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Jeff
Lemire,
Essex County Volume 1: Tales From The
Farm (Top Shelf, 2007).
$9.95, paperback.
by
Jared
Gardner
An orphan boy finds
himself suddenly transported after the death of his
mother to a lonely farm life with a bachelor uncle he
never knew. He takes comfort behind comics and
fantasies of superheroism, wearing a mask and cape
even as he feeds the chickens and runs his errands.
We learn, predictably, that his superhero fantasies
are deeply enmeshed with his mother’s illness and his
desire to: first rescue her; and then, when that
mission proves unsuccessful, to rescue himself from
the barren new landscape on which he finds himself.
He meets, as he must (sigh), another loner – an
ex-hockey player who has returned to his hometown to
work in a gas station after taking a career-ending
blow to his head in his one and only pro game. Their
unlikely friendship will make you laugh and make you
cry, and the drama ends with a touching scene of
coming-of-age and acceptance (cue “Solsbury Hill”
here).
If
all of this sounds like the plot of any of a few
dozen arthouse films about loneliness, imagination,
and the harsh realities of rural life, that’s because
it is any one of those films. The characters are
touching and believable (especially the uncle, dazed
by his new-found responsibilities and the clearly
troubled child he now must lead into adulthood), and
the telling of the tale across the four seasons is
clever enough to be satisfying. In fact, “clever
enough to be satisfying” describes the book as a
whole, which has all the depth and texture of a good
bag of popcorn (say, the one you ate while
watching What’s Eating
Gilbert Grape or any other of
countless tales of misfits lost in a dysfunctional
rural America—or in this case, Canada).
But in the end, I just didn’t quite buy it (as much
as I wanted to). The hulking ex-hockey player who
turned out not
to be a
child molester, the lonely orphan boy who turned
out not
to get
molested or even severely beaten by his classmates
for wearing his cape and mask – I mean, I know
Canadians are nicer than Americans (no locked doors
and all that), but there was a gentleness and
quaintness to this tale that undid its gestures at
darkness and depth. And the cape-and-mask metaphor
used to describe the fantasies and fears of loss
seems just a bit overused (frankly, it seemed a bit
threadbare five years ago when Paul Hornschemeier
deployed it as his central motif in
Mother, Come
Home). The magical
realism of the ending is well handled, but those
gains are squandered in a quick and easy final
gesture (hanging up the “you know what” and “getting
on with life”).
Tales
from the Farm is the first volume
in a planned trilogy of Essex County tales that
Lemire is publishing in quick succession with Top
Shelf this year, and there is reason to believe that
one might look back at this first installment and
recognize in it more depth and complexity after the
series is completed. But I can’t say I am eager to
return to Essex County quite so soon, and I am not
willing to bet the farm on finding more in this
colorless landscape than I did on my first visit.
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