FictionThatMatters.org

Shortcomings
by Adrian Tomine.
Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. 108 pages.

Adrian Tomine is not a bold new voice in comics. He has already arrived. He has met with success, drawing covers for The New Yorker and illustrations for Rolling Stone. He has also published the series Optic Nerve since he was in high school, and released two volumes of short stories. His longer narrative Shortcomings is a humorous culmination of meditations on race and relationships.

While Tomine has already arrived, he is on the crest of a new wave of creative artists that I call the ‘Brooklyn School’.

Shortcomings follows Ben Tenaka, a thirty-something Asian American who manages a movie theatre in Oakland. Ben’s relationship with his girlfriend Miko is on the rocks. He is cynical and complacent, and can’t control his temper. When Miko decides to fly to New York for an internship, Ben sifts through his troubles with the help of his friend Alice. Together they unearth disconcerting truths about Miko and discover that Ben’s problems are really of his own making..

Shortcomings is a book full of awkward moments that are so rarely captured in other media, but which permeate our lives. Hesitation, hurt feelings, confusion, pauses to read body language — Tomine captures all of it in his comics with both wit and sensitivity. This makes his characters live and breathe on the page.

Adrian Tomine was born in Sacramento and lived in Berkeley before moving to Brooklyn, New York. A life-long comic fan, he became heavily influenced by the Japanese manga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi, whose work addressed macabre, workaday themes with innovative drawing techniques. (For background, read my review of Tomine interviewing Tatsumi or my review of Tatsumi’s work A Drifting Life.) But whereas Tatsumi’s rough-hewn work brims with explosive energy on the page, Tomine’s reminds me of a draftsman. Tomine’s panels are clean and methodically organized, as if the characters would feel perfectly at home living within an architecture blueprint. The austerity of his drawings reduces the dialogue and action to a very palatable core. With few distractions on the page, the conversations are easy to follow.

Shortcomings is also chock full of gems and witty one-liners:

Ben: We’re taking some time off. Those were her words. So I figure, while the cat is away, the mouse will play.
Alice: Knowing you, the ‘mouse’ will just be playing with himself!

What makes the work special is that Tomine weaves racial and sexual issues within the storyline of Ben Tenaka’s souring relationship with his girlfriend Miko. Ben’s closest friend Alice is gay, making for enjoyable banter from a variety of political viewpoints. But living in the liberal hotspots of Berkeley and New York, their political convictions are never really challenged. Ben would prefer to remain complacent while his girlfriend Miko embraces Asian American activism.

Why does this book matter?

So now you’ve read my endorsement. But what is a review of Shortcomings doing on a blog about human rights? To answer that question, you have to understand The Brooklyn School.

The Brooklyn School

The Brooklyn School is a term that describes a trend that I have observed in reviewing several plays, books, and films by Brooklyn-based authors.

Works of the Brooklyn School are marked by recurring tropes. A typical work will depict characters who are wracked by liberal discourse. Such characters use politically correct speech — that speech which attempts to do the least amount of harm to the least amount of people. This means they are cognizant of racist stereotypes, gender bias, anti-Semitism or homophobia. Yet, unhappy with their own lives, these characters become imprisoned within this liberal discourse and delve into sarcasm. Such characters know what they should believe but often feel the opposite. They don’t know what they truly believe in, so they trash everything. They are full of words but little action. Such characters are, in short, the exact kind of people that conservatives tend to hate.

In Shortcomings, Ben Tenaka is a character typical of the Brooklyn School. He is intelligent, having dropped out of a PhD program, but is wallowing as a manager of movie theater. He has no real passions so he disparages anyone who does. The problem for him is that the main target of his criticisms is his girlfriend Miko. He uses race and politics to his advantage in their relationship. When Miko tries to celebrate Asian American creativity by working at a film festival, Ben denies the importance of race:

Ben: I mean, why does everything have to be some big ’statement’ about race? Don’t any of these people want to make a movie that’s good?
Miko: God, you drive me crazy sometimes. It’s almost like you’re ashamed to be Asian.
Ben: What? After a movie like that, I’m ashamed to be human!

