In the first chapter, Luke’s twin brother announces his best man for his wedding—and it isn’t Luke. Due to a live streaming mixup, Luke overhears his brother saying that Luke is too stunted in his life to be his best man. Luke runs home, buys a bunch of self-help books, and when his brother comes to apologize he sneaks out the window and goes to a hotel on a quest for self-improvement (accompanied by two mice that live in his apartment and try to steer his growth). Flash forward five years: Luke is working for a company and is staging a murder mystery play. His mom comes to watch the play and, after seeing rehearsals, tries to persuade Luke to call off the play. She cites an argument that they had fifteen years earlier, when Luke published a comic that was too similar to their real lives, saying that this play was going to be insulting to his coworkers and get him fired. He tries to call it off, then tries to escape into an intense storm—but the bridge is swept away. In the third chapter, Luke travels to Greece and goes on a hike to disperse his brother’s ashes, having passed away from lung cancer. In the “final” section, one of Healy’s comics has been optioned for a film and he travels to Palm Springs to be a part of the process. He is being filmed constantly for bonus features, but the filmmaker is making so many changes to his story that it betrays his message. He becomes convinced that they are doing it purposely to enrage him and eventually he takes a stand and copes with change.
Then the book ends.
Sort of.
The story ends and there is a brief epilogue. Then, there is an appendix that is about fifty pages long and it blew me away. It is the comic that was optioned for the film, the same comic that caused a conflict with his mom twenty years earlier. Up until the end, Self-Esteem and the End of the World was a good book. The ending really pushed it to being great, for a number of reasons.
First of all, one of the tensions in the book was just how much of it was true. I have absolutely no knowledge of Luke Healy’s career, so I don’t know if he wrote a murder mystery play, I don’t know if he had a story optioned for film, and it was only after research that I saw the appendix “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” was published on its own years earlier. Having no knowledge of Healy’s career, the book had this strange liminal quality that made it enticing. There were references to his work, for example, when we see him touring the film studio. We hear about an argument of him borrowing from real life with nothing more than a genderswap of he and his brother, but that could just be a throwaway anecdote that sets the context for the more immediate drama of the second chapter. So, when the comic which serves as so foundational to the story is presented in its entirety, it hits like a truck. I haven’t seen anything quite like this recently, where the necessary foundation for so much of the story is presented after its effects. Suddenly, everything clicks and the strategy of saving it for last works so beautifully thematically, given that the book deals with so much loss.
I need to focus a bit more on the appendix, “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.” It’s a fifty page comic that features a mother and her two sarcastic daughters on a three week whale-watching trip in honour of their deceased father. Having just read 280 pages of seeing a similar dynamic, Luke’s mother’s critique of him borrowing from their lives too closely seems entirely justified. One of the daughters, Luke’s stand-in, sees a whale jump from the water while on deck alone with the captain’s son. She’s seen as lucky, but something has upset her. A book has fallen and gotten wet. She is visibly distraught over it and then goes back to the captain’s son’s room for an intimate evening. She continues seeing the whale and at one point gets frustrated and throws the book at it before realizing—too late—what she has done.
Most of the graphic novel is somewhat static, especially in comparison to Symptômes, and is far more dialogue-driven. The most impactful visuals, though, come in that moment of throwing the book at the whale. There is a huge panel that takes up three quarters of the bottom part of the page. In two thin rows at the top of the page, we get vignette flashbacks of the girl and her father. It goes on for pages and pages. It’s amazing to see two timelines running parallel: the slowness of the moment of throwing the book away, the speed of years passing as the memories of fraught relationships with her father go by. The arrangement of the pages is excellent, as well, suggesting that these fragmentary memories are hovering above the current moment that is taking up most of the attention. Yet, the memories inform the moment beautifully.
That balance of focusing on the moment and looking back on the past with a new perspective is achieved stunningly, and forces you to do the same. It’s compelling to me because something that was written in the past informs what you are currently reading, but then you’re reading it after what you just read and it revises the experience. It’s an engaging chronological wavering and suddenly when the past is presented to you, the present becomes more comprehensible: you understand why the book is important, you understand why Luke referred to himself as lucky, you understand why the changes to his film were so upsetting, you understand why his sexual encounter with one of the actors fails and it gains a new dimension. It’s great and it’s devastating.
Much of the book has a humour to it, sometimes effective (bantering police officers), sometimes not (mischievous birds narrating a couple’s retreat in Greece), but the emotional core of the book is what I found particularly compelling. The chapter where he steals his brother’s ashes and runs away to Greece to disperse them has some funny dystopian moments, but it really tugs at the heartstrings when you realize that Luke is listening to self-help books because his brother recorded the audiobooks and he just wants to hear his brother say that he is good. Wow. Some of the mental health issues that Luke goes through are hard to bear witness and some of the dialogue hits too close to home. For instance, when he is reflecting on his brother’s death, Luke says over a series of panels: “I’ve spent my whole life, every day, thinking about the future. Stressing about the bad things that are on their way. Striving to make good things happen. Working all the time. And truly, for what? The good things never happened. Not liked I’d imagined them. The bad things that happened were never the ones I’d prepared for.” Absolutely devastating.
Overall, the artwork of the book was OK. The dialogue is the prime focus and sustains the narrative. The individual chapters are all good, but the ending is what makes the whole book come together as a cohesive unit, richly layered.
The book is not necessarily a happy one, but I wish you happy reading anyway and hope that I can learn from Healy’s self-help advice and decide every day to be better. Happy reading!
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