“Stone Fruit”

Lee Lai’s debut graphic novel “Stone Fruit” (Fantagraphics) is mature in so many respects. It’s wise and gentle about relationships. It’s narratively and artistically confident. It’s patiently restrained and full of deft choices.

The paradox is that such mature art pays such poignant tribute to childlikeness. Lai unsparingly shows the ways we hurt and get hurt by the ones we love the most. But from cover to cover of this 230-page monochromatic blue tome, the tale grabs your soul like a toe or a tail at your fingertips, pulling you in to a chase that leaves you both panting exuberantly and aching to be held. Like the best novelistic characterizations, something stings at the heart when you have to leave these characters. The book’s sweetness comes with a prickly core, but that same roughness bears the promise of more life to come.

Written and Illustrated by Lee Lai

An exhilarating and tender debut graphic novel that is an ode to the love and connection shared among three women and the child they all adore.
Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seated personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties — Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn’t fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew.

“Stone Fruit” opens with a scene that’s paradigmatic throughout the book, and will burrow in your memories. It looks like three monsters– or rather, dressed-as-people but faces-like-creatures– run wildly and euphorically in the woods in pursuit of a faun or some such prey. They chatter and conspire in rhyme, their scuttling bodies arched forward and caked in mud. Two appear to be adults and one a child.

But as one of the adults gets a cell phone call, she slows and she increasingly morphs into a human face as her voice on the line needs to sound like a responsible caretaker. She fibs that they are at the mall, hangs up, and then rejoins the fray, her face returning to the joyous monster.

It’s a brilliant device that Lai weaves throughout the story to show the altered state when aunties Ray and Bron play with Ray’s niece Nessie out in the woods, which they frequent on their twice-a-week playdates. Gradually we scan the scenario: Ray is in a long-term relationship with Bron, and to help out Ray’s sister Amanda, who is raising Nessie on her own, they take care of Nessie on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Nessie loves both of her aunties, but her mother Amanda is reticent about Bron, perhaps jealous or guarded. And she’s not afraid to let her sister Ray know her feelings.

The opening scene of their transformation into impish, frolicking monsters represents the chemistry when young Nessie, her aunt Ray, and her auntie Bron get together. Their sense of play, which Ray credits to Bron’s spontaneity and mercurial nature, overtakes them. Lai fills their pages together with uncanny and unmistakable joy and mirth, and we as readers are instantly transported to whatever childhood relationships I hope we’ve all had, where propriety flies to the wind and imagination is infectious. When Nessie, Bron, and Ray play, the feral characters seem to burst beyond the panels (even while the book holds tidily, dutifully, to a four-panel grid through almost every page), and lines vibrate with a curvy energy like a liberated Charles Burns drawing.

It’s a somewhat subtle but totally legible contrast to the other scenes of the book, the majority of it, which is preoccupied with the fallout when Bron and Ray come to a heartbreaking pause on their relationship. Inevitably, the magic of their rapport is interrupted and then halted by real life, as the tempestuous parts of Ray and Bron’s bond and estranged ties to home put wedges between them.

Dining table silences, moments of staring at a garden or tossing restlessly in bed, heart-to-hearts between sisters, all are affecting and humane scenes, which Lai executes with stirring grace. But they are also all anguished by the absence of those monster selves, that missing space where child and two children-at-heart manifested that precious precocity.

Lai’s artwork is singular, but it read to me like there were reminiscent traces of two artists, Jillian Tamaki and Tommi Parrish, both of whom appeared in Lai’s Acknowledgements, as it turned out. Like Tamaki, Lai conjures spare lines and brush strokes into an emotional range from repressed to rebellious, all accomplished with poetic concision. Like Parrish, Lai’s characters are fleshly, fluid, dressed in clothes and dialogue that make each wonderfully distinctive and alive in a thoroughly social world.

In fact, Lai’s characterizations are especially artful and fine-drawn as the story progresses. We get to know Bron and Bron’s sister, as well as Bron’s minister father and mother, disapproving of Bron’s trans and queer “choices” and estranged until Bron attempts a reconnection. And we watch textures form around Ray and Amanda’s sibling relationship, while Nessie always stays in the picture, always holding that kid magic, but also ever-so-slightly hardening through the weeks and months. I never had trouble distinguishing sisters Ray and Amanda, nor Bron and sister Gracie, and not just because of the shorthand of hairstyles or glasses. Nessie and her mother and aunt… Bron and Bron’s family… they’re all visual resonances that cry out to be bound together, but each individual so uniquely drawn and granted life that their distances echo.

Lai’s merging of that Jillian Tamaki-like crafted interiority and that Tommi Parrish-like vibrant community makes “Stone Fruit” feel so much more expansive than its few words and potent but short chapters. I didn’t find the story’s beats and arcs surprising at all, but I was caught off guard with how moving they were, even when I could see them coming.

“Stone Fruit” is one of the best comics I’ve read this year, one that will linger the way “Spinning” or “Rosalie Lightning” or “Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me” did. It’s an incredible debut and leaves me hoping we see much more from Lee Lai.