Jayakrishnan's Reviews > Ghost World

We often look towards art for comfort. You feel so close to characters in some books. They are like your best friends and you feel like they are talking directly to you. Almost as if the writer knows exactly what you are experiencing in your life.

Ghost World is that sort of a book. When the book ends, you feel like your best friend just left the bar you were both drinking at and talking in the most honest way possible.

Enid is one of my favorite characters of all time. Right up there with Holden Caufield and Mark Renton. She embodies the anomie and acedia that we all experience as teenagers and as adults. The same is the case with Seymour. I could completely relate to his sense of despair and isolation in a society which is not artistically inclined and lacks moral values.

Ghost World is about two teenage girls who are in the very short period between when your teenage life ends and adult life begins. While their classmates are already on the path to becoming middle class dullards and corporate slaves, Enid and Rebecca try their best to postpone the inevitable. But the pull of ordinary life is strong and their friendship starts to crack.

Both the comic book and the excellent movie based on it have touched my life deeply. I have been in love with the Enid character ever since I watched the movie. I mean, very few people are truly happy with adult life. Its pretty hard to feel the way you did when you were in school (though Enid hated her school as well), when things were less complex. Everything falls apart later on in your life, no matter how successful you are.