Pretending is lying

IT IS A rare gift to come across a book as tender, affecting and complete as "Pretending Is Lying." Dominique Goblet, a Belgian painter and sculptor, began working on her graphic memoir in 1995, completing it 12 years later. Jean-Christophe Menu, her editor at the influential French comics press L'Association, which first published Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis," writes in the introduction that the initial pages she showed him "were as impressive as they were pungent. ... This book smells of oil, grease pencil, humid wood." Though Goblet has written five others, this is her first book translated into English (she relettered every page). She uses charcoal, pencil and ink to employ a range of styles; splotches of yellow oil saturate the opening pages, which depict a visit to her estranged, alcoholic father, as if to express the mess they're in. She renders a televised racecar crash with the blurry precision of a Gerhard Richter black-and-white photorealist painting - gorgeous panels that are violently interrupted along the bottom by Dominique's mother shouting in angry letters, "Little brat! I'm going to tie you up!!! " Later, it's darkly funny when she draws the phrase "that said" with elaborate curlicues, as her father mockingly imitates her fancy "university language." "Thaaaaaat said ... you're not gonna come here and get stuck up with me! !" But she distinguishes herself from memoirists who insist that their past pains are really so awful. Although her mother is in one scene quite cruel, Goblet notes in her acknowledgments that she thanks her mother, "for whom I have lots of love and who, I hope, will consider this book an homage." She does not treasure her wounds as the pulsating source of her identity. The book concerns a burgeoning romantic relationship, and one visit to her retired father and his ghostlike partner, Blandine. She arrives with her 3-year-old daughter, Nikita. Dominique's father is drawn with his belly protruding, legs splayed, his mustache and eyebrows dark and prominent. The lettering of his speech is heavy and in cursive - a sign of the florid dominance of his personality. Blandine, meanwhile, is frighteningly hairless, with a masklike head and tiny circles for nose and eyes - as if she's trying to fade into the background, away from her abusive husband. Nikita shows Blandine a picture she has made of a girl with crazy hair. "That's my friend!!!" Nikita says. Blandine asks, "Ah, does your friend have long hair?" "Well no why?" "You just said that it's your friend and that she has long hair! !" Nikita says, "Ha, nope, it's just a character! ... That was just for pretend! " In the next frame, Goblet has drawn Blandine in the style of Nikita's drawing, with stick arms and legs, eyebrows sharply downturned in anger. "Pretending is lying!!" Blandine hollers. This childlike rendering of Blandine makes us feel the innocent terror of Nikita, and the childlike fear Dominique experiences, upon seeing her daughter attacked. To call one's book "Pretending Is Lying" is to express some anxiety about both autobiography and fiction, which can seem like lies to the people depicted, or to the hypothetical reader. The book contains an afterword by Guy Marc Hinant, Goblet's music producer boyfriend, who collaborated on a few of the chapters. He writes that if he can help bring to life his "disturbed and deceitful" character, Guy Marc, it's because "these are, in reality, avatars controlled by living people bearing similar names." Also, perhaps more important, art's subject is always a question about invention; our creations are "not just about life itself but about Art." Or, as little Nikita says, art is "just for pretend." Goblet has a wonderful sense of humor: Early on, Dominique and Guy Marc are in a grocery store. As she loads the cart, he regards her skeptically and says that cooking "has to be quick, otherwise what a waste of time." He proceeds to flaunt one of his signature dishes: "It seems like a simple recipe but actually it isn't quite so easy.... First of all, you have to fill a saucepan with water. When it's boiling, bam! You throw in the pasta in one go. And at that moment, you open a can of tuna." He goes on in this ridiculous way, leaning arrogantly against the meat counter as Dominique continues to fill the shopping cart, smiling indulgently. Guy Marc is shadowed in the supermarket, and in other scenes, by a white, hovering apparition. Later we see the apparition made flesh as he sits in a car with a nameless blond ex, who, although she has a new boyfriend, insists, "There's nobody but you, you know that ... we're the only ones who can understand that." Guy Marc returns to Dominique, lies about where he's been, then sits at his computer in the dark. Goblet makes literal the emotional hauntings we have all known, as the blond woman's ghostly body swirls around his body and drifts across his eyes, separating him from his life with Dominique. The book ends with a telephone conversation between Dominique and Guy Marc. We don't see their faces: Instead, we're presented with pages of painted skies - what they see as they look out their separate windows. I imagine that his sky is the regretful, guilt-ridden brown one, while hers is the hopefully bright blue and white. These final paintings echo Rothko: blocks of color assembled one against the other, vibrating with emotion and life. One closes the book knowing that our deepest relationships both make time move forward and stand still. On one of the earliest pages, Goblet draws her face smallish in the center, leaving evidence of erased lines. In both art and life, the past exists in the present like sediment, like a faint or erased line. ? SHEILA HETI is the author of "How Should a Person Be?"

Belgian artist Goblet's English-translation debut, an award winner in its original European publication, is a fever dream of a mixed-method graphic memoir. From the book's first pages, where Goblet's father's partner is portrayed with more than a passing resemblance to Munch's screaming figure, readers will become accustomed to Goblet's shifting, often simplified characters: primarily herself, her lover, her daughter, and her parents. In an unforgettable scene, Goblet depicts a fight between her mother and her toddler self, sympathetically showing both painful sides of their unwinnable argument a feat owing to time's passage and Goblet's becoming a mother herself, perhaps. Primarily pencil-sketched, Goblet's art is unbridled and alternately busy and peaceful. She uses lettering to great effect, too, expressing mood, feeling, and, in her father's case, drunkenness with the appearance of the text. Some pages feature only vague, dimly lit shapes, as if there are ghosts hovering on the periphery of Goblet's relationships, her memoir's primary subject. This is an imaginative, nonlinear rendering of an artist's life so far.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist

This beautifully rendered, emotionally intense, and chronologically scattered reminiscence essentially questions the veracity of all autobiography. In her English-language debut, Goblet, an acclaimed comics pioneer in her native Belgium, juxtaposes her relationships with her alcoholic blowhard father, her distant partner, her abusive mother, and her combative daughter in a kaleidoscope of relationships turned into tugs-of-war. (In a short afterword, Goblet's partner, Guy Marc Hinant, gets to the heart of this supposedly autobiographical work, suggesting that his own appearance in Goblet's book does not constitute an actual appearance by him, but by an "avatar" that inhabits Goblet's fictionalized truth.) Goblet changes her art style throughout-sometimes employing almost amateurish line scrawls, other times rich, mysterious, hazy color washes, and just about any style in between-to create a vivid and puzzling representation of emotional memory and the ways the brain retells stories to yourself in order to help you bear them. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.