BLANKETS: Sean Collins wondered what I think of Blankets, the vast semi(?)-autobiographical graphic novel about a Wisconsin teen growing up, covertly drawing comics, wrestling with God, and falling in love. I’m not sure what to tell him; I’m not sure I know what I think of it. I finished it about four or five days ago, and put it aside to see if it percolated in my mind, but so far I’m still left with a confused and basically lukewarm impression of it. So here are some scattered reactions; you’ll notice that several of these points are at least as much about me as they are about Blankets.

1) First I should tell you the scene that made me decide to buy the (huge, pricey) thing, after putting it on my “check this out” list: There’s a terrifying early sequence about a young boy being sent to sleep for the night in a spider-infested cubbyhole, and when the father opens up the folding bed inside the cubbyhole, it’s transformed into a set of slavering fangtoothed jaws. That definitely grabbed my attention. Also, the guy at the register told me the book was great. So I bought it.

2) Other stuff I really liked: There’s a long stretch of about 100 or 120 pages, starting when Raina (the girlfriend) calls Craig (the narrator) from the phone booth in the Wisconsin snowstorm, that completely worked. It mostly explored her family’s turbulence. We saw more of the parents (Raina’s parents and Craig’s mother) than usual. Most of the dialogue in this section felt really honest.

All the snow. Seriously, this book is slathered in snow. Totally reinforces the general sense of isolation and battling against everything around you.

Raina’s beautiful. A real pleasure to look at, especially in her Eskimo hood (to protect her from All That Snow).

3) Two reasons I don’t think I was the ideal audience for this book: a) The narrator really got up my snout, because he reminded me so vividly of all the things I most dislike about who I was in high school. This may well be because he’s written an unflinching look at teenage alienation-as-snobbery written entirely from the inside; I couldn’t get a real handle on Craig-the-author’s attitude toward Craig-the-narrator, which is fine as far as it goes but does mean the book lacks a certain critical distance.

So I kind of wanted to smack the narrator throughout the book. He found a worldview that transmuted his sense of alienation and his sneaking suspicions of his own inferiority into a reason to feel superior to the herd around him. For him it was evangelical Christianity; for me it was left-wing cultural politics; the conflicted moral impulses seem to be pretty much identical. It’s beautiful how we can take our best desires and our deepest knowledge and turn them into just another source of vainglory and contempt for others!

b) I really have no personal experience with this style of evangelical American culture. It’s very hard for me, in my Catholic world of statues and stained glass and cathedrals and bloody-minded novelists, to understand a Christianity that would ridicule a young man’s artistic talents.

On an intellectual level, the “Jesus doesn’t want your silly pictures!” scenes reminded me of Amy Welborn’s rambly post about why evangelical culture churns out so much mainstream-aping kitsch. Let me put my own spin on her post: If you think all art is a sinful distraction from Christ, you don’t end up with a culture of ascetics. You end up with either kitsch (because humans are naturally art-loving and art-creating beings, made in the image of a divine Creator, so we gotta make and look at something!) or atheism (because people who are told that Jesus doesn’t want them for a sunbeam sometimes do believe it).

But on an emotional level, every time I felt myself becoming really engaged with the evangelical parts of the story, I found myself wondering if I wasn’t taking glee in exposing the mote in my brother’s eye. I necessarily come to any description of evangelical-conformist culture as an outsider, practically a sociologist, and I hate it when people take the sociologist stance toward a culture I’m part of, even a culture with which I have huge problems. So I constantly found myself jerking out of any emotional engagement with this aspect of Blankets. (Hey, is this exactly the sort of rejection of aesthetic life in the name of fidelity to Christ that I just said Catholics don’t/shouldn’t do? D’oh!)

4) So, in the end, lukewarm. I’m not sure I can articulate why the drawing didn’t grab me the way Jaime Hernandez does, or why the layouts didn’t grab me the way the first “Alias” book does, or why the storyline and dialogue didn’t grab me the way, I dunno, really good realistic novels do. Admittedly, my tastes are lurid: Sabbath’s Theater and As I Lay Dying are not exactly “slice of life” tales. I’m sure that’s part of the problem.

Anybody who wants to talk about stuff I’m missing here should feel free, since I do sense that I’m not giving this book what it deserves. I know I’m not being fair; I just don’t know what “fair” would look like. (Story of my life, eh?)