Jessica Abel’s La Perdida takes the “novel” part of “graphic novel” more seriously than most. It feels hefty, meaningful, novelistic, and not just because of its actual pagecount. As a high-stakes coming-of-age story set among young, politically idealistic but ethically challenged expatriates, it reminds me of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (albeit with more cocaine and less cabaret). Granted, Isherwood’s Communist (and fellow-travelling) characters lived closer to the bone: their wished-for, gabbed-about, imaginary revolution felt more real — because it was actually starting to happen in other nearby countries, maybe, and because Germany, the setting for Isherwood’s book, was in the process of turning itself into Hitler’s Third Reich at that very historical moment, in part due to middle-class panic induced by the rise of chattering, well-off expatriate intellectuals purporting to be the vangard of a Soviet-style revolution while gobbling canapes and guzzling fancy cocktails. As in Isherwood’s turn-of-the-century Germany, the politics in La Perdida’s turn-of-the-millennium Mexico come across as dangerous, deceiving poses. For example, Abel’s self-professed Communist agitator, a balding lounge lizard named Memo, uses his presumed moral superiority as a weapon against (primarily) women: self-righteous political outrage as pick-up line. When he does act upon his “convictions,” it is in a deeply nasty, pathetically opportunistic way. That he is able to justify a simple grab for money with high-sounding rhetoric is entirely believable, and handled very well, and very subtly, by Abel, making him more interesting than he might have been in any other graphic novel, but, all the same, we feel nothing but contempt for him. He is abhorrent. We never understand what the other characters see in him — and we never understand what he sees in the other characters, either, by the way. There’s not a winner in the bunch.

And there’s the rub. It is difficult to sympathize with any character in this book. They’re all thoroughly unlikeable, and not even in a smart-ass, “love to hate’em” kind of way (as in, say, the novels of Will Self or Martin Amis). They just come across as pathetic, self-deluded, and self-absorbed — the narrator/protagonist not least of all. That was my biggest obstacle while reading La Perdida — which, admittedly, is a fine achievement, a major work, a technical tour de force, with beautifully rendered illustrations, realistically-staged, morally difficult situations, a meaning that matters, and so on, and so on, and so on. I hated every well-written, painstakingly defined, superbly acted, eminently believable character, as though they were real shitheels whom I’d simply rather not know. I wanted to shake them. I didn’t want to spend my time with them — not even in my imagination. I dunno. I might be overstating this. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old, and don’t have a lot of patience with grandstanding adult children anymore (which is why I’m glad I never became a college professor, by the way).

Or maybe (more likely) it’s an actual structural problem with the book itself. First-person narratives (and, thanks to a framing story, plus narrative captions scattered throughout the book, we are encouraged to think of this as a first-person story, a very detailed flashback, essentially, which starts on page eleven, and lasts for more than two hundred pages) don’t all come in the same size and shape, or with the same intention. Any fiction, actually, but especially first-person fiction, depends on the artificial device of a narrator, whose distance from (or closeness to) the action can color the reader’s experience, and create (or destroy) potential meaning. For example, a story told today by an ninety-five-year-old woman about something that happened to her when she was fifteen will be very different from a story told eighty years ago by a fifteen-year-old girl about something that happened to her earlier that same day — even if the same events occur in both stories. Similarly, the tone of story (and hence its meaning) will be affected by the narrator’s imagined audience, and her intent in telling the story: is the narrator telling the story to, say, her priest for absolution, or to her ex-husband, as an excuse, or to her daughter, by way of preparing her for some important moment in her life, or (as is the case in La Perdida) to herself, to wallow in her own self-disgust and regret over mistakes she has made in the recent past? Usually, these kinds of frames and meta-frames are left invisible — in the same way that a method actor’s preparations for a role (the biography she writes for her character, the traumatic scenes she imagines for her character’s past, and so on) are not provided explicitly to the audience, but are simply allowed to color and inform the performance for good or for ill, the novelistic narrator’s distance and intent in telling a story cannot always be understood directly. Most of the time, they can only be inferred.

The narrator of La Perdida has not forgiven herself for the mistakes she made during her short stay in Mexico — so her telling of the story focuses with brutal precision on every self-deception, every example of poor decision-making, and every unkind motivation, every flaw in her own and her friends’ moral complexions. We are never given a chance to live vicariously through Carla’s mistakes, by accepting them as inevitable, and thereby imagining that we understand them, and her. Tales of youthful folly and redemption work best when the reader goes along with the protagonist’s moves, taking them as supremely logical and self-evident, until the metaphorical boom is lowered. In other words, if we are made to feel like we would have made the same mistakes, given the same set of circumstances, we have a greater stake in the outcome of the story. That’s not the case here. From the very beginning of this book, when Carla decides to move to Mexico and take advantage of her ex-boyfriend, a lazy Trust Fund kid who wants to be the next Kerouac, we can’t help but disapprove of her choices (in part because the narrator refuses to slide over them or give them any kind of winking approval). Or, at least, I couldn’t. That makes it very hard to be surprised — or even to care — when the inevitable bad climax occurs. You just get the feeling that the narrator got exactly what she deserved (and what she got, I have to tell you, was pretty damn harsh). Maybe if Carla-as-narrator had had a few more years to ruminate, and forgive herself for what she did, before telling us her story, she could have brought a little humanity and humor into the mix, to alleviate the uncomfortable, wallowing angst that she delivers to us in the book as-it-is. The same story could have been told in a way that made us understand Carla’s motivations (Memo’s strange attractiveness, as a friend, and a womanizer, for example, could have maybe been developed and made real, shown to us in action, instead of merely pointed-at and taken for granted — but that would have required a narrator with more distance, and more experience of the world, maybe, a calmer and more mature outlook, than our narrator, Carla, as she exists at the beginning of the book).

My creative writing teacher used to tell me that there were several levels of mistake-making, when it came to writing novels. The first level, epidemic in undergraduate (and, for that matter, graduate) writing classes, is strictly technical: your sentences are clunky; your scenes aren’t set; your plot doesn’t make sense, and so on. That’s the level of mistake-making that keeps you from being a professional writer. After you’ve gone past that level, and have become a professional writer, there’s the next level: your characters don’t come alive as brightly as they might; your themes contradict themselves in ways you didn’t intend; there’s too much of your favorite writers showing up in your work. That’s the kind of mistake-making that keeps you from being a prominent contemporary. At some point, you get to the final level of mistake-making: the kind of mistake-making that keeps you from being a Great Figure for the Ages, like, say, Virginia Woolf or Thomas Hardy or whatever. It seems to me that the mistake Abel makes in La Perdida (the narrator’s lack of sympathy and affection for herself and her friends — maybe Jessica Abel’s own lack of sympathy and affection for her characters? — causes the reader to regard them coldly, too) is at that level. Everything else is impeccable here. Few other graphic novelists — even among the most famous — have even advanced beyond the first level of mistake-making. Most of them can only draw pretty (or distracting, at any rate) pictures.

But, yeah, there it is: in my opinion, this book is on the verge of greatness, but fatally and deeply flawed all the same. I expect that maybe if I’d read it when I was twenty years younger, in the throes of my own selfish, idealistic, post-collegiate period of self-deception, I might have liked it a lot more. Make of that whatever you will.

Title: La Perdida Author: Jessica Abel Publisher: Pantheon

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