Rabagliati, Carver, Peck

I've been reading the autobiographical comics of the Canadian Michel Rabagliati lately, and I'm really in love with the simple way in which he depicts the relatively mundane events of his life. Each of Rabagliati's books chronicles a specific time in his life, using his author surrogate Paul to describe his upbringing in Canada. The books are full of details that are very tied to time and place. Last night I read Paul Has A Summer Job, and a good place to start is Paul Goes Fishing. The titles are wonderfully direct. They remind me of the title of the first Kings of Convenience album: Quiet Is the New Loud.

In Paul Has a Summer Job, Rabagliati's Paul drops out of school in Montreal and spends his summer as a camp counselor. He learns to rock climb, befriends a blind student, and has a brief camp love affair. Very few of the things that happen in the book seem important, but upon finishing I felt as if I'd been granted access to something deeply intimate. Reading it, it was is if I was sitting with Rabagliati in the quiet corner of a library. His writing seems muted by the passage of time, as if he's recounting an old memory which he long ago came to terms with.

Rabagliati has thick, dark eyebrows, and in every photograph I've seen of him, he has turned his body towards the camera to smile. It's hard to see how he could write anything unkind or complicated.

That is a compliment. Let me explain by comparing Rabagliati to the wave of minimalist short stories that followed after Raymond Carver. The genre into which his stories fit is realism. Carver's minimalism was used to convey the sense that something was seriously wrong. There's a tendency to call stories that focus on problems and pain "realistic," but this discounts the huge portion of existence that is both real and happy. Rabagliati's work is also realism, but he uses simplicity of description to convey contentment, not misery.

Gregory Peck disliked the common actorly conceit that it's more realistic to play the villain. For him, villains weren't inherently more realistic, it was just harder to play the heroes as if they were real people. Peck preferred playing heroes.