ABSENT FIGURES IN

Instead of allowing the specific miasma of the Neapolitan Quartet to seep out and move through Ferrante’s other work, we must be suspicious of the smoothing processes of amalgamation or incorporation. The particular Naples of The Lying Life is not exactly the blurry-edged Naples of the Quartet, which in turn is neither the haunted, subterranean one of Troubling Love, nor the loud, dark Naples of memory that overlays the removed locales of The Days of Abandonment or The Lost Daughter. The uglinesses of all these books’ Naples are subtly different; laid atop one another, their imaginative maps form a harmonious, ever-expanding palimpsest, but not a single plan.

Along with the desire for a singular, shared Naples, another of the tacit assumptions of the Ferrante novel is that the first-person female narrator must always herself be the author of the book itself. Yet, as Merve Emre notes sharply in The Atlantic, this is not articulated in The Lying Life of Adults. Unlike the narrators of her earlier books, who are literary women, authors or editors themselves, Giovanna never declares herself a writer. Instead, she refers obliquely to “the one who is writing,” who may be her, or may be her childhood friend Ida (the only self-declared writer in the book), or may be someone else entirely. “The one who is writing” writes in conversation with Giovanna, but we don’t know if that’s the internal conversation of the past self with the present, or the external conversation of the interviewer and interviewee. It is the conversation that is signified, rather than the one with whom Giovanna converses, to whom she could be telling the story from a distance of decades or mere months, even days. This non-specificity of perspective gives the novel a necessary immediacy and contingency that none of Ferrante’s earlier accounts of adolescence possess; the reader has nowhere to ground herself but the present moment of the narrative.

The novel follows Giovanna from the ages of 13 to 16, the lurching years when every new experience is edged on one side with vague desire and the other with revulsion. It is also the age when the choice between wearing raw interiority on one’s face, or hiding it underneath the mask of comely politeness becomes necessary. One of the elements that The Lying Life of Adults captures best about early adolescence is the ugliest feeling of this time that Giovanna calls “those ugly years”: the involuted, self-loathing pleasure of the sulk. The teenage sulk is a phenomenon rarely expressed with sensitivity or accuracy; it is often caricaturized as a frivolous, playacting affect, where the sulker selfishly gives in to their pettiest negativities and lets them run rampant, at the expense of whoever happens to get in their way.

But sulkiness, as Ferrante shows us through Giovanna, is more than just pouting and flouncing. It is also an exploratory, masochistic impulse to lean right into ugliness rather than turn away from it. “I thought I was hideous and wanted to be more hideous,” says Giovanna, a feeling that I remember clearly from those early teenage years, a confrontational, challenging way of being in the world. Like the “ugly feelings” that Sianne Ngai theorizes in her book of the same name, sulkiness might be classed as “minor and generally unprestigious […] [e]xplicitly amoral and noncathartic.” Yet this type of affective response is no less real or readable — or generative — than its grander, more easily aestheticized cousins like anger, sympathy, or shame. Rather than blockages on the

way to adulthood, as they’re often depicted, Giovanna’s teenage sulks are periods of growth, as she experiments with the effects of immersing herself in the ugliness of the world.

The novel ends with a moment as ugly as the harsh statement that begins it, but by the time the reader gets there, she’s learned to read ugliness in its infinite variety. Giovanna has also learned: rather than being frightened or titillated, she is simply “delighted,” choosing of her own will to confront ugliness directly, rather than to prettify it dishonestly. In so doing, we get the feeling that Giovanna is, unlike the lying adults she leaves behind, somehow ready to experience the world as it really is, endlessly expansive. And like the semigrown Giovanna who leaves Naples at the end of the book with Ida, determined to “become adults as no one ever had before,” Ferrante has a spectacular way of diving cleanly into the depths of the ugly without wallowing in them, and of occasionally drawing a kind of wild, almost alarming elation from the ugliest encounters.

Trudging sweatily along the waterfront in August, resisting the urge to dip my toes in the horrible mysteries of the East River, it occurred to me that reading The Lying Life of Adults is like joyously plunging into a filthy city river on a hot day. You know the deceptively clear water is full of sewage and needles and condoms and that three-eyed fish from The Simpsons and unspeakable other things. Yet for a second it looks so cool, the soft lapping of waves is so tantalizing, that you forget you’re not at the beach. If you pause and think about it reasonably, the idea is revolting. But the plunge — might not the plunge be sublime?

