Bosch Fawstin's graphic novel Table For One actually came out last month, but I've only just had the chance to read it.

Will Howland is an aspiring writer who's spent his last year working as a waiter at his uncle's restaurant.  Will is thoroughly unsuited to the job, being entirely uninclined to be nice to people he doesn't actually respect.  Which is pretty much everyone.  However, he does actually show up and do the work, not least because he's got a bet with the owner that he wouldn't last a year.  And that money is due to him if he makes it through the night.

Fawstin is an interesting artist - the book has imaginative layouts, with panels seeming to fold out from one another.  His characters range from the essentially normal to the openly caricatured, and the art is able to encompass both.  It's a little unfortunate that the book so blatantly adopts the old convention where characters are admirable in direct proportion to their physical attractiveness, but then it's always been a useful shorthand in the past.

He's attempting something quite difficult here in trying to illustrate Will's philosophy of life and sell him to the audience as an admirable figure rather than merely an obnoxious brat.  Fawstin is an objectivist and the influence of Ayn Rand is readily apparent.  Rand described her own fiction as "romantic realism", based on the idea of presenting an ideal and admirable man (ie, an objectivist) in the context of the real world. 

Essentially, that's the approach of this book.  Will serves the role of showing the readers how to deal with the clowns around him, most of whom don't deserve his respect and accordingly don't get it.  Will is eventually rewarded for his principled ways by the return of a love interest who's seen the light.  Frankly, this all gets a little heavyhanded, when Will is given dialogue like "The only thing I'm loyal to is the truth."

Fortunately, for the most part Fawstin avoids simple lecturing and just gets on with illustrating the point, with a content-packed story and some amusing wordplay.  It's certainly a great piece of work in terms of presenting its worldview.  The practical difficulty, of course, is that objectivism has always been a bit of a minority worldview, and that one man's principled hero is another man's irritant.  Still, whether or not you agree with him, Fawstin certainly communicates it well.

Rating: B+

back | continue