Toward the end of my undergraduate career, I met a girl named Sarah. She was a co-worker at the grungy restaurant where I spent more time serving coffee than I did in class. She was also a townie, in the problematic argot of college towns. Sarah was a punk kid who’d lived (or so she said) in a squat in Cleveland. As a student at Oberlin, I’d met many kids trying out big ideas: veganism, Marxism, anarchism. The sort of young people who felt shoplifting was ethical because capital is inherently not, who drank coffee from glass jars instead of insulated mugs, because why buy what you do not truly need?
I can barely remember Sarah (it’s been more than two decades), but I do recall her teasing me, with some affection, for eating meat, for caring about clothes, and for enjoying Belle and Sebastian. “You’re a boy in corduroys,” she said. “You’re not terrific, but you’re competent.” I thought of Sarah when I met Zena, an American studying abroad in Paris, in Sophie Yanow’s new graphic novel, The Contradictions. Zena has the conviction of youth and a well-intentioned politics, making her the sort of person who can say something like, “For sure, work in our society is meaningless.”
That I was in Sarah’s thrall probably makes me a bit like Sophie, the protagonist of Yanow’s comic. She shares a name with the author, who refers to The Contradictions as a work of autofiction. When we meet Sophie, in the story’s first panel, she’s alone, walking by the Seine; we then see her alone, sketching in a museum (she’s an art student); then later, alone again, her long spindly body folded up on a narrow bed in her unadorned bedroom, on the phone with her mother. When her mother asks if she’s seen a friend in Paris, Sophie replies, “I kinda wanna do my own thing.” |
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Sophie is a bike enthusiast, and chases Zena down in the street when she sees her on a fixie. The two forge a friendship. Though Sophie is queer, it doesn’t feel like she’s attracted to Zena romantically. She’s nevertheless captivated by the way she holds forth on radical politics while smoking cigarettes, cowed but also a little thrilled by her expertise as a shoplifter. Early in their acquaintance, Zena presses a book into her new friend’s hands: “It was originally a zine. It’s these two anarchist girls who hitchhiked around Europe.” Then we see Sophie googling “illegalism” and reading into the night.
I recognized so much in Yanow’s book. The particular solitude of being a young American studying abroad, eager to conquer the world but mostly palling around with other young Americans studying abroad; the frisson of meeting someone who lives according to their own exciting ideas instead of whatever they’ve inherited from their parents. The Contradictions captures that period of trying on a self, and is by turns discomfiting and funny.
The two girls head out on a hitchhiking adventure of their own. They end up in Amsterdam, where Sophie is eager to see the sights but Zena wants only to stroll around. Eventually, she reveals this is because she’s hoping to run into her ex-boyfriend. Even if Sophie isn’t interested in Zena in that way, this still feels a betrayal, a violation of the code that friendship matters more than romance. The rest of the trip only sort of goes as planned, but that’s what it is to be young, I guess.
The comic is a complex form that often has to defend itself against the implication that it’s not. As with any comic, engaging with The Contradictions is an act of both looking and reading—twice as much work for the author and reader alike. As both writer and artist, Yanow is spare: The frames are uncluttered and often empty of words altogether. But there’s enough story that I marveled, as I finished the book, that the characters felt so real when Yanow’s drawings do not aspire to realism at all.
I’ve already explained the book’s nostalgic appeal—potent on this Gen Xer, so maybe we can call it timeless. But I wanted to write about a graphic work this week because I think they’re a solution for the reader who feels unable to read right now, distracted by dire headlines and lingering uncertainty. The form requires looking, and this muscle feels to me like it’s atrophying, since I don’t look at much besides my home, my family, and my phone (I know that last ostensibly shows us the whole world, but I barely see what I gaze upon through that portal). Happily, The Contradictions might also be a balm for the reader who misses traveling. Using only a few lines and a slender story, Yanow conjures the particular pleasure of wandering aimlessly around a European city. As that’s not happening for me any time soon, a book will have to suffice. |
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| I cannot stomach reading any of the ever-growing library of Trump books. But I do rather enjoy reading reviews of these books, because critics seem to have a good time tackling them. “The book is written with all the heat of a spurned former lover, and much of its energy comes from the kind of disbelief, pain, and longing experienced by the wronged heroine of a bodice ripper, who is calamitously drawn into the arms of a heartless rogue, badly used, and tossed aside,” Naomi Fry writes of Michael Cohen’s new memoir. |
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| The Criterion Collection recently came under scrutiny for its lack of films by Black directors. Artel Great has an in-depth look at the body of Black cinema, writing, “Black films are continually viewed as a part of a shiny ‘new renaissance,’ rarely understood as grounded in a rich legacy, as an essential ingredient in American film, or as vital to the mainstream cultural conversation.” |
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| This is the kind of true-crime story that I get excited about: the tale of archivist Greg Priore, who looted the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s rare and antiquarian collection. |
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| Though many galleries and museums in New York have started to reopen, I’ve yet to visit one, due in part to an exercise of caution and in part to a sense that maybe the coronavirus has fundamentally changed the experience of looking at art. Ravi Ghosh writes of visiting London’s Whitechapel Gallery, concluding, “A space of relaxation, leisure, and education has become one of intense moral precarity.” |
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—Rumaan Alam, contributing editor |
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