Zeros, ones, murder and boredom
A missing woman creates ripples on the internet
Calvin Wrobel, whose wife and young daughter have recently left him, invites a distraught childhood friend, Teddy, to stay at his home in Colorado. Teddy’s girlfriend Sabrina has gone missing under mysterious circumstances and is presumed dead.
So begins “Sabrina,” Nick Drnaso’s absorbing graphic novel about grief, depression and the Information Age.
Sabrina’s killer, we soon learn, is not a rapist or a gangster, but that modern species of terrorist: an internet-addled boy with no manifesto and no motive besides a vague sense of injustice and a lust for fame.
As the story plays out in the national media, each new plot twist comes with a raft of online commentary, BuzzFeed-style listicles, and “false flag” conspiracy theories. Through Calvin’s laptop and smartphone screens, we see the contemporary news environment: web pages studded with gleaming advertisements, glibly announcing their number of “likes” and “shares,” and the inevitable comments section like a burp from the abyss.
Although it was committed by a weirdo loner detached from society, Sabrina’s murder doesn’t seem all that strange in the digital context that spurred and amplified it. If the internet allows for the unprecedented distribution of information, it spreads misinformation just as well.Facts compete with alternative facts. And to the big media companies who grow rich on web traffic, there’s no difference between reasonable discourse and depravity — except that depravity gets more attention, and attention sells more ads. A theme throughout this finely wrought novel is that information technology bestows far more communicative power than anyone can responsibly wield. If there is a villain here, it is not just a homicidal boy but also the national id that created him, to whose impulses Calvin, Teddy and all the other characters eventuallysuccumb.
In a prescient early scene, the two men are sitting on Calvin’s couch, drinking beer and watching a TV special on the 16th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In a series of disconnected frames that mimic the bewildering shot changes of a highly edited documentary, a journalist tours the 9/11 memorial and museum in New York City, where Americans “relive the tragedy in painful detail through 23,000 pictures and over 10,000 artifacts, creating an overwhelmingly visceral sensation.” The words appear as closed captioning in black boxes, even though the men are presumably watching it with the sound on, caption-free. This is one in an arsenal of clever devices Mr. Drnaso uses to represent talk radio, cellphone chatter and all the other inhuman noise that carries the human voice. The memorial itself may be a “visceral” experience, but watching it on TV is not. Calvin sits in his Snuggie, unmoved.
Ina novel about painful memories and senseless slaughter, none of the characters’ revelations take place at the scene of the crime. Everything is mediated through radio towers, web browsers, videotape, a tragedy of the mind where even the main participants are reduced to passive observers — the default position of the screen age. Calvin himself is a senior airman in the Air Force but stays grounded, working IT in a windowless room. “I look for weaknesses in the system, update firewalls, investigate possible security breaches,” he says. “A desk job, truly.” Mr. Drnaso’s people are so abstracted from daily life, so awash in their thoughts, that when they speak, they don’teven open their mouths.
“Sabrina” is drawn in a smooth ligne claire style with simple human figures and lush backgrounds digitally colored in pastel hues. Mr. Drnaso restricts himself to a conservative comic strip format (square frames of varying size), and yet he is a master at modulating the intensity of light and has a draftsman’s knowledge of 21st-century architecture.
Like any fine novelist, he is unafraid to confront us with the terrible facts of how people really live. His characters don’t reveal themselves through melodramatic conflicts or desperate confessions, but in the actions they take when they’re alone, restlessly navigating their mediated world.
The only disappointment is the last few pages, which come cheap and relatively happy, a resolution unearned by the mounting horror that precedes it. Then again, it’s hard to imagine the proper end to such a timely book, because we ourselves are still caught in the throes of the Information Age, its glory and its madness. A good ending is far fromsight.