Pilgrim’s regress

A celebrated chef learns you can’t avoid the past in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s frustrating fairy tale Seconds

It’s hard not to read a little bit of autobiography into the first pages of Seconds, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s follow-up to his millennial-geek-defining epic Scott Pilgrim. Katie, with her orange buzz saw hair and full moon eyes, is a chef at the most successful restaurant in town (also called Seconds). Four years into her run, though, its success is more of an annoyance than an accolade: Her desire to move on is so strong she is almost bursting at the seams, held back by endless renovations and frustratingly sticky co-workers. At the start of the book, all she wants is to turn the page.

Scott Pilgrim is likely to cast a long shadow on O’Malley’s life, its allencompassing explosion of cultural touchstones and highwire heartsickness as perfect a distillation of being a mope-prone twentysomething dude (with all the inherent limitations that implies) in the aughts as anything else produced at the time. But there’s nothing more boring for a creator than perfection, which after all implies that there is nothing left to be done. Lucky for O’Malley, then, that Seconds never comes within spitting distance of that hurdle.

If perfection is an uncomfortably high bar, Seconds also fails to clear considerably lower ones. Despite Katie’s initial restlessness, the book is not so much concerned with future as with the past, and how we deal with it — or, in Katie’s case, avoid it at all costs. She gets this particular power thanks to some red-topped mushrooms with the ability to correct your mistakes: Simply write down what you’d rather not have done, pop in a cap and sleep your regrets away. Katie starts with undoing an accident that left one of her waitresses with serious burns; eventually she is erasing drunk nights, reversing breakups, changing restaurant locations … well, you get the idea. Everything bad is new again. You have already figured out how this ends up.

Seconds is firmly in the land of fairytale morality, the only stroke of modernity being O’Malley’s fairy, a vintage-clothed house spirit who watches over the restaurant and issues warnings as obvious as the story’s arc. That you have to learn to live with what you’ve done, who you are, is a message that really can’t be overemphasized, and just might be the hardest thing humans have to keep consistently doing.

In this considerable depth, though, O’Malley skips only along the surface, reducing honest struggle to lifeless philosophical neatness: His moral is so telegraphed there is precious little tension in Katie’s mounting mistakes (or fixes, as the case may be). O’Malley is discovering nothing in the book, and so consequently neither is Katie: She is just dragged along from point to point, reversal to reversal, until it’s very necessarily all too much. It’s told you its point without ever honestly showing you.

This turns out to be a bit of a theme of the book, too. It’s tempting to say that O’Malley’s lively cartooning rescues Seconds’ narrative flatness, but it’s not really the visual storytelling that shines here so much as the actual visuals. His character designs are the highlight, comfortably cartoony but still detailed enough to speak for themselves. There are also some smart

O’Malley skips along the surface, reducing

struggle to lifeless philosophical neatness

sequences — in particular a staccato series of Katie erasing multiple mistakes, fractured across a few pages like her memories — and several lush splash pages, but O’Malley falls down when the story most needs his touch.

The book’s moments of revelation are nearly all punctured by almost absurdly literal narration, as if someone were explaining the panels to a blind person. (Katie also has a habit of arguing with her narrator, a potentially metafictional trick that is used mostly to make her seem ingratiatingly cute.) “What else had changed?” asks one panel in the middle of two pages’ worth of explicit changes to Katie’s life, in the middle of a book all about how the main character doesn’t recognize the world she’s creating with her resets; O’Malley’s faith in the reader’s logical faculties, I guess?

All this is compounded by the fact that Katie’s story is maybe necessarily kind of a solipsistic one, her experience the only constant in the world she keeps changing. The people Katie interacts with are as one-dimensional to the reader as they appear to her. This is, in fairness, at least part of the point — that Katie’s perfectionism in life is a type of selfishness — but it gives us few other side roads to explore, and learning to appreciate the full reality of others matters far less to Katie than learning to accept herself. Whatever philosophical shortcomings this has, it’s also just a crying shame from an artist who’s shown a gift for high-density minor characters.

This is sort of Seconds’ problem condensed, though: For a book that wants very much to convince you that life cannot be made perfect, that its hurt and mistakes and mess must be lived in, it is altogether too neat, too tight, too just-so. “Life is messy,” it claims, “but it has to be”: a neat little bow on a hideously complex idea.