Stone Fruit by Lee Lai review – breaking up is hard to do

Lai’s debut graphic novel is a downbeat but moving exploration of the aftermath of a relationship

Lee Lai’s graphic novel, Stone Fruit, named after a nectarine on which one of its characters chips a tooth, is not much of a book for spring. Granted, its treatment of the unfathomable silences that can often be found at the heart of a family is magnificently unvarnished; if its minimalist, indie-film tone is ever downbeat, it’s also, at moments, highly affecting. But you finish it with no hope at all that its characters will ever be able to resolve their difficulties. There is something intensely bleak at its centre: a sense, perhaps, that while blood is not always thicker than water, even happily chosen families may not be able to withstand certain kinds of emotional inheritance.

But I don’t want to put you off. Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist who lives in Montreal; her short comics have appeared in the New Yorker. This is her first graphic novel and it impresses from the moment we first meet Bron and Ray, a couple who relish their role as wild, alternative aunties to Ray’s six-year-old niece, Nessie. In Nessie’s company, they’re at their best, the problems in their relationship made distant by her innocence and excitement. To express the sense of freedom the three of them experience whenever they’re together, Lai has a magical visual trick up her sleeve. Exploring the park, our trio turn into furry beasts, all snouts and teeth: feral creatures who only return to their human state when Nessie’s mother, Amanda, calls up, wondering what time she’ll be home.

Nessie, though, is a part-time distraction. However beloved, she cannot tether Bron to Ray, nor can she see off Bron’s worsening depression. Soon, Bron will leave Ray, returning to the Waspy Christian family she left behind when she fell for her. She wants to talk to her parents – to try somehow to get past their horror at her sexuality – because she believes that only by doing this can she ever hope to feel truly herself. A devastated Ray, having no other option open to her, now attempts to get along a little better with Amanda, who has always made her disapproval of Bron uncomfortably obvious.

The reader longs for a big thaw for both women, a defrosting that will release them into renewed happiness. But Lai is too much of a realist to tie up her story with a bow. “I don’t know what you came home looking for,” says Bron’s mother, refusing to answer difficult questions about the past. At suppertime, the talk is of church groups, not feelings. Ray makes a little more progress – at least she and Amanda can smoke together – but the two of them are hardly soulmates. How can Amanda comfort Ray for the loss of Bron when she’s still reeling from her own divorce?

Lai’s monochrome illustrations are, like her dialogue, spare and unyielding; she wants for a lightness – the occasional joke would help – that would imbue this story with a warmth it sometimes needs. But she tells her story with control and authority and it’s impossible not to admire the way she has made a dextrous narrative out of so much taciturnity and mossy sadness.

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai is published by Fantagraphics (£29.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Contributor

Rachel Cooke

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Fruit of Knowledge by Liv Strömquist review – eye-poppingly informative
Witty, clever and angry, this book about the suppression of female sexuality is fantastically acute

Rachel Cooke

21, Aug, 2018 @6:00 AM

Article image
Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson – review
This updated version of a comic book classic beautifully captures the emotional topsy-turvy of travelling alone

Rachel Cooke

26, Jun, 2018 @7:00 AM

Article image
The Drunken Sailor by Nick Hayes review – intense beauty
A wondrous visual narrative based on the translation of a seafaring poem by a teenage Arthur Rimbaud

Rachel Cooke

30, Apr, 2018 @7:00 AM

Article image
Brave New World by Fred Fordham review – brilliant Huxley reboot
This rip-roaring graphic retelling of the Aldous Huxley classic brings to mind Fritz Lang, Spielberg and vintage comics

Rachel Cooke

26, Apr, 2022 @10:00 AM

Article image
Isadora review – glorious art of a dervish
The avant garde dancer’s wild life is celebrated in Julie Birmant and cartoonist Clément Oubrerie’s clever retelling

Rachel Cooke

17, Sep, 2019 @8:00 AM

Article image
The Adventures of John Blake by Philip Pullman review – wonderfully nostalgic
Beautifully illustrated by Fred Fordham, Pullman’s latest book is a daring mix of Tintin, Treasure Island, time travel and social media

Rachel Cooke

23, May, 2017 @6:30 AM

Article image
Wendy, Master of Art review – witty graphic novel unleashes hipster hell
Time for Lacanian sculpture and the semiotics of string in this third outing for Walter Scott’s winningly messy heroine

Rachel Cooke

21, Jul, 2020 @8:00 AM

Article image
The Con Artists by Luke Healy review – a beautifully observed masterpiece
It’s the little things that strike a chord in this funny, melancholy book about the curdling of a friendship between two single gay men

Rachel Cooke

23, May, 2022 @8:00 AM

Article image
The Cliff by Manon Debaye review – misfits with a monstrous plan
This deceptively charming story of preteen friends seeking refuge in the French countryside is a modern-day Lord of the Flies

Rachel Cooke

06, Nov, 2023 @9:00 AM

Article image
The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge review – powerfully strange
A gritty and humorous postwar Japan is depicted in these early works by the influential manga cartoonist

Rachel Cooke

24, May, 2020 @8:00 AM