Wry Anxiety

You notice the glasses first. They are large, horn-rimmed, Marian-the-librarian spectacles that look larger still atop her petite face and frame. From across the table in a Manhattan restaurant, they appear to magnify her eyes, slightly distort her features. But that’s an illusion; for it’s we who are examined, analyzed and reflected back through the lenses.

For nearly two decades, Roz Chast, 42, has peered through her glasses into our collective anxieties, laid them bare in the pages of the New Yorker magazine and made us laugh at ourselves. Virtually any subject can and has come within her sights--assisted suicide, the inner life of cats, corporate downsizing, packaged food, overanxious and overindulgent baby boomer parents, urban life, mega-mergers and driving woes.

Chast’s work is as distinctive as Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” or Scott Adams’ subversive “Dilbert.” Her drawings too are taped to refrigerator doors and office bulletin boards, or pasted above the department copying machine.

Mention her name and expect only a glimmer of recognition, but pass around a Chast classic, say “The Tournament of Neuroses Parade” (1989) or “The Velcros at Home” (1983), and her work is widely recognized. She mines a familiar vein for cartoonists, the absurdity of contemporary life, and then gently pushes that absurdity over the top--way over the top.

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She readily admits that her own anxieties fuel her work. “If you try, you can be anxious about just about anything. I am that anxious.”

In “The Velcros at Home,” a hapless mom, dad and kids, dressed in Velcro garments, stick to their living room wall as if thrown by a darts player with poor aim.

In the “Tournament of Neuroses,” Chast conjures a parade of floats peopled by contemporary neurotics, such as the “I never really broke away from my parents float” featuring a middle-aged mother and father huddling on either side of their grown son.

New Yorker cartoon editor Lee Lorenz says Chast “seems to have a genius for showing the absurdity of some view of life that has become so cliched that people overlook it.”

“People always want to know what she’s like,” Chast’s art dealer, Pam Sommers, says. “What kind of a person sees things the way she does?”

For the record, Chast is an ordinary-looking suburban wife and mother. Dressed in a tailored blue sweater and black pleated skirt, her straight blond hair pinned back on one side, she blended with the crowd during an interview at an Italian restaurant a block from the New Yorker’s midtown office. But her usual setting is the suburban Connecticut house she shares with her husband, writer Bill Franzen, their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, a parakeet, four mice and four lizards.

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It’s her humor more than her art that sets her work apart and commands between $600 and $1,500 for her original drawings. Sommers, who sells Chast’s drawings from the Illustration Gallery in her Manhattan loft, says most of her customers are “typical New Yorker readers,” with a large sprinkling of doctors and lawyers in the 30- to 50-year-old age range. Sommers attributes Chast’s appeal to her ability to “see humor in the little things but in a twisty way.” A common reaction to Chast’s drawings, Sommers says, is, “That’s what I meant to say but I couldn’t put it that way.”

“Rorschach’s Parents” is one such work. The 1989 cartoon features a little boy, squeezed between his two domineering parents as they battle over the meaning of the blob of milk he spilled on the table.

A psychiatrist purchased that cartoon through the catalog of Chast’s work. Other psychiatrists, who also apparently had hoped to acquire it, pestered Sommers endlessly, “unable to accept the fact” that the drawing was sold, she says. Chast’s customers “have to have a keen appreciation of the neurotic,” she says.

Chast’s nervous lines and the wry and often wacky humor her drawings evoke also finds common ground with Matt Groening’s “The Simpsons.” Chast and her two children are, in fact, huge “Simpsons” fans. She estimates they have seen every episode of the animated TV show at least three times. But unlike Groening or Adams, Chast serves up few ongoing characters and her cartoons range from single drawings to story panels.

Her climb to that pinnacle of arch humor, the New Yorker, reads more like a fairy tale than grist for her free-range anxiety. A Brooklyn native, Chast “always loved to draw” and began experimenting with cartoons as a child. Charles Addams, whose darkly humorous cartoons were a fixture of the New Yorker until his death in 1988, was one of her childhood heroes.

By 14, she felt she had developed a kind of style. At the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, Chast tried graphic design and illustration before graduating in 1977 with a degree in painting. But “I knew I wasn’t going to be a painter,” she says, and quickly went back to “drawing funny pictures.”

