krazy witness the mega-brick explosion in the desert, Krazy becomes depressed, and refuses to perform. To coax her back to work so they can regain their lost limelight, Ignatz invents his own brand of psychotherapy, orchestrates her kidnapping, and tries to seduce Krazy with promises of stardom from a Hollywood producer. As the mouse confronts the Kat with bewildering new concepts like sex, death, and politics, Ignatz and Krazy begin yearning to become round, for a fullness of body and spirit beyond their two-dimensional realm.

Forming an altogether witty and winning counterpoint to George Herriman’s classic comic strip, Jay Cantor’s kinetic novel has become a classic in its own right, one of those masterpieces that creates its own unforgettable universe.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After 40 years' absence, Krazy Kat and her cartoon cronies, last seen in George Herriman's famous comic strip, reappear full-blown in this brilliant and powerful consideration of some very current anxieties. Subtitled "A Novel in Five Panels," it is an imaginative tour de force. Krazy was picnicking with her beloved Ignatz Mouse at Alamagordo the day the atom bomb was tested. Witnessing such destructive power shook the Kat's hitherto unshakable innocence; she spiraled into depression and retirement. How could she work when she was no longer even sure that the bricks lobbed daily at her noggin by her mouse were proofs of his love? But if Krazy doesn't work, neither can Offisa Pup, Beau Koo Jack, Mrs. Mice or the other denizens of Coconino County; Ignatz mobilizes all of them in the effort to get their Kat performing again. With themes of love and work in place, it's no surprise that Ignatz first tries the talking cure with Kata problem in a place where neither sex nor death is known. Subsequent attempts to straighten out Krazy are politicala Patty Hearst-type kidnapping/brainwashingand culturala scheme to put them all in the movies. What finally does reconcile Krazy and Ignatz in love and work is a fusion of fantasy and reality that rounds out the metaphor for growing up that Cantor, who also wrote The Death of Che Guevara, has uncovered in Herriman's comic characters. With quirky wordplay, telling misspellings and, finally, plenty of sex and a death, his novel, perhaps slightly uneven and a shade overlong, is unfailingly intelligent, fully felt and tremendously moving.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Cantor's first novel ( The Death of Che Guevara , LJ 11/1/83), was a powerfully imagined portrait of the Latin American revolutionary. Here, he shifts gears, using George Herriman's old comic characters to explore the psychosexual underpinnings of the atomic age and the bomb's effects on personality and culture. Cantor turns the novel's central difficultyhow to create complex characters from cartoon imagesinto its central metaphor, using their two-dimensionality as a reflection of the contemporary psyche. Though the parodies are sometimes strained, Cantor successfully combines social satire and psychological insight into a blackly comic tour-de-force. Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 245 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (December 12, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394550250
• ISBN-13: 978-0394550251
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,464,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Intentions are confusing; there's a lot to enjoy, though, August 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels (Hardcover)

I guess I'm just a big softie and a hackneyed sentimentalist, but there was something about this book that got to me. Recasting Krazy and Ignatz and hateful, hurtful people in an ugly 20th century landscape devoid of the magic and beauty that radiated around Coconino County was a real blast of cold water. I loved the opening, in which Krazy gives up comics after witnessing the first atomic bomb blast, but the outright savagery that characterizes the rest of the book wears very thin. Ignatz goes from being mischievous to being a complete bastard in no time, and his plans to shake Krazy back into work through constant humiliation and degradation are creepy. I guess the point is that our century has degenerated to the point where something as magical as "Krazy Kat" could never thrive like it did in the first half (fans ranged from James Joyce to Picasso to Woodrow Wilson). But you don't need Jay Cantor's arty postmodernist tract to tell you that. Just turn on the six o'clock news, dollin'.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Better to read the comic itself, February 27, 2001

By 

Jay Stevens (Missoula, MT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels (Collier Fiction) (Paperback)

Reminiscent of Frederic Tuten's "Tintin in the New World: A Romance," Jay Cantor takes a comic long since unpublished and attempts to reinvigorate and modernize its characters in novel format. Both "Tintin" and "Krazy Kat" flirt with postmodernism. Both Tuten and Cantor soak their characters in a philosophical bath. And most notably, both authors suggest a ripe and healthy sex life would serve as the tonic for the comic characters' incompleteness, flatness.

Why do this to "Krazy Kat?" Who can tell from the insipid prose Cantor offers up in this confusing, frustrating novel? Although there were some humorous scenes in the book (notably the image of comic strip characters creating a terrorist organization in order to win the rights to themselves from Hearst), generally the book was weighed down with too much Freud, too much babble, too much abstract.

And it's nothing like the comic strip, "Krazy Kat," which was sparse, mostly silent, and dreamlike. Sure it had surrealistic scenery and an ambiguous plot, but it defied explanation, and that was where its beauty lay. Cantor, apparently oblivious to the strip's finest quality, proceeded to trample over its delicate balance by overanalying.

Don't think. You can only hurt the ballclub.

I hear Jay Cantor's "The Death of Che Guevera" is a good book.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A slow but endearing look at what it means to be human, December 23, 2008

By 

Samuel Holley (Peoria, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Krazy Kat (Paperback)

This is not a book for everyone. I am, admittedly, a fan of Cantor's style, so perhaps this isn't an unbiased review. Cantor's books have a way of sneaking up on you - they're kind of slow, but every sentence is a joy to read, if you enjoy good writing for the sake of good writing. In Krazy Kat in particular, I think Cantor does an excellent job of weaving theme and symbolism into something that literally is 2-dimmensional. He manages to glorify both the innocence of that simple, flat world that Kat and Ignatz live in, and the less-than-perfect but complete world that we inhabit. This is a book, for all its cartoonish presentation, about being human.