Review by New York Times Review
Adrian Tomine's characters grapple with identity and love. MIKO HAYASHI and her colleagues have worked hard to organize the Asian-American Digi-Fest, a little film festival in Berkeley, Calif., and now it's time to screen the prizewinner, "Fortune Cookie Rookie." The movie is just another piece of high-minded, low-budget hokum, but the Asian-American audience smiles and applauds at the fade-out - except for Miko's boyfriend, Ben Tanaka, a grumpy, 30-year-old Japanese-American, who's having none of it. After refusing to go to the after-party, he starts spewing his usual venom. "God, you drive me crazy sometimes," Miko tells him. "It's almost like you're ashamed to be Asian." To which he replies, "After a movie like that, I'm ashamed to be human!" Vaguely misanthropic and sexually insecure, Ben is the not-so-lovable protagonist of "Shortcomings," a meticulously observed comic-book novella by Adrian Tomine. When Miko leaves Berkeley for an internship in New York, Ben finds he dislikes his own company even more than he disliked hers. Ben is a fascinating, maddening character, a young fogey whose snobbishness doesn't prevent him from enjoying DVDs with titles like "Sapphic Sorority," much to Miko's chagrin. She accuses him of having a thing for white girls, which really sets him off - and Tomine takes voyeuristic delight in capturing every gruesome facial expression of a couple in midargument. The author is an expert at hooking the reader without tricks or obvious effort, and you'll be tempted to buzz through "Shortcomings" in an hour. But you'll want to slow down to take in the detailed black-and-white panels that casually document the way we live now. Tomine has always been attracted to love gone wrong among the hesitant young men and women of the bourgeoisbohemian set, but he gets his subject across in the unsentimental style of an anthropologist's report. Unlike the more playful graphic novelists who influenced him, Daniel Clowes ("Ghost World," "David Boring") and the Hernandez brothers ("Love and Rockets"), Tomine isn't given to flights of surrealism, rude jests or grotesque images. He is a mild observer, an invisible reporter, a scientist of the heart. His drawing style is plain and exact. The dialogue appearing inside his cartoon balloons is pitch-perfect and succinct. He's daring in his restraint. Tomine has been writing and drawing his "Optic Nerve" comic books since 1991, when he was a high school student in Sacramento. He hit upon his proud-tobe-mundane style toward the end of the decade. Before "Shortcomings" (working title: "White on Rice"), he put out three collections: "32 Stories" (an apprentice work), "Sleepwalk and Other Stories" (pretty good) and "Summer Blonde" (oh, yeah). Just about the only Asian-American to appear in his earliest comics was Tomine himself. In "Shortcomings," the three main characters are Asian-Americans who explicitly address how they handle being in a minority. Once Miko leaves for New York, Ben entangles himself with two young blond women. A Philip Roth vibe reverberates through the volume as he and his friends question whether he likes blondes because of a subtle cultural brainwashing or his own hidden desire to assimilate. Tomine balances his antihero's slowmotion fall from grace with the more hopeful story of his friend and foil, a Korean lesbian graduate student named Alice Kim, who stumbles upon true love after years of bed-hopping. Alice's presence makes Ben a more palatable figure: he's funny and relaxed when he's with her. When she does an imitation of her immigrant parents, complete with Korean accent, Ben says, "What is this ... your Margaret Cho routine?" Maybe because Tomine wasn't fully formed when his first comics came out, his readers have never been shy about sending him letters full of advice and criticism, and he has seemingly taken a perverse glee in printing them on a regular letters page in "Optic Nerve." "You always do stories about shallow people who feel lost," went a letter published in the 2001 issue. "Shallow, immature people make for shallow, immature stories." When he began using "Optic Nerve" to serialize the story of Ben Tanaka, there were more complaints: "I find your stories completely infuriating. ... I couldn't help groaning." And this, from another dissatisfied customer: "I have a challenge for you: write a story about beekeeping. Create characters who are interested in something other than themselves." Tomine's complaining fans may have a point You look at his stuff and imagine the sociorealist masterpiece he might produce if he were to engage in some heroic Steinbeckian research. On the other hand, he has done well with what he once called "thinly veiled autobiography," and his latest investigation into matters of the heart has gently led him to the stuff of more obvious social relevance. In its mood and its analysis of how male sexuality is tied up with ethnicity and social status, "Shortcomings" finds itself somewhere between "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Portnoy's Complaint" Eventually, Tomine may have his "American Pastoral." And his cranky fans, like Roth's, will probably take issue with him every step of the way, until they give in at last. Jim Windolf is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
