By Abeer Hoque
“St. Petersburg lay under its enormous, grey sky like a carefully posed, regal creature…”
Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (LFMB) is Anya Ulinich’s fantastic second book, a graphic novel about love, immigration, and relationships. I read the entire book in three hours, almost every aspect of the protagonist Lena’s life ringing like a bell in my head, from the awkward growing up, to being new immigrants in America, to the foibles of writing and online dating. Ulinich is hilarious and sharp and her illustrations are bold and sweetly drawn. Her protagonist Lena’s observations cut everything to the quick. This cutting instinct extends to her hapless, earnest charm: “I like what happens before and after sex… the breaking and entering aspect of a hook up… googling the contents of a guy’s medicine cabinet…”
LFMB presents the immigrant experience as well as that of returning home (as impossible as that is) in pitch perfect prose. Ulinich gets how hard it is for immigrants to express angst or despair of any kind. It’s like a luxury: “Existential crises are unpleasant to anyone, but to a first-generation, the unpleasantness is compounded by the distaste for the frivolity of such crises and guilt for their retroactive cost….”
Home is not the only social milieu that Ulinich explores with perspicacity and humor. The dating sections of LFMB are spot on and hilarious although there’s probably more ridiculous and interesting variety in the book than one might find in real life. But the world of online dating isn’t portrayed as a hopeless horrible misadventure, but just another way to meet people, and for Lena, to gain some much overdue experience, no matter how awkward: “Dates were like deep friendships filmed in time lapse; one-night-stands were like express-marriages, from courtship to dissolution.”
The relationships Lena engages in: her first love, her long and difficult marriage with her husband, her passionate time with “the orphan” and others, are described in rich and sometimes painful detail. She leaves none of the nitty-gritty out because none of it is trivial. In describing her life after a move, the mundane reveals deeper issues: “When we’d moved to New York and Josh started working long hours, leaving most of the housework to me, each adult-appropriate meal I’d had to make, each load of Josh’s laundry I’d had to do had left me feeling vaguely humiliated.”
This graphic novel is evocative and warm, and the prose is witty and funny and real. I highly recommend this book.
Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel
By Anya Ulinich
Penguin Books
ISBN 978-0143125242
