PARRISH'S GRAPHIC NOVEL deftly reconciles seemingly divergent modes.
The "graphic" part feels expressionist. The human figures, for instance, are highly stylized, with small, sometimes tiny heads and enormous legs, their torsos stretched and elongated. (The effect is a little like the figures of Fernand Léger.) The color palette changes from episode to episode, looking a little like Matisse here, a little like Emil Nolde there, darkening or brightening with the tone of the episode.
The "novel" part, however, is unvarnished realism. Eliza is a single mom with one son and an ex-husband who tends to be delinquent with child support payments. She has a job and is trying to establish herself as a spoken word poet. (Parrish uses an Anne Boyer poem as a sample of Eliza's work, so we know she's good.) Sasha is slightly younger and has yet to get much of anything going for herself; she has just moved back in with her parents, an arrangement that pleases no one.
Sasha hears Eliza read and develops a powerful crush. Most of the novel is Sasha doing her damnedest to get as close as she can to Eliza, hoping to become her lover. Eliza appreciates Sasha's friendship but is not ready to reciprocate Sasha's feelings.
The reader assumes...well, this reader assumed that we were headed for some nice rom-com ending, but actually, no we are not. We get the tale of a relationship that might have gone in one direction but instead goes in another, alongside all the up-and-down stress of living in families and trying to make a living.
Straight contemporary urban realism, then--but taking place in a visual world all its own. Maybe a little like what you might get if Georg Grosz turned Berlin Alexanderplatz into a graphic novel.
I'm baffled by the title. A few men make brief appearances in the story, but not a one of them seems trustworthy. Quite the opposite, in fact.
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