“I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.” — David Lynch
Daniel Elkin: I knew my early 1980s North Dallas suburbia like Jeffrey Beaumont knew his Lumberton in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Raised middle-class and white, there among so much concrete and small trees with the sun constantly beating down, I only found out the seasons had changed when there were illegals raking yellow leaves into brown plastic trash cans across the street and dumping them into the bed of a dented, white, medium duty Ford F-series.
My days were spent in a ranch-style home among ranch-style homes, each with their own manicured lawn of precarious green. Once in awhile you’d find a quarter on the sidewalk. But I never found a severed ear.
I never found much of anything at all.
Ennui is a by-product of the complexity of privilege. There in the Dallas, Texas tarmacked flatness of my youth with 100 cable channels, five pairs of shoes, and Southwest styled woven rugs covering Mexican Talavera floors there were infinite possibilities for distraction, but none of them could satisfy the listlessness within. Boredom arises in the face of cheap choices. We stare up at the cloudless cerulean that encompasses the Sistine Chapel ceiling of our plastic neighborhood and sigh, wondering where we could score some granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) to see if it could get us high.
Growing up in the suburbs is like trying to pick up a tiny fillister head wood screw from a beige hand-tufted shag rug while your hands keep falling off. It breeds a smug frustration that reeks of sacks of liposuction fat and empty bottles of salicylic acid. It undulates with a gothic sensibility, as if the red ants are constantly pulsing under the flesh. It is a unique result of duck ponds next to shopping malls with tiered parking lots and a security force driving golf carts slowly around and around hoping to finally jostle some teens.
Minutiae becomes monumental in the face of everything-but-nothing to do. Daily life is written by soap opera hacks gacked out on Sinutab and stroking corrosion-resistant ball peen hammers. Fears and anxieties come from combining plaids with stripes, not guns or starvation. The social nuances of every interaction become tantamount to Gilgamesh crossing the Waters of Death. There is the eroticism of despair. What doesn’t exist is created in order for meaning to occur.
The weariness of entitlement, advantage, and prerogative all promulgate a strange kind of weirdness — this is what begets the ear on the lawn covered with the scurry of red ants.
And this is what Nick Drnaso seizes and bags in his debut graphic novel, Beverly, published by Drawn and Quarterly.
In a hushed and disconcerting manner, Beverly captures the nuances of white, middle-class, suburban mid-West America and lays bare its ennui and privilege. Washed in an unshadowed palette of soft pinks, yellows, browns, and blues, Drnaso’s cartooning is reminiscent of the work of Barcelona-based illustrator Joan Cornellà, but Drnaso isn’t interested in Cornellà’s black comedy, rather he focuses on being “very metered and quiet… bleak and frozen.”
Gentlemen, so far Beverly is the best book I’ve read in 2016. I feel that there is much to talk about when it comes to it, from Drnaso’s subject matter to his panel layouts, color choices, and pacing, but I don’t want to get too far ahead without allowing both of you to air your thoughts first.
Keith Silva: I’m sorry your upbringing wasn’t more Lynch-like more Beumont-ian, Elkin. No severed ears, no dreamlike serenades sung by drop light, no joyrides. Now that’s a great idea!
Joyless Jeffrey is looking for something … mysteries and secrets and pussy heaven too. Regardless if he’s a pervert or a detective, our “neighbor” Jeffrey is wanting, lacking. What he discovers in that severed ear he finds– that strange world– is what Lumberton lacks in square miles, in breadth, it makes up for, tenfold, in depth. But at what cost?
The suburbs– North Dallas or those found in cooler climes like Southeastern Massachusetts say– act as a covenant, a trust struck between town planners and the godless frontier, a promise neither sun-baked flatlands nor old-growth New England forests will be (should be) without consumerist creature comforts like indoor plumbing, ready money from drive-thru ATMs, donuts, or Heineken. And that makes you and Nick Drnaso… bored. Sameness breeds contempt does it? Poor you, poor you two. If the suburbs were designed, squared off, and boxed up to leach away the survivalist within, our lizard brains would seem to have other thoughts. For all the quiet, the metering, the suburban ennui, you, Mr. Drnaso and, yes, Jeffrey Beumont are better (?) off than the cliched provincials of Beverly and the Aunt Barbara’s of Lumberton because what they miss and you possess resides in ambition. Drnaso got out, Elkin too. So what’s wrong? Why does the trauma still itch? There’s a whole lotta’ wood waitin’ out there.