ABSENT FIGURES IN THE FRAME

MIN HYOUNG SONG

The cover of Killing and Dying shows a starkly rendered street scene. It is mundane but at the same time so precisely rendered that it feels revelatory. It is done, moreover, in a style that readers familiar with the work of Adrian Tomine can easily pick out as his. There are the well-known brands plastered on roadside signs — the happy red and yellow of Denny’s and the ultra-stylized red dot within a red circle of Target. The light inside the distinctive midcentury rhomboid shape of the Denny’s restaurant is lit in a cheery yellow while the pink of the setting sun gives the street a golden-hour feel. The cars are nondescript and impersonal. No figures are visible through opaque windows. Only the headlights seem to

suggest, somehow, some kind of motion. A lone tree interrupts our line of sight almost at the middle of the cover, while the stark silhouette of a palm tree on the right mimics its shape and gives it a sinister twist. There are no pedestrians nor, for that matter, is there any suggestion of humans occupying this space. The scene is at once so familiar and so strange that it conjures the strong likelihood that bad things are about to happen. What these bad things might be is intimated by the title, which dominates the cover in inch-tall white lettering. The two words, “killing” and “dying,” promise hard-boiled crimes committed by tough guys and hardened gals, characters as likely to lose their own lives as to take those of others.

Given such expectations, it’s disorienting to read the first of the six stories that comprise this collection. A painfully funny tale about a gardener who wants to found a new school of sculpture, it is drawn in a loose, almost cartoonish style. The lines are rounded, the details are minimal, and the depth of the pictures flat in the way Sunday comics are flat. The drawings lack the kind of draftsman-like precision that Tomine is known for, whether in his covers for The New Yorker or in the drawings found in his long-running series Optic Nerve. The second story returns us, visually, to what we might expect from Tomine’s art, but it’s noticeable that the colors are vibrant pastels. The title pages face each other, the title of the story centered on each page in mirror apposition, the one on the left pink and the one on the right white. This contrast calls attention to the pink, which is a color that Tomine uses extensively in the story itself. When a character gets into a fist fight, for example, the words “Pop,” “Wham,” and so on float in the air in pink balloon lettering with black borders. Such use of color has a way of softening the sharp edges of the images, a softness that is further accentuated by the rounded curves of the characters’ faces. Each story that follows features similarly unique stylistic touches.

This level of self-conscious experimentation says something, I suspect, about where Tomine is in the arc of his career. He’s already a highly successful cartoonist with nothing to prove. Unlike, say, the book-length narrative of Shortcomings, whose protagonist seems unable to leave his childhood behind, these stories feature characters who are much older. Pushing middle age, they are forced to reckon with the messes they’ve made of their lives, and are being asked by every sharp turn of Tomine’s plots to take responsibility for what they have become and what they are becoming. The drawings reflect a style of storytelling that is serious, mature, and mindful of how art becomes differently meaningful as one gets older. Maybe this is the theme that Tomine means to foreground in the first story, in which the gardener spends years defiantly chasing his dream of becoming an artist. No criticism seems harsh enough to deter him, but at the end, looking at the sculptures he’s put up on his front lawn in defiance of the homeowners association letters requiring him to take them down, he exclaims in a moment of lucidity, “Jesus fucking Christ, those things are hideous.”

Contrary to what we might expect, this moment reverberates not as a selfcritique of Tomine’s own artwork, but as a sign of how exquisitely self-aware he

is as an artist. He is the opposite of the gardener in the sense that each image and reference seems to mean something more than the story itself is telling us. Tomine’s experimentation with style, then, could be understood, at the most basic level, as an invitation to pay attention to what’s there on the page. We are being asked to see the details, and to wonder at the ways in which they complicate the story that’s being told.

Nowhere is this last point more in evidence than in the story that shares the name of the volume. The fifth story in the collection, it is also the most ambitious and detailed. It begins with a frustratingly negative dad who too easily gets angry at his wife for being supportive of their daughter. The daughter, who is painfully shy and stutters when she speaks, wants to be a stand-up comedian. The father opposes this choice. When asked why, he says with the brutal honesty that is a trademark of Tomine’s narratives, “I’m opposed to embarrassment.” Undeterred, the mother signs the daughter up for a comedy class. The class ends with a show, and both parents are amazed to find that their daughter is good. Really good. All seems well until the daughter’s teacher lets slip that he is the one who wrote the jokes. The daughter had only spoken them. The group’s celebratory dinner is awkward, to say the least.

