All the Answers
by Michael Kupperman
(Simon & Schuster, 2018)
review by BK Munn
Surrealist humourist Kupperman brings his trademark deadpan cartooning style to the serious story of his father's life, focusing on Joel Kupperman's bizarre career as a child prodigy and star of the 1940s radio and tv show Quiz Kids. The elder Kupperman rarely discussed his childhood with his son, and the book comes across as something of an investigative report into these mysteries, equal parts reckoning and quest, filled with ellipses and unanswered questions, fitting for a biography about a genius skilled in solving puzzles but unskilled in relating to other people, especially his own children. In the sense that the book is the story of a Jewish son probing a recalcitrant father about his life during wartime, I like to think of the book as an anhedonic Maus, but where Spiegleman's book chronicled his father's survival of the Holocaust in microscopic detail, in a scratchy, agonized, diagrammatic style, Kupperman's homefront tale is as cold and distant as his subject matter, the expressionless characters more like cardboard stand-ins, clipped out of old scrapbooks and newspaper articles, that Kupperman is desperately trying to fill up with personality, meaning and answers. A brilliant book!
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