Karen Green’s Frail Sister leads the reader down the rabbit hole in a storybook of a largely invented life, an account of what is known of the life of Constance, the author’s real-life aunt gone missing. Each page of this unique graphic narrative is a visual bombshell collage. The author gives voice to Constance in the form of an elliptical scrapbook, a documentary made of “artifacts” — art made of selected facts. The pleasure comes by way of guessing and fitting the pieces together, though the process might frustrate you until you let go trying to figure it out.
Each page is a visual stand-alone chapter in the life of the protagonist, the sister who leaves home, as told in manipulated dispatches addressed to the one who stays home. As if crafting a funky historical novel made of fragments, the hand of the Karen Green animates the wayward life of aunt Constance by way of letters, postcards, telegrams, sent and received and saved, cut up, painted over, erased. Text is obsessively typed over to alter original meanings and give new significance to salvaged sheet music, poems torn from a book, photographs. This typewriter commentary threads together what might have, could have, and/or ultimately did happen to a high-strung woman whose choices were marked by the limitations of her class and gender in the early to mid-20th century America and war-torn Europe.
I found it impossible to simply leaf through this gorgeous book. The artwork is reproduced so authentically that readers might imagine the pages could crumble in one’s hands. These are the sensations Green cultivates — fragility and discovery. Frail Sister moves beyond the nostalgia for the past and dwells in what is unknowable from the start. Are these the actual newsprint ads or programs featuring Constance and her sister, child performers? Their act, a song and dance routine, appears to be the sole means of support for their family as it recovered from the Great Depression. What happened to these girls?
Constance is the risk-taker, the trouble-maker, the one who grows up and leaves home to join the USO, touring Italy to entertain troops during World War II. One centerpiece is a series of saved (and collaged) V-mails, sometimes bawdy correspondence written to “Connie” by lovers and admirers. The sheer volume and the avidity of her many suiters serves as a comic reprieve. Connie forwards these, along with her own notes, to her sister. The confessional tone is particularly poignant in that her sister remains nameless and mute. Not a single response from the one who stayed home is part of Constance’s story.
Green tests the limit of how far a genuine drama may be wrung from nostalgia, a nostalgia so worked over, engaging and convincing that what happens to the speaker seems to have happened to you, or someone you know. I approached the book the way I dipped into my own dead father’s footlocker from WWI, for the secrets kept there. The story requires the reader’s keen attention, to play a forensic investigator, while at the same time letting go of linear logic. Much like reading George Saunders’ magnificent novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Frail Sister is best experienced if you give up on following the facts and instead dwell in the newness of how the story is being told. Both require you to give yourself over to an original experience of a new kind of storytelling. Green’s text riffs on a surface of images, putting her character’s present in conversation with her past. The speaker, a singer and evident poet, remains strangely silent regarding key elements of her story, and that mystery haunts page after page, in turn funny, dark, ironic.
Karen Green is an artist as well as a writer. Frail Sister is her second book with Siglio, the go-to publisher for books “at the intersection of art & literature,” with an impressive list of titles on work by Joe Brainard, Ray Johnson, Jess, and works by Nancy Spero, Sophe Calle, and Robert Seydel, to name a just a few. Her first book with Siglio, Bough Down, also features a fascinating and brilliantly funny speaker. Both protagonists share an unease, a kind of relentless lament in storytelling that never lets up. Bough Down includes images, but fewer, some as small as a postage stamp, mainly to illustrate the text. Frail Sister does the opposite — text and images are inseparable.
Frail Sister shares a common theme with the Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, beginning with the first in the series, My Brilliant Friend. The specter of who is “brilliant” and who is “fragile” looms over both. Each narrative begins as the story of a pair of girls, the choices they make, as told by the one who leaves home. Both share a feminist subtext, the hardships women endure in order to have a career, making their way through a brutal terrain dominated by men. Like Ferrante, Green creates an indelible character of a girl who exercises her ambition to step out of the tedium of a scripted life, with very different consequences. Green digs down into the realm of a particular kind of loss and despair, engaging and somehow entertaining the reader as she exposes that hurt. In this way, her visual storytelling merits a comparison to Saunders’ in fracturing the way we expect a story to flow. Frail Sister is not simply a graphic narrative made up of a compelling art form — it is a song, a dirge, a mystery, and a tragic lark.
[Published by Siglio Press on October 23, 2018. 164 pages, $39.95 hardcover]