After a decade's worth of pithy, finely observed short comics stories chronicling the rudderless lives of his alienated twentysomething contemporaries, Tomine stretches out a bit in a novella about Gen-Xer Ben Tanaka, a movie-theater manager whose attraction to white girls threatens his troubled relationship with Japanese American girlfriend Miko. The dislikable (selfish, snobbish, lacking self-awareness) Tanaka's a bold choice for a protagonist. But like the other, equally flawed characters, including Miko, who leaves Berkeley and Ben for an internship in New York, and Ben's best friend, Alice, a Korean American lesbian, he's strangely sympathetic as Tomine incisively portrays him. The low-key, understated artwork points up Tomine's perceptive characterizations, which are conveyed as much through facial expressions and body language as by the true-to-life dialogue. Shortcomings' greater length, deeper portrayals, and accuracy about sexual and racial politics constitute an advance by Tomine. Pehaps there will be a similar leap forward in subject matter next time. The gifted young artist has been mining this milieu long enough. Time for him to broaden his worldview.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tomine's lacerating falling-out-of-love story is an irresistible gem of a graphic novel. Shortcomings is set primarily in an almost otherworldly San Francisco Bay Area; its antihero, Ben Tanaka, is not your average comic book protagonist: he's crabby, negative, self-absorbed, uber-critical, slack-a-riffic and for someone who is strenuously "race-blind," has a pernicious hankering for whitegirls. His girlfriend Miko (alas and tragically) is an Asian-American community activist of the moderate variety. Ben is the sort of cat who walks into a Korean wedding and says, "Man, look at all these Asians," while Miko programs Asian-American independent films and both are equally skilled in the underhanded art of "fighting without fighting." As you might imagine, their relationship is in full decay. In Tomine's apt hands, Tanaka's heartbreaking descent into awareness is reading as good as you'll find anywhere. What a relief to find such unprecious intelligent dynamic young people of color wrestling with real issues that they can neither escape nor hope completely to understand. Tomine's no dummy: he keeps the "issues" secondary to his characters' messy humanity and gains incredible thematic resonance from this subordination. Tomine's dialogue is hilarious (he makes Seth Rogan seem a little forced), his secondary characters knockouts (Ben's Korean-American "only friend" Alice steals every scene she's in, and the Korean wedding they attend together as pretend-partners is a study in the even blending of tragedy and farce), and his dramatic instincts second-to-none. Besides orchestrating a gripping kick-ass story with people who feel like you've had the pleasure/misfortune of rooming with, Tomine does something far more valuable: almost incidentally and without visible effort (for such is the strength of a true artist) he explodes the tottering myth that love is blind and from its million phony fragments assembles a compelling meditation on the role of race in the romantic economy, dramatizing with evil clarity how we are both utterly blind and cannily hyperaware of the immense invisible power race exerts in shaping what we call "desire." And that moment at the end when the whiteboy squares up against Ben, kung-fu style: I couldn't decide whether to fold over in laughter or to hug Ben or both. Tomine accomplishes in one panel of this graphic novel what so many writers have failed to do in entire books. In crisp spare lines, he captures in all its excruciating, disappointing absurdity a single moment and makes from it our world. (Oct.) Junot D!az's first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has just been published by Riverhead. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-Ben Tanaka is a Japanese American in his late 20s, living in Berkeley and working in a movie theater. His confusion and frustration with his girlfriend, Miko, are compounded when she moves to New York for a four-month internship at a film institute, leaving him to have some "time off" from their relationship. The women in his life now include his best friend, Alice, a Korean lesbian; a beautiful, white bisexual who chooses her ex-girlfriend over him; and a performance artist who delights in photographing her own urine and having sexually explicit musical stage shows, but finds kissing icky because of germs. When Ben goes to New York with Alice, he finds that Miko has hooked up with a photographer and isn't in the city for an internship at all. Tomine uses an understated drawing style that is simple yet effective, and fits well with characters who are intelligent, reflective, and honest. In addition to tackling modern relationships and racial politics, pop culture, art, and cinema are also discussed. Ben acts as an Everyman, standing in for all Americans of mixed ethnicity and the confusion that often surrounds a person divided between two worlds. The wordless final frames speak volumes for his quiet contemplation, and many readers will identify with his struggle.-Jennifer Waters, Red Deer Public Library, Alberta, Canada (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