Beverly makes for a frustrating read. Drnaso points a finger and invites us to laugh at the foibles of these saps, these sheeple, their sadness and patheticness, their herd mentality. And while he aims that fingerpost, he reminds us about the other three other fingers pointing back at us, at our own failures, small victories, and smaller lives. What does Drnaso hope to achieve from his cringe comedy? His bitter sympathy? Drnaso denies (almost) all of Beverly’s characters the opportunity to have their cake and eat it too because it seems he’s the only one that gets to have it both ways. Pointing. Laughing. Chiding. We’re all sinners, yeah?
The joys of Beverly are found in Drnaso’s precision. Stories of suburban sad sacks require an accounting of acute details. The look and the feel are equal, the same. The population of white suburban languor is downright suburban. Said another way, we’ve seen and heard this story before, many times. So what makes Beverly different from the Ice Storm(s), the White Noise(s) or the Ghost World(s) and those many other monuments of minutia? From its art to its stories Beverly appears prescriptive, always and in every way. So where are those red ants, those underdwellers? Is the having the cake AND eating it too how Drnaso squares his own struggle in the suburban jungles? How he leavens the privilege and safety (the tradeoff) the suburbs offer– or so we are led to believe– with the “stuff,” the inspiration of his art? That’s rich. Not unique, but who am I to slag a guy down for the source of his transformative power.
If Drnaso got out, transformed himself through sheer chutzpah and talent, what happens to the population of Beverly? What about Tina and Charlotte, Tyler and Cara? What about Kyle and his asshole older brother Adam? What about them? What about Sal? What happened to Sal? Did he finish his machine? Did he get out? If the population of Beverly is trapped in their prescribed boxes is that it? Where’s Sal at? Where’s Sal? Where the fuck is Sal (String!)?… Where’s Sal? Where the fuck is Sal?
Taylor Lilley: Is Sal the Godot of this comic?
Because reading Beverly is a lot like reading “Waiting for Godot.” It takes the breath of flesh to make it rise. Without actors, Beckett might be a well read man having a series of small infarctions on paper. Without Elkin to anchor me in a lived experience that testifies to the flat-baked ‘burban reality Drnaso’s working from, there’s little here to invite the reader deeper in. But that may be the bravest artistic choice of Beverly, the steadfast refusal to use comics flash to leaven the ennui.
It’s not just ennui though, this book is thematically and formally incestuous, I believe deliberately so. Drnaso has been a part of Oily Comics, and this feels like a progression of the themes of rebellion and off-kilter adolescence that several of Oily’s best titles have explored (I’m thinking of de Radigues and Forsman in particular). Where those creators would often work around pairs of characters or couples, Drnaso here works the suburban ensemble, enabling layering of tensions across different sets of characters. That those characters are, due to Beverly’s relentless stylistic homogeneity, often indistinct from each other in tone and appearance adds to the cousin-kissing. That their voiced concerns (as distinct from their felt and lived ones) are mostly the common fodder of cheesy entertainments and universal-by-design sagas of passage heightens the seeming innocuousness. That Drnaso’s line refuses articulation, his characters‘ and locations’ planes inscrutably smooth, is the only marker that this is not another snotty creator sneering at less cultured folks.
But going back to that question of ennui, Drnaso mixes the washed out palette of lands that should never have been paved with the rigid grid and relentless smallness of that most ‘burban entertainment: the TV serial. Beverly is bright, but not colourful. It’s well-organised, but hard to make sense of. He must have worked hard to conjure so many pages of so little obvious interest. Red ants underneath, indeed, and what an embarrassment of space there is to be burrowed into and pillaged, so many blank expanses, from the featureless moonfaces of the protagonists to the unadorned walls of their buildings and the remorselessly flat panels of their story. The POVs are as fixed as the imaginations of the characters are limited, and the question of which determines the other is Drnaso’s Chicken and Egg.
In Beverly’s final Act, we transition to the BIG City, to the “real world.” A point of intersection for Drnaso’s characters, their fictions of dubious health, unmodified dreams and inescapable plainness, I’m curious to know what you, Elkin, make of this transition. Are these characters the red ants of civilisation, or is it the ideas they’re fed, and perpetuate with their purchase of them? What is it that scurries from desert concrete onto city streets, and is it an infestation, or a return to roost?
Elkin: I don’t know if I can answer those questions, Lilley. What I do know is that therein we get to witness Tyler’s transition from “Little King” to “King Me”, and though he has grown in stature, he’s not abandoned his desire… for his sister?
