TV writer, New Yorker cartoonist Kaplan scores with 'I Was a Child'

I Was a Child

A Memoir

By Bruce Eric Kaplan

Blue Rider Press. 208 pp. $25.95

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Review by Katie Haegele

You may not recognize Bruce Eric Kaplan's name, but there's a good chance you've enjoyed his work. Maybe from skimming New Yorker cartoons: His are the ones with the square-shaped people and the none-more-black humor, always signed BEK. You might have LOL'd at an especially pithy joke on Seinfeld, Six Feet Under, or Girls. That's him, too.

I Was a Child is a kind-of memoir of Kaplan's childhood, told in tiny vignettes. Few are longer than a paragraph, and most are accompanied by one of his signature line drawings. Like the artwork, his anecdotes are simple but hugely evocative.

The memoir begins: "I was a child, but I wasn't very good at it," and if you get what he means, then this is the book for you.

Kaplan was born in Queens and grew up in North Jersey in the 1960s and 1970s. He was enthralled by old movies on TV, and Halloween candy, and the sound of his mother's lipstick cracking when she smiled. He horsed around on empty construction sites with his friends. He was a kid, in other words, and he renders his family's peculiarities so perfectly that they become universal.

But this is Bruce Eric Kaplan we're talking about, so the conclusions he draws are surprising, his insights deep and dark indeed: "I remember being in a gas station and looking at other families parked at the other pumps, studying them. They seemed like real families, and we seemed like we were pretending to be a real family. They were always in a station wagon."

Kaplan's thickly lined, cubistic drawings sit squarely on the page, underscoring his every observation. His recollections are never of anything extraordinary. They're deadpan, hilarious, and really quite moving.

His love affair with television is the one constant in his childhood. There was the Late-Night Movie and the Sunday Night Mystery Movie and televised plays on public TV. There was tinfoil on the antenna. They watched I Love Lucy, the Brady Bunch cartoon and reruns on summer nights.

Once he's all grown up, he moves to Los Angeles and rents an apartment with a Spanish courtyard as in the Humphrey Bogart movie In a Lonely Place, one of his favorite Four O'Clock Movies. "It was like I had been planning to live there my whole life," he concludes - and you'll find you were rooting for him to get there the whole time.