Rogue Wave

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer


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Published: Apr 29, 2008

The late George MacDonald Fraser had little enough patience for the 21st century. Best-known for writing a series of books about a swashbuckling Victorian hero, in the mode of Rider Haggard or some other long-forgotten boy's book writer, Fraser gleefully embraced anachronism. He began his last book, The Reavers (Knopf), with an admonishment to consider the book "nonsense," "an octogenarian's rebuke to a generation which seems to have forgotten fun and become obsessed with ... obesity, cookery, football, racism, politics and a general sense of doom." Fraser's antidote comes in the form of a Walter Scott borderlands picaresque. He doles out highwaymen with powerful moustaches and pneumatic, distressed damsels; he winds up with a rollicking, cheerful mess that resembles a particularly tongue-in-cheek Scots-accented classic comic.

As any good grad student can tell you, picaresque — the episodic adventure of a rogue hero — gives birth to the modern novel after morality and realism get mixed in. It also donates a lot of DNA to comic books, as both get packed with a headlong rush of events and outsized heroes and villains and great, fragile chains of coincidence. The really important thing — and this is Fraser's point — is pleasure. And Fraser, from his dark-and-stormy-night opening (yes, really), works hard to deliver pure, primary-color pleasure.

But even as modern-picaresque comic books win over the mainstream, they take on some of the preoccupations Fraser tries to banish. This is largely good, a form growing up and into adulthood, and the variety of comic book work shows a willingness to push boundaries that some other genres lack. The leading lights of new comics like Chris Ware or Harvey Pekar or Daniel Clowes now concern themselves very little with pleasure. That seems to have become the purview of a generation of writers raised on dime-store comics, with Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay and Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude setting the standard.

Jack O'Connell, with The Resurrectionist (Algonquin), works hard to join their ranks, and his book shows a magpie willingness to incorporate any material at hand. O'Connell's book starts serious, with a single father grappling with a son's coma; it quickly takes a right turn into the Gothic, with sinister doctors administering shady cures; and ultimately ends psychedelic after incorporating storylines about circus freaks and charismatic bikers. The core of the book, though, is an imagined comic book, a favorite of the comatose son's and a riddle his father tries to figure out.

Even though he's working the same vein as Chabon or Lethem, tapping into a child's immersion in a world drawn panel by panel, O'Connell doesn't have the same success. Part of that is the fault of the setup — after all, it's the father who reads the comics to his comatose son. The son and his engagement in the story remain a cipher. O'Connell becomes a victim of description, forced to describe the comic rather than its effect on his character; with half a fine oddball Gothic devoted to describing pictures, O'Connell may have been better served by pen and ink instead of a word processor.

Abraham Rodriguez keeps a firmer grip on the same kind of chain-of-circumstance plot as Fraser. His territory is the gentrifying South Bronx, rather than some imagined misty highlands, and his South by South Bronx (Akashic) comes across neo-noir cool rather than swashbuckling. Still, the elements are there, with a hapless blackout-prone hero and his femme fatale against a chorus provided by a Statler-and-Waldorf pair of Puerto Rican artists. Rodriguez may be largely serious, or at least as serious as he can be with a caper adventure, in setting his book among a clique of boricua painters and writers, and embedding their art-world stories in a crime novel. Still, he manages not to lose sight of his main plot, which flows along, incorporating these characters into a community that can take in and react to the mechanics of the plot and the blonde who drives it.

Rodriguez even pulls off the toughest part of a crime novel, resisting the impulse to tie off loose ends and instead closing his book with a satisfying coolness. The mood, though, gets set right from the beginning — atop a fire escape, on a dark and stormy night.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

Justin Bauer is a regular City Paper contributor whose "Shelf Life" column will appear the first Thursday of every month.