How Did I Get Here?

June 1, 2020

Coauthor with David Letterman of This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me), McCall started in the commercial arts, then switched about, ending up writing and painting funny stuff that got him to National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, and finally The New Yorker as one of its celebrated cartoonists. Here's the story of his trek from Ontario to New York City; with an introduction by Adam Gopnik.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2020
An affable memoir from the New Yorker cover artist and humorist. Born in Simcoe, Ontario, in 1935, McCall grew up with five siblings. In this nostalgic account of a creative life, the author begins with vignettes about his childhood and his early enchantment with artists like Norman Rockwell, who was "sui generis, so confoundingly skilled that no artist ever tried to copy him." A move to postwar Toronto was less picturesque due to an alcoholic mother and absent father, a situation he indelibly describes as a "Grand Guignol of lovelessness and casual cruelty." With potent affection and deadpan candor, McCall chronicles the struggles of his younger self, and his bemusement at ideas he'd once thought were ingenious is charming. Though some passages about family rake over repetitive wounds, the author effectively frames them as spurs toward independence, and the narrative is rich with metaphor and allusion. About retreating into a satirical, autodidactic world as a refuge, he writes, "I could use this creative energy as a bathysphere to explore the deep mysteries of my life hidden below the surface. My vessel bore no relationship to the Good Ship Lollipop....I crept up on truths, spun my wheels, invented detours that led to more detours." From an ill-fitting apprenticeship in commercial art at an advertising agency to his parents' deaths (both at the age of 49), McCall unfurls his memories with a raconteur's colorful flourishes. His accounts of writing failures, including an attempt at producing a car magazine, meander with enthusiastic detail, and he brings to life the Mad Men-era advertising world via sections on his move to Detroit to write copy for Chevrolet and, later, to New York, where he wrote for Mercedes-Benz. Midcentury automotive buffs will find this history fascinating while others may skim. Only in the final chapter does McCall discuss his work as a cover artist, an affirming feat after years of pushing art to the side. The book includes the author's photos and drawings. A leisurely diversion packed with insight and knowing panache.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2020
Budding artists are best advised not to try McCall's formula for success at home: disinterested father, alcoholic mother?both of whom died young?desultory school career that ended with no high-school degree, dead-end jobs in dead-end cities, no early mentors, long stretches spent not honing his formidable writing and painting skills, and a sense of failure that lasted deep into middle age. The results for McCall, though, were somehow spectacular. He and his partners in crime at the National Lampoon all but recast postwar American humor for the better. For the New Yorker, McCall has created 77 covers and more than 100 Shouts & Murmurs entries, generating some of the magazine's most iconic images: airborne blimps wending their way around Manhattan skyscrapers looking for a place to park; a city parkway given over to grazing bison and their human admirers, who observe the animals from lawn chairs. At age 85, and suffering from Parkinson's disease, McCall has all but retired from work life, but he musters here a smart, uncommonly funny, thoroughly endearing account of his long but consequential coming-of-age.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)