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Living with her parents, Chast made a halfhearted attempt to get work as an illustrator before she tried the New Yorker, sending the magazine a 2-inch-high stack of her cartoons in 1978.

“Never in a million years” did she expect to sell on the first try. But she did, a cartoon called “Little Things,” a drawing of blobs with made-up yet commercial-sounding names like “chent” and “kellat.”

“It shocked readers,” recalls Lorenz, the New Yorker cartoon editor, who bought that first cartoon. “We got a lot of outraged letters asking, ‘What’s funny about this? This looks more like the pages from an eccentric’s notebook.’ ”

“People didn’t know how to respond to it,” Lorenz says. Older readers were particularly critical, because they could not see Chast’s work “as a legitimate extension of the kind of cartoon form they were used to.”

Nevertheless, Chast became a regular. Except for a college job coloring needlepoint canvases, she has held no other steady job, “which terrifies me,” she says.

She and the other contract artists at the New Yorker troop into town every Tuesday to take turns showing their “batch” to Lorenz. Chast generally brings about seven or eight cartoons, the product of that week’s work and worry in her home studio. Some weeks she may sell two or three drawings, others none. Even after 19 years, the anxiety remains that she won’t sell, that her work will be rejected.

This is a tough world. The market for cartoons is small and few publications have the stature of the New Yorker. The fear that she “will never have another funny idea again,” a fear common to creative artists, always looms.

Yet Chast continues to find new avenues of commercial success. She has published eight collections; a ninth, “Childproof: Cartoons About Parents and Children” will appear in May from Hyperion. She has illustrated children’s stories; her work has hung in galleries around the East Coast, in Los Angeles and abroad; and she illustrates for such high-style corporate clients as Barneys New York, Audi and Absolut vodka. Even the staid Deutsche Grammophon asked Chast to draw the liners for several compact disc recordings.

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She can and does find humor almost anywhere. Chast does her most intensive work, “the batch,” Sunday night and Monday, in anticipation of the Tuesday meeting with Lorenz. She begins reviewing scraps of paper on which she’s jotted ideas during the week and by reading the newspaper, although she confesses that “I don’t really know what I’m looking for.

“The news seems so absurd.” Serious reporters are “taking all the work away from us,” she says. For instance, “the tobacco industry’s insistence that cigarettes don’t cause cancer: I mean, that’s a real knee-slapper.”

Chast says she needs to feel under pressure to work well, but then admits, “Only once in a while does something I do make me laugh, I mean seriously laugh.” She shows her work to no one while she’s drawing and says her friends know better than to suggest ideas.

Art dealer Sommers says Chast mines her own life in her cartoons. “When she had children, when she moved to the suburbs, and then, when she learned to drive, I knew she would draw about those experiences.” Learning to drive at 37 was a big source of worry, and she remains “a reluctant driver.” She passed the driving test, but in her mind only because the examiner never asked her to parallel park.

Chast clearly would be more comfortable on her imaginary “Poky Little Parkway” (1988), “the highway for people who hate to drive.” Among the attractions of that idyllic, tree-lined road:

* Five lanes in either direction: slow, really slow, incredibly slow, crawl and standstill.

* Each lane is 40 feet wide and separated from the one next to it by a 3-foot-wide “mistake aisle.”

* No trucks.

Parenting and generational tensions are another of Chast’s recurring themes. “Simply by existing you embarrass the hell out of your kids,” she says. Take “Madonna and Child, 2008” (1996), from her forthcoming “Childproof” collection. There’s the rock legend, clad in her trademark black bustier and high-heeled boots walking near the schoolyard with her conventionally dressed son. (The cartoon ran before Madonna’s daughter was born.) Says the child, “Mom, you’re kind of, like, embarrassing me.”

Chast’s own children have by now realized that their parents lead unusual lives. Her son recently said of a friend that “Billy’s parents have real jobs.” But Chast says they are used to the routine. “When they see me shuffling around the house, distracted, with a cup of coffee in hand, they know it’s Monday.”

Otherwise Chast describes her life as “so incredibly boring.” She shops for groceries, packs school lunches and watches “The Simpsons.”

Her goal--”that’s a funny word isn’t it?” she says--is to raise her children and “get through the day without an anvil falling on my head.” Talk about anxiety.