‘Seek You’ explores our need for human attachment

In Jim Shepard’s “Phase Six,” a character mockingly defines loneliness as “solitude with self-pity thrown in.” That line’s chilly dismissiveness would not play well in Kristen Radtke’s immersive, novelistic and intensely humanistic book-length graphic essay on the subject.

Taking its title from the term “CQ ,” a ham radio operator’s general call seeking contact, “Seek You” is ostensibly an investigation of loneliness in an ever-more-fractured America. Radtke does pull in at some of the expected stops, like the studies finding that isolation is a deadly public health crisis or Robert (“Bowling Alone”) Putnam’s writing on the collapse of American community.

But she pivots from seeking easy answers (“technology is an easy scapegoat”) in favor of a bolder argument: “It seems to me quite possible that we have always been a very lonely people.”

The book curls through autobiographical episodes ranging from her Wisconsin suburban childhood to New York adulthood in which Radtke illustrates both the loneliness of physical solitude and of crowds. These make up some of the book’s lovelier sections with Radtke’s enigmatic text contrasting with her richly precise, Chris Ware-ian illustrations of dark buildings lit by bright rectangular windows framing people in solitude.

Radtke’s approach here purposefully mirrors that of those ham radio operators sending CQ signals out into the void, not necessarily with anything to say but just wanting to connect.