#also I will probably always be a sucker for every instantiation of ''people are complex and profoundly unknowable;

[notbecauseofvictories]

Lately I've been dipping my toe in graphic novels. They're different from my usual plain text on white paper, and interesting. Plus some of them dig their nails in my brain and yank, which is always a fun quality in a work of art.

The most recent was Will McPhail's In. You might have seen McPhail's art in the New Yorker, and the novel certainly starts out with similar familiar territory---sparse lines and greyscale, anxious citydwellers flitting from coffee shop to bar to subway, and back again; the narrator, a semi-ghost drifting and suspended, somehow out of time.

But McPhail then has his anxious, semi-translucent narrator be honest. Not with anyone important or about anything important! Just admitting he's uncomfortable chatting with the plumber who comes to fix his broken toilet.

And suddenly---

It happens again and again, any time the narrator is honest, and provokes an honest response. With the nephew he's babysitting, with his mother, as they paint cornices and sand walls; with the woman he's seeing, when she admits that her job weighs on her. The flat greys of the city vanish, and in their place is the imaginal landscape of whoever he's talking to:

For someone who's read quite a few very good graphic novels, but never had one quite land before---it really is something.