Julie recommends Sabrina by Nick Drnaso:
There doesn’t need to be another review of Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina; it was heaped with praise when it was published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2018. Zadie Smith said, “Sabrina is the best book—in any medium—I have read about our current moment.” And if you come across as many Zadie Smith blurbs as I do, you can spot the difference between a lukewarm this-certainly-wasn’t-the-worst-book-in-the-world Zadie Smith blurb and a glowing I-actually-loved-this-book Zadie Smith blurb. Sabrina also caught the attention of the Man Booker judges, becoming the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the prize. Suddenly, Sabrina was a book everyone wanted to read, and booksellers were forced to say “sorry, we’re sold out.”
I don’t care for buzz, nor am I the type of person who travels to the ends of the earth to read something that’s selling like hot cakes. Nearly a year after Sabrina’s release, I finally sat down to read this inked favorite, this game-changer, this magnificent addiction—and let me tell you, Sabrina is worth all the praise, and then some. If you, too, avoided the stampede to get a copy, I’m here to tell you, now’s the perfect time to read this superb creation.
The plot is basic: a woman goes missing. Her name is Sabrina, and Sabrina represents the archetypal MIA woman who intrigue swirls around. Out of the mystery of Sabrina’s disappearance, two old friends are thrown together. Calvin, a military worker whose family life is on the fritz, invites Teddy, Sabrina’s very depressed boyfriend, to live with him.
In my recollection, I haven’t come across a story (graphic novel, book, movie or otherwise) that depicts raw tenderness within heterosexual male friendships. We see women comfort each other—pick each other up off the linoleum floor—all the time but we rarely see men perform the same service. Calvin helps take Teddy’s pants and shirt off because he’s too depressed to. Calvin washes Teddy’s clothes, reminds him to eat, and routinely asks him if he needs anything.
As readers, we fear what Calvin has gotten himself into. Teddy vacillates between white hot rages and the fetal position. He’s in bad shape, real bad shape, and if you’re someone familiar with the fate of missing women, you might even begin to wonder if Teddy’s conscience is bothering him.
An element of mystery combined with depictions of an unhinged media make for a tense read. Teddy starts listening to an alarmist radio announcer. “The orchestrators,” the announcer says, “stir the pot, to keep us separate, suspicious and hostile… [T]hey manufacture tragedy. They deal in deception. They stage massacres. And murder civilians. This is the smoke screen.”
It’s surprisingly easy for Teddy (and the reader, too) to get sucked into the melody of the announcer’s warnings and rants. It’s the same black hole that can be found on Facebook, YouTube, and anywhere message forums pop up. Around the black hole congregate people who deny the Holocaust, 9/11, Sandy Hook, and accuse students who witnessed their classmates get shot in front of them of being paid actors.
As someone who doesn’t read very many graphic novels, I confess I’m at a loss for how to describe the drawings and the color palette of Sabrina. There’s an eeriness that I can’t quite place. The closest thing I can think of is an experience I had recently. I was approaching a bus stop at night. A man was sitting on the bench watching what I assumed was a Fox News type program. The man had his phone propped up on his stomach and his pale face was lit up by the glow of the screen. From the blaring volume, I heard clips of Trump shouting, and pundits throwing in their two cents, which is no sense at all. It was creepy, really creepy.
Sabrina is a bit creepy, too, but an artful, good kind of creepy. Creepy because it’s easy to recognize certain features of the current mess we’re in now. Creepy because the mess seems to be getting messier.