Take The Long Way Home
Jon Claytor, 456 pgs, Conundrum Press, conundrum.com, $25
“The highway ends at the Pacific Ocean. At least, it feels much more like an ending than a beginning.” Jon Claytor’s graphic novel, Take The Long Way Home, is preoccupied with endings and beginnings. As he takes us on his road trip across Canada, Claytor is looking for a definitive end to the chapter of his life involving alcoholism, believing that is what he needs to start a new one. This brand of soul-searching is something anyone who has brushed up against addiction will understand. And even if one has somehow not experienced such a trial, I think anyone can relate to Claytor’s raw vulnerability as he grapples with how slippery life is — impossible to properly compartmentalize into tidy beginnings and endings.
Claytor’s main conceit is to bleed his unfiltered self onto the page. He bounces between dark suicidal thoughts and folksy vignettes about cute critters he sees on the road, but the flow feels natural. This is because the structure of the story encapsulates the anxieties of the author just as well as the content of the story itself, from the sometimes manic pace to the scrawling illustrative composition. I related to Claytor throughout the book, but when I came to him imagining that a tow truck driver was going to tell him, “your car probably died because you’re a bad person,” I am certain I’ve had that exact anxiety myself.
Ultimately, though the book is part autobiography and part Canadiana travelogue, it is mainly a love letter to the people who have helped Claytor through his struggles: loved ones and friends, but also those ephemeral presences in our lives like David Bowie and Dolly Parton. This is Claytor’s homage to the ones who give us support when we are at our weakest, and I think it’s a fine piece of artistic gratitude, an emotional road trip well worth taking.