Tender

"Some days I think I'd feel better if I tried harder," the Mountain Goats sing, the first half of a sentiment that seems largely to anchor Tender, the graphic novel debut of Beth Hetland, published by Fantagraphics this past March. Of course, the second half of that sentiment —"most days I know it's not true" — is just as important here, yet it remains, against all logic, ever the compelling notion, especially when you're in a bad place – that "fake it 'til you make it" does, in fact, mean that you will end up making it after all.

A literalized ouroboros lies at the heart of Hetland's graphic novel: self-cannibalization, pushed to its farthest limits, as an attempted self-sustenance. Carolanne, our protagonist, is more a curator than anything else: her top priority in life is to achieve the appearance of a perfect life, a role perfectly filled — no matter what bits she has to hack off to achieve it. She meticulously plans and engineers moments, and for a while there it even works. Yet reminders that not everything lies within her control — first a stillbirth, then her husband asking for a divorce — exacerbate her self-mutilating tendencies. She pulls out her hair; she peels her skin. She eats the pieces and covers herself with band-aids. Most importantly, though, she lies about the source of the injury to ensure that she is viewed as a victim of accident.

Of course, throughout the book Hetland comments on hegemonic models of tradition: a woman must be a wife, must be a mother, to be worthy of societal love; the use of social media as Carolanne's periscope into obsession further clarifies that these roles, more than they are occupied, are performed, affected. From here emerges almost an auto-vindictive element to Carolanne's pattern of response: she comes to view her body as an external presence in itself, going against her desires for a picture-perfect life, and if she is flawed in the eyes of society it is because a third party made her flawed – a third party that must not go unpunished. The use of stillbirth, then, becomes doubly devastating: it is not only one of the biggest heartbreaks a couple can go through – it is also a disruption of social order and category. By coupling this virtue of motherhood with the repulsion of failure, Hetland refutes this view of bodily conformity as the sole metric for societal worth as absurd.

---

Hetland's art has a plain though not unpleasant immediacy to it, reminiscent of autobiographical cartoonists like Audra Stang. It's a quiet, non-ostentatious atmosphere that works well for the stiff charade-of-routine that the story tries to evoke. The environments are likewise solid, on a very material level; when it comes to settings, she leaves little room for shorthand, giving each object its requisite fullness.

Where Hetland shines is in her sense of heightening. She establishes the visual language of routine — her monochrome colored-pencil purple, her three-tiered pages with neat, uniform gutters between panels — in a manner that is so intuitive that it approaches invisibility, thus ensuring that any break away from this pattern is not only noticed but glaring. The most notable divergence is in Hetland's introduction of bold red into her palette, particularly in the depiction of both meat and human flesh (thus synonymizing, of course, subsistence and mutilation) — it's a contrast that pops immediately against the 'blandness' of the default purple, allowing her rendering of self-mutilation scenes to achieve the sickening effect that they warrant.

The cartoonist's command of image, however, becomes a crutch at times. For all of Hetland's deftness in tonal heightening, she struggles to establish a baseline of investment that would allow her blows to land with the force they would otherwise merit. All we know of Carolanne's job is that it takes place in an office and that she quits to have her baby; the people around her appear to share a uniform plot function: to be present, then absent.

At several key points in the book Hetland relies on acceleratory montage, a shorthand that affords her the appearance of familiarity without the stakes that familiarity entails. When Carolanne successfully engineers a meet-cute with her would-be husband (she pointedly leaves her cubicle at the same time as him while leaving her umbrella behind), for instance, the two board the same train and talk throughout the ride, except their speech balloons are completely empty. Elsewhere, the author brushes through events, reducing them to mere gestures so as to signify they are important while prioritizing economy above all else. The reader is thus both present in and absent from key moments in the lives of characters that they — we — are supposed, for all intents and purposes, to care about. What begins as a critique of the "everything works out" mold of rom-com, wherein characters are familiar only insofar as the very dialect of romantic comedy repeats itself with little variation, becomes indicative a key authorial fear: the fear of getting too close.

The result is exactly the sort of tentative feeling that Hetland appears otherwise eager to avoid. The narrative in Tender takes the risky approach of relying, for the most part, on inevitability of escalation — instead of protagonist introspection, of broaching points of relief, Hetland makes a point of establishing a pattern of hanging on past the last exit. It's an approach that, when it does work, comes with a glorious, sickening impact; I think here of Uncut Gems, a movie that, when I watched it, left me quite physically wired and breathless for some hours afterwards. Hetland, however, tips over from inevitability to mere predictability, emphasizing her messaging to the detriment of her emotional impact. A façade, to me, only really works so long as it sets its viewer's mind at ease, convincing them not to look past it; in failing to find a balance between the underlying psychology of the protagonist and the idealized state she wishes to externalize, Hetland is a puppeteer telling her audience to make sure they see the strings.

---

 

 

Toward the end of Tender, Carolanne’s friends surprise her with a baby shower. They suspect that something is amiss, but they say nothing — perhaps they indulge her, perhaps they believe her lies, perhaps a mixture of both. And she really does look pregnant — not because she is, but because her consumption issues have caused her stomach to distend. Her mutilation is no longer limited to her own body: in a truly disturbing follow-up to a cutesy-couple-y sequence early in the book, Carolanne is revealed to have killed and eaten her cat — to achieve the look of motherhood, she has killed the one living creature that did, in fact, depend on her.

Yet buried in that sentence is the very problem: in Tender, everything is payoff, leaving little open to question or contemplation. One does not wonder whether external perception is a matter of curation; one is told, rather explicitly, that this is the case, and that it comes with a heavy price. One is left with the unnerving notion that routine itself is a charade, and a precarious one at that. You'd better make sure that you feel good, my friends — because you're never going to feel better, no matter how much you "try harder."

The post Tender appeared first on The Comics Journal.