The story unfurls in a series of small panels, each neatly bordered into perfect rectangles. There are 20 per page. The quotidian family drama plays out in these confines, the number of identical panels stretching out each moment and making them painfully long. Reading the first few pages feels like being seated at a Denny’s next to a family who can’t stop fighting with each other. We don’t want to overhear, but we overhear every word and wince at how uncomfortable they make us feel. It’s only when the story reaches the daughter’s performance that, at least for a moment, the reader is allowed a sense of relief — albeit one that’s almost immediately taken away.

But of course this refusal is where the story has been going all along. When the parents arrive at their daughter’s show, the mother is wearing a kerchief on her head and walking with the assistance of a cane. When I saw this, I had to look back at the earlier pages and wonder at the depictions of the mother, who seems happy and full of cheek and in many ways more full of life than her husband or daughter. The only detail that might suggest something is askew is her short hair. This is not a very telling detail, since lots of women wear their hair short. Of course, some of the women who wear their hair short are also in the early stages of being treated for cancer. The restaurant scene ends with the mother holding her daughter in a hug. A blank panel follows. Then, the mother is completely gone. Time has passed. There’s only the father and the daughter, and they’re eating pizza. The father wonders out loud if he should have also made salad for dinner. The daughter reassures him that the pizza alone is fine. They don’t have much else to say to each other. It’s clear at this point that the mother has died, most likely of cancer, even though no one in the story ever says the words. The only indications that something was wrong with the mother’s health were the kerchief and the

ART TK

Roula Nassar, the (strange) bargain, 2019, ink on paper, 15 x 13 inches.

cane. At this point in the story, I thought I finally understood how much Tomine had played with my expectations. The killing and dying of the title doesn’t refer to crime. They refer to the fact that the mother in this story is dying, and that the daughter was “killing it” in her comedy routine. Rather than something sinister or awful, the killing is a contrast to the dying, something happy that offsets the terrible sadness of what’s happening in the story’s background.

If this sounds sappy, it is, and Tomine refuses to have any part of something so sentimental. The story ends with the daughter appearing on an improv stage, her performance disastrous, to say the least. No reader should expect a happy ending in Tomine’s fiction. In this respect, the ending of the story is both more and less awful that it could be, since the father who saw his daughter humiliated in front of an increasingly hostile audience pretends not to have been there and allows her a face-saving lie.

What has always intrigued me about Tomine’s fiction is the absent-present role that race plays in the stories he chooses to tell. Tomine is part of a growing number of Asian American writers and creative artists who have focused their talent on telling a wide variety of stories. These stories don’t always have an Asian American character at their center, and in some instances don’t have any Asian American characters at all. Rather, they seem focused on practicing what the literary scholar Stephen Sohn calls, in his recent book Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds, “strategic antiessentialism.” Just because they are Asian American does not mean, in other words, that writers and creative artists have to focus all of their energy on telling stories about Asian Americans. They can, but they can direct their energies in other directions as well.

A crude assessment of the drawings and the details found in the six stories that make up Killing and Dying suggests that four of the stories are about white characters. A fifth seems to be about a black man, but this is based on only the images and nothing explicit in the storytelling. A sixth story begins in Tokyo and ends in Oakland, but because it is told in disembodied images of cityscapes, objects, and human figures seen either from a distance or with their backs turned toward us, it’s impossible to determine anything about the race of the narrator. What this means is that the one story that seems narratively to fit a story about Asian immigrants (although the story makes explicit that the trip consists of a return to the United States rather than a first voyage) stylistically refuses to give us a visual representation of the characters involved. This seems like a deliberate choice designed to call attention to the absence of Asians and Asian Americans among the book’s protagonists more generally.

And yet, despite such purposeful elisions, the book from other angles goes out of its way to foreground the issue of race. In the first story, the gardener Harold is inspired to become a sculptor after reading a book by Isamu Noguchi, the modernist artist and landscape architect who may be best known for having designed the Noguchi coffee table. Noguchi also made substantial contributions to the