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PERFECT EXAMPLE reviewed in OC WEEKLY

Updated May 16, 2006


Books
Sorrow Floats

Periodically buoyant, Perfect Example is a tender little yelp of a book
By CORNEL BONCA

Thursday, May 4, 2006 - 3:00 pm

W.H. Auden once dubbed the 20th century the Age of Anxiety, but it抯 beginning to look as if a lot of people may not be up anymore to the sustained psychological tension that抯 the hallmark of anxiety (you抮e anxious because you抮e afraid of something you can抰 quite name, but at least you抮e fighting it), and that we抳e descended into the Age of Depression, where the active tensions of anxiety dissolve into passive darkness and bleak affectlessness, and Prozac begins to take Valium抯 pride of place in Dr. Feelgood抯 bag of magical tricks.

Pop artists have, for a while now, been registering this shift as much as the pharmaceutical industry has (though they may not be reaping quite the profits): the alternative film movement of the 1980s and �s, kicked off by sex, lies, and videotape and the really depressed James Spader, gave rise to countless film portraits of befuddled melancholy (most played by Eric Stoltz, if you recall); �s grunge was basically musicians screaming their way out of black chasms of sadness (genuine or faked); and even a magazine called No Depression was founded to chart alt.-country bands like Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, whose leader, Jeff Tweedy, contracted a case of depression so bad that he needed to be hospitalized a couple of years ago.

That depression would infiltrate 揷omix,� or the graphic novel, if you will, is no surprise, given that so many of the new comix come from the ground zero of pop culture梩hat is, from suburban American high school kids who抳e graduated from doodling on their math folders to illustrating fanzines to writing full-length autobiographical narratives spelling out how strange and sad it feels just to be alive. Time was when this sort of abjection was the province of exhausted Russian cynics living underground, or Algerian nihilists killing Arabs on the beach for no reason at all, but the depression caused by existential alienation, unlike wealth, has dependably trickled down to the masses. And so the appearance of a graphic novel like John Porcellino抯 Perfect Example gives us the chance not only to note the trickle-down, but to see how an American pop medium, in the right hands, can transform, democratize and enliven an old idea.

Perfect Example is so pretensionless that it feels odd to put it in such austere cultural company; in fact, the only cultural reference points that the book alludes to are �s bands like REM, the Cure and Soul Asylum, as well as the cabal of bands條ike H黶ker D� (one of whose songs supplies the book抯 title)梩hat recorded for the SST label. That music, however, is pretty smart stuff. It provides a terrific soundtrack梤eplete as it is with perplexed misery and mystified longing梖or Porcellino抯 autobiographical narrative (called both a 揼raphic novel� and a 搈emoir� on the book jacket) of the spring and summer of 1986, when he applied to college, graduated from high school, went to parties and on road trips, fell into dangerous suicidal moods, and took some extraordinarily touching if timorous steps into the world of romantic intimacy.

The drawing in Perfect Example is so primitive and kindergarten-like that I sometimes couldn抰 tell if Porcellino can抰 draw梚f he may as well sit on the school steps and draw 搇igers� with Napoleon Dynamite梠r if he抯 doing an extraordinarily accurate rendering of a little kid抯 sketching. Whatever the case, the results are convincingly and heartbreakingly innocent: the 17-year-old John is often drawn as if he were maybe 10, which only reinforces the pathos involved in his initiation into the fearsome realms of adulthood. What further reinforces the pathos is that Porcellino recounts his almost embarrassingly timid fears with an absolutely vulnerable sincerity. The first chapter, for instance, details a trip John takes with his friends to a Soul Asylum concert, which they can抰 get into because it抯 a 21-and-over show. Not wanting to blow off the night, his friends decide to buy some booze and get drunk, but John is too afraid, and when he refuses the bottle梞uch to the what抯-the-big-deal consternation of his friends梙e plunges into a depression so deep that he has an out-of-body experience (captured in images that recall the woodcut novels of German expressionist Franz Masereel). Almost the same thing happens whenever he approaches another precipice of adulthood: making out with a girl, he stops in the middle and trudges home, dark with sexual confusion. Even worse is the night he抯 asked by a male friend to watch the July 4 fireworks: the friend ends up bringing along a girl梐 girl John has a crush on梐nd making out with her while John looks on. John goes into a tailspin: 揟he next thing I knew I was standing on my front porch at home桰 had decided to kill myself.�br>
The innocence of John抯 emotions, the childlike drawings, the searing suicidal leanings: the combination makes for a reading experience that makes us feel protective, but not in a sentimental way. Porcellino is a pure folk artist梙e genuinely, 揾onestly� wants to express his feelings, his free-floating sadness, his perplexity at being young and utterly at sea, without manipulating the reader or getting all fancy in the expression. The book抯 bravery is in having the courage to be a wimp, and to not even make the implicit argument that he抯 speaking for anyone other than himself. But it turns out he does. Perfect Example is a tender little yelp of a book, like some cry you hear echoing in the bedroom of a suburban house as you walk past. As John Irving once wrote, sorrow floats梕verywhere.

 
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