It’s in this last piece of what is the puzzle of the plot that we finally meet the titular character (and if I was a lesser man, I would have meant that as a pun), Beverly the masseuse. I don’t want to get bogged down in plot, though narrative is the name of the game, but Beverly HAS to end with Beverly, who is a dead ringer for Tyler’s sister Cara, followed by Tyler “saving” a fictional Cara from the sexual danger that exists even there, in the suburbs of Tyler’s upbringing and Drnaso’s focus, only to be shut out by a closed door (oh man, that last page is perfect).
Because as much as this is a book about ennui, it is also a book about repression– specifically sexual repression, but also the repression inherent in the homogenization of community fundamental to a construct such as one engendered by suburban existence. Everything ties together in this book, for the most part. And while Drnaso veers off into tales of “Pudding” and “Virgin Mary,” each of which furthers the thematic load while taking a break from the larger character study (much like, say, Sherwood Anderson does in his conceptually whole Winesburg, Ohio), this is ultimately a story about Tyler and Cara’s family.
Silva, you ask “Where the fuck is Sal?” I answer, he’s where he needs to be. The odd man out, as it were. Sal makes the dreadful mistake of being “different” in a closed system and therefore must be banished. You keep that shit on the inside if you want to play the game. Tyler knows this (his one infraction of the code happens on vacation– never to be spoken of again), and that’s why he’s able to still fit in, and, in the end, pick up trash on the side of the road for Rich. That’s why he has travel to the City (and lie about it) in order to be touched by his sister-stand-in, Beverly. Conform or be cut out. Repress or be removed.
The quest to assimilate is the definition of suburban life. Sure we may try to one-up the Johnsons with a shiny new fully-featured “Hypersonic Red” 2016 Prius Three in order to “Be Someone,” but it’s all tightly bound by the norm– you can only go so far. Thus the repression. Which breeds the ennui.
All swaddled in the smugness of privilege.
As Tyler and Cara’s dad says to his young son, “Cherish these years. You will miss them someday.” There’s perfunctory abuse in these words. It is as it needs to be. It is expected, don’t you see?
Drnaso gets it as if he’s lived it. Beverly connects because it captures the concrete sponge we use to whitewash the lives of suburban white America. It so easily reveals the effortless castigation of the stranger, because one of us would never do us any harm.
And yet the red ants keep pulsating with every heartbeat, and the severed ear is always waiting in the undeveloped and overgrown part of town, just as they do under the flesh. They may be constrained by compliance, boxed in by ticky tacky, but they still devour, no matter how many panels you put on the page. And Drnaso knows about putting panels on a page. Sometimes sixteen of them on a page. It’s claustrophobic, perfectly so. Form follows Function, after all. The Medium is the Message.
My only concern with Beverly is that I like it too much; that my ardor for this book reveals all the things about myself that I am desperately trying to disburden myself of as I age. That I connect to this book so strongly is either affirmation of my fears or testament to my journey.
Good lord, I almost just quoted Arcade Fire lyrics.
Help me, Silva. Tell me why I am wrong to think this may be the best book of the year.
Silva: You know me better than that. You know I prefer not to play the invalidate-my-personal-choices-you-fucker-you reindeer games, Elkin. Sorry. How about this proposition, I’ll tell you why this book works and what that means. Cool? And that first Arcade Fire album? Masterpiece.
Beverly marks the further development of the “impersonal personal” (feel free to workshop that title) and Drnaso is fast becoming one of its young turks. What I’m calling “impersonal personal” (IP?) are those works that appear stolid or emotionless, but seethe with meaning and sentiment. I suppose Ben Marra’s Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T falls into this (made up) category as do the films of Todd Solondz, the novels of Rick Moody, and the comics of Chris Ware– art that does its best emotional work while it keeps the reader or audience at an arm’s distance while, you know, not.
I’ll climb further out on this shaky critical limb and say Beverly feels like what a Westerner (maybe a suburbanite) watching a Noh play would perhaps experience. Even with only a generalist’s knowledge of the Japanese culture it’s clear what’s being presented is stylized and codified. Despite those barriers a viewer understands the essence, the message to be understood and connections made at the most rudimentary level.
