“Cannon” is the second graphic novel by Lai, a thirty-two-year-old Australian who lives in, and makes art about, Montreal. Her first book, “Stone Fruit,” applied a similar visual style (characters in strong outline, hatch marks, soft gouache landscapes, film stills) to similar themes of gulped-down feelings, queer romance, and caregiving. Both books, but especially “Cannon,” are studies of rage in the context of familial (chosen, biological) obligation. For Lai’s characters, and for many of us, home is the place most resistant to real emotion. And moving on from the past doesn’t mean giving it up altogether. In relationships, there’s no such thing as a clean exit.
It’s the mid-aughts, at a public high school in Lennoxville, east of Montreal. Two blond mean girls are bullying Cannon in the cafeteria, and Trish, who’s as loud and uninhibited as Cannon is pent up, intervenes in the most embarrassing way possible. This is their meet-cute. Soon, the two are besties, and Trish is at Cannon’s house every day, eating dinner with Cannon and her mom. “I guess Cannon’s, like, my family person,” Trish tells her fling. In their youth, Cannon and Trish crush on each other, though never at the same time.
They move to Montreal after high school, where they can each afford to live on their own. (This is still somewhat possible for cooks and writers in that city.) Their standing date is dinner and a movie—Australian horror films such as “Howling III: The Marsupials,” whose bloody scenes Lai re-creates in red. (The book is mostly gray scale.) On the couch, in the summer swelter, their sticky bodies are inches apart, even as their souls drift. Trish talks a lot, and talks over Cannon. She later asks to spend more time together—but only to mine Cannon’s life for literary material. Lai draws their exchanges as colliding speech bubbles. Trish’s words efface Cannon’s, which slink off the page. Elsewhere, the meditation tape Cannon listens to on her runs plays over a rapid montage of her life. “Thoughts, after all, can be invasive and preoccupying,” the voice intones, as she and her grandfather eat in silence, a vampire goes in for the kill, and her co-workers panic at the restaurant. “Mindful breathing . . . in . . . and out . . .” I find these intruding speech bubbles more rattling, more effective at conveying failures of communication, than voice-overs onscreen, or ellipses and dashes in a traditional novel. Lai has described comics as a form that “nestles itself between prose and film-making.”
Cannon’s model of restraint (or repression), her mother, lives alone and works as a day-care provider at a Francophone garderie. Gung Gung, Cannon’s grandfather, sort of manages to live on his own, with help from Cannon and a part-time home health aide. He’s isolated, and for good reason. A flashback to his wife’s funeral shows him apart from the crowd, staring out a window. When Cannon’s mom approaches him—“Baba,” she says, touching his shoulder—he turns into a red, superhuman ogre and yells, “Get lost!” in Cantonese. Another long-ago scene suggests that he was physically violent. Having endured a lifetime of this—from stories, Trish has imagined him as a “thunderous tyrant”—Cannon’s mom can’t bear to tend to him, even as he shrinks into disability, “a little walnut man.” It’s on Cannon to cook him pork and mushrooms and rice (why can’t he remember to start the rice cooker in advance?), and to persuade the aide not to quit just because, in the aide’s words, “he’s disagreeable and aggressive” and “doesn’t speak English.” Cannon pleads, “Is this you resigning?,” but can’t seem to get angry at either the aide or her mother. It’s exasperating to observe Cannon’s unaddressed exasperation.
The sprinkling of untranslated Chinese characters and Québécois French is a smart touch, adding to the over-all sense of miscommunication. Cannon’s second and third languages become stumbling blocks for the reader, and visual shortcuts for emotional distance. But Lai isn’t interested in furnishing the kinds of gay-immigrant plot turns that Trish hopes to swipe from Cannon’s life. Whatever, exactly, is festering between Cannon, her mom, and Gung Gung goes largely unsaid. And so, as Trish starts to extrude fiction from reality, she hits a narrative limit: “Something a bit clichéd and sentimental with these family figures,” as her mentor puts it. The embedded diasporic novel fails.