But soon afterwards he changes his tune. When he finds Miko with a non-Asian man, he says: ‘There’s something creepy about a big white guy who’s horny for little Asian girls.’ After being dumped by a bisexual girl so she can return to her ex-girlfriend: “Well, that’s great. Have fun back on the other side of the fence, okay?” Ben does not act this way because he is shallow or ignorant. He is aware of these issues but only wields them to his advantage.

So Ben represents one aspect of the Brooklyn School: cynical, self-absorbed characters who are imprisoned by liberal discourse. But there is more to it than that. In terms of a story arc, the typical plotline consists of a lot of witty banter, and then the depressive character is forced into action when he ’sees the light’ through intervention by friends. (It is usually a ‘he’.) After a work dominated by a character who is completely self-absorbed, this call to action is frequently unconvincing. Most people don’t spend 90 percent of their time being total jerks and then suddenly snap out of it.

This is where Shortcomings is distinguishable. Ben Tenaka is clearly enmeshed by political correctness. He frequently speaks of race and politics but in a feckless way. He works a dead-end job at a movie theater after dropping out of school, and his cynicism seems drawn from watching the world pass him by. Yet Ben’s best Alice friend is a gay Korean girl, and their friendship seems genuine. He is trapped by liberal discourse but he affirms Alice’s beliefs by accepting her sexuality. I will not spoil the ending, but Tenaka’s personal growth does not extend much beyond that. That, to me, is more convincing than the call-to-arms hallelujah typical of the Brooklyn School.

The Brooklyn School is Not Generation Y or X or ‘Me’

The Brooklyn School is not a generational development, although age does play a role. Only artists raised in the age of political correctness can fall into the Brooklyn School, but plenty of artists raised with political correctness do not. Nor is the Brooklyn School necessarily Brooklyn-based. Tomine lives in Brooklyn and so do most of the artists that I have noticed creating in this genre, but I have seen at least a few works that were created elsewhere. Tomine has produced a large body of work, so I’ll be specific and say that Shortcomings alone seems to fall into the Brooklyn School. And ‘Shortcomings’ offers a lot more: good entertainment, great art, a touching story. But I feel that this analysis is totally relevant to understanding the role of human rights in fiction. Because effecting change requires action, and the Brooklyn School is marked by the inaction of its characters. The Brooklyn School is ultimately concerned with intrapersonal change, and not societal change.

Bamboozled and Shortcomings

Let’s take another moment to identify extremes that lay outside of ‘The Brooklyn School’. On the one hand we find Spike Lee films, which consist of a liberal discourse mixed with lots of decisive action, frequently resolved through violence. (Check out Do the Right Thing or Bamboozled.) Lee comes from a previous generation, in which there was an understanding that decisive action is an excellent way of telling a story. Spike Lee belongs to the Spike Lee School. Then at the other extreme stands Samuel Beckett, writing even earlier, whose Waiting for Godot consists of characters speaking of nothing, and unable to accomplish anything either. Shortcomings and the Brooklyn School fall squarely in the middle. Lots of talk and a little bit of action. The trifling change that occurs is inside the character, and that’s about it.

Straightjackets

Categorizing a work into the Brooklyn School has limited value. It is merely one lens into a diverse body works. Yet I can’t help but notice this trend of writing, and I am not altogether happy with it. At its worst, such works inhibit change by celebrating total self-absorption. This has negative implications for activists. But at its best, Brooklyn School stories express the conflicting emotions that many of us feel. Shortcomings falls into the latter. There is comfort in knowing that you’re not alone. And there’s something of Ben Tenaka — and his promiscuous friend Alice — in all of us.

Unlike other works by the Brooklyn School, Tomine has created a story that left me wanting to read more. Indeed, I read Shortcomings all over again and noticed clever allusions that had escaped me the first time. I look forward to the next installment — and hope that there is one.

–Deji Olukotun