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This story actually happened, it isn’t just a gimmick. Well, it is a gimmick, but it’s true. I was on the bus reading Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine’s new graphic novel, when the guy across the aisle asked what it was about. As I grasped for the right words, I realized that this was a question to which the book provided no easy answer — the first thing I thought of was that, like an episode of Seinfeld, Shortcomings is about friends and the people they sleep with. Is Shortcomings, then, a book about nothing?
The only thing I said was that it was a book about “a depressed guy.” This isn’t a very good way of describing the story, but maybe at the end of this review you’ll understand why that’s what I told him.
Ben Tenaka, Shortcomings’ acerbic hero, has “a problem with depression and anger management...weird self-hatred issues... and relentless negativity”; he is “critical of everything, [has] no career ambitions anymore, [he has] what? One friend?” And aside from Ben’s job, I’d be hard pressed to say what it is that he does, exactly. The manager of an Oakland movie theater, Ben is (was) the boyfriend of a girl who, from the book’s first pages, we sense could do a lot better. Her name is Miko, and she is the beautiful, talented, patient ex we all wish we’d been nicer to when we were actually dating them.
With a feeling of powerless awe like the one we get when we see a bad car accident, we watch Ben royally fuck things up with his girlfriend. One night, Miko invites Ben to bed, telling him, “We don’t have to go to sleep right away.” Oh, did I mention she’s in her underwear? Rather than accept her invitation, Ben opts to watch some DVDs he can’t even remember ordering.
Shortcomings is nothing if not the story of Ben confronted by the fact that his relationship is in the shitter. When Miko leaves Oakland for a prestigious internship in New York, Ben is confronted with a terrifying question: What am I without her?
And that question gives rise to a slew of others. What does Ben want to do with himself? Is Ben still attracted to Miko? If not, then why not? Now a bachelor (well, he’s not exactly a bachelor, but it’s complicated), Ben begins to meet other women. The world is suddenly full of them. These new women that Ben is meeting are exciting, interesting, articulate, and, without exception, blonde-haired and blue-eyed.
It ever so slowly dawns on Japanese-American Ben that he is pathologically drawn to white women. So the question is not as simple as “What is Ben without Miko?”; that question permutes, grows, multiplies, finally becoming something else: “What is America?”
Is America Ben’s home? His oppressor? Has America been sleeping with Ben’s girlfriend?
There through it all is Alice Kim, Ben’s best friend. Alice makes Shortcomings succeed because she is apparently the only character unafraid to tell Ben exactly how it is (though that’s not to say she’s not without shortcomings of her own. In addition to a rabid and desperate promiscuity, Alice is living a lie: her parents still don’t know she’s a lesbian).
By the book’s conclusion, we sense that Ben’s journey is really just beginning, in the literal and figurative senses of the word. But more than that, Tomine manages to convey that Ben’s quest is a long time coming. The truth is that the Ben we’ve known isn’t just “a depressed guy”; he has actually been hovering somewhere between denial and depression, a nowhere land that has twisted him into a sarcastic, jaded asshole whose existence is work, sleep, and watching DVDs.
Shortcomings’ Ben Tenaka faces a cruel choice: either suffer the questions or suffer the consequences of ignoring them. |