I mentioned precision earlier a lá Drnaso’s specificity, his style. From the narrative to the panel layout everything in Beverly is in its place, every line, every detail, as explicit and as intricate as a formal garden and as beautiful to look at. As we’ve said the indistinguishable appearance of many of the characters comments on the homogenous qualities of suburban life, including what we, at a safe distance away, consider the small and laughable (?) concerns of its denizens. Small and provincial to the reader, but important to the characters themselves. What’s so funny about genuine emotion? It’s a big deal for Cara’s mom when she learns she’s been selected to take part in a survey and she does her best to preserve her dignity when she realizes she’s been duped– she’s (almost) like the Grandmother in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” but less stubborn and stupid. This “sameness” in emotion, of caring, extends to Charlotte’s interest in what Tina has been up to since they last saw each other. They care about each other … a lot, as much as Cara’s mom cares about that survey. Except Charlotte and Tina can’t hide their caring in the drudgery of domestic duties. Neither girl can (or wants to?) act in order to access her emotions or their sexual interest in the other. Is this because they’re awkward teenagers or because, as I think you’d have it Elkin, they’re automatons, products of the industrial suburban machine? Conform or be cast out, SUBDIVISIONS! Drnaso’s style makes everything appear impersonal when, in fact, it’s incredibly personal. It’s a masterwork of a distinct and precise storytelling and it’s also cold and alienating. So be it.
I’m all for idiosyncrasy in my cartoonists and Drnaso’s style is distinctive enough by half, but I need more emotion from a cartoonist’s line, more ink and less of a prescribed formalism, less gestalt-y in its execution of its well-developed theory in order to respond at a similar emotional level as you, Elkin. I need more blood. Not blood blood, I want swagger (heart) and less remove. The best way I can describe what I feel from Drnaso is how words like “dollhouse” and “hermetically-sealed” are used to critique Wes Anderson, especially in early work like Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums. As Anderson has progressed as a filmmaker that precision has become a touch scruffier. He’s gone the full Hal Ashby as his career has progressed. Anderson was always able to mine the quirk of Ashby’s loners in Harold and Maude and The Last Detail, but he’s found the heart and soul of the complicated survivors in Being There and Coming Home as he’s aged. Don’t get me wrong, the heart is there in those early works, but it’s not tucked up into Anderson’s tailored sleeve as far as in his more recent films like The Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel. I’ve always seen the talent in Anderson, the skill. But I’ve appreciated, loved, his work more as he continues to reveal his more humanist side. I think I need to see the same from Drnaso.
“Best book of the year?” I’d temper that. Best book about the ennui, inauthenticity, and repression in the straight white midwestern American suburbs? Sure. How’s that for personal?
Elkin: That’ll do, Silva. That’ll do.
I understand your desire for more “swagger (heart) and less remove”– the quiet moments require us to overlay emotional content: it’s far easier to feel in the face of the explosive force. We connect to art viscerally. We want to be assured artistic intent is indeed that which we devour, that which we inure– we don’t easily trust ourselves in our connections to aims. It’s what accounts for our reliance on soundtracks and explosions and lazy symbolism. There is a certain certainty to being spoonfed our reactions.
Let X = X, as it were.
But Drnaso is a flat page. He refuses to blow shit up or overlay clonking, ominous tones to tell us what to feel. He presents, quietly, tightly packaged moments for us to bear witness. Our reactions to Beverly become OUR reactions a posteriori, from the woods or the paved paths from which we have sprung. It is personal because it is personal, complete in the interaction between artist and audience. It’s art, natch, and what we grok tells everyone else who we are.
As comics are comics because of the closure we bring to the gutters, these texts read us as we read them. Beverly speaks to the self in a very intrinsic way. Those of us who have lived that life see clearly what Drnaso is penciling in. To those who have grown up free of suburban ennui, perhaps, it tells a different story. Though I am loathe to quote from On the Road at this point in my development as an empathetic human being, there’s one line that Kerouac writes that seems apt in this discussion: “Because here we were dealing with the pit and prune-juice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man…”
The wilderness is at bay. We have conquered the unknown by paving it over and putting up Starbucks and Best Buys and Burger Kings and Home Depots. Roseville, CA looks like Lisle, IL, which looks like Frisco, TX, which looks like Brookline, MA.
It’s hard to find your place on the map when all the landmarks are franchises.
Yet the red ants are underground, churning, frantically digging, carving out their world, still looking for an ear. Bless them, though their bites raise nasty, itchy welts.
I mentioned Sherwood Anderson earlier in this piece, so I think I will let him have the last word because on a fundamental level this is the best summary of Beverly there is: “If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles.”
Daniel Elkin reviews small press comics for his blog, Your Chicken Enemy, @DanielElkin
Keith Silva writes the occasional review for his blog, Interested in Sophisticated Fun, @keithsilva
Taylor Lilley is British, @capelessT
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