All too often, a biography gives an author a chance to demonize or sanctify the life of its subject. It is the rare biography that can attempt to tell a balanced view of a life, without trying too hard to lean one way or the other. For that reason alone, “Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City,” from Nobrow Press, is an unqualified success; toss in the gorgeous artwork and carefully crafted story, and it transcends just about any biography, graphic or not, that you’re likely to read this year.
Written by Pierre Christin
Illustrated by Oliver BalezA new graphic biography by Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez recounts the achievements of one man who changed the the face of an entire city. Robert Moses: the mastermind of New York.
From the subway to the skyscraper, from Manhattan’s Financial District to the Long Island suburbs, every inch of New York tells the story of one man’s mind: Robert Moses, the architect who designed it all. Now, in Christin and Balez’s graphic biography, the rest of Robert’s story will be told.
For those unaware of Mr. Moses’s life, here are the broad strokes: a man born into wealth in Connecticut, eventually settling in New York City. After getting his education at Yale, Oxford, Columbia, and more, Moses started to catch the eye of some very important people, who allowed him to see his vision of New York City become more of a reality.
That vision is the most interesting part of Moses’s story – he was simultaneously a champion of poor people, building city pools and beaches to benefit city dwellers, and horribly prejudiced against the very same people, halting public transit plans and rewarding those who drove cars. In fact, many of his bridge and road designs for the Long Island suburbs were built specifically so that buses could not travel there, eliminating the riff raff of the poor instantaneously. That doesn’t even go into his decimation of many neighborhoods that were seemingly too inconvenient or too poor for him to “let” survive.
What makes this particular graphic novel so successful is that every action, from his questionable liaisons with pop singers at Jones Beach, to his triumphs of helping the poor, are illustrated in a beautiful, colorful style that is filtered through a nostalgic haze. Because of Balez’s technique, everything looks like a tranquil memory, and so the edge is taken off every action. This soft focus allows the man to be at the center of every action, and never let the consequences overtake the moment.
Is that the most accurate way to address the subject? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an effective way to do so.
This book is especially interesting to me as a lifelong resident of the New York metro area – each year, I travel on Moses-responsible roads and bridges dozens of times, and so it is easy to see both the benefits and the detriments of his vision for New York first hand. When the book was showing the low to the ground overpasses by Jones Beach, I’ve driven under those on my way to concerts; I know many of the buildings that Moses had a hand in not by reputation, but by first hand experience.
That experience is also what hurt the book a little from my personal vantage point. It is very easy to be nitpicky about things you know well, and being so close to the setting hurt my reading experience as much as it helped it. While it was interesting to see things that are so familiar, it also allowed me to be bothered by things like having Rockaway Beach called “The Rockaway.” I recognize that this is a personal problem that 99% of readers won’t notice, but it did manage to take me out of the book at a few instances.
I find it very interesting that the book was written by a Frenchman and illustrated by a Chilean because, to me, the story is so local. Sure, New York is perhaps the most famous city on Earth, and a marvel of architecture and urban planning, but it is fascinating to see two people who live in very different environs care so much about the subject to devote a book to it, and to do so in a fairly accurate way.
Christin’s script focuses on four periods of Moses’s life, and each shows the man in different positive and negative lights. In the early chapters, hubris is what makes Moses a questionable character, whereas his secretly held opinions come out in the light much more clearly as the book goes on. Despite him bring brought down by said hubris, Chrisin portrays it as really being a shift in media perception that brings him down. It is an interesting way to look at it; when Moses’s life is viewed through the prism of public opinion, his story is far more linear and easier to plot than when it is viewed through actual successes.
Final Verdict: 7.9 – Overall, the book is a great introduction to Moses for those that aren’t familiar with his story, and a beautifully illustrated one at that.
