This week’s evergreen review looks back a mere two years ago to Jonathan Case’s “The New Deal.”
Written & Illustrated by Jonathan Case
The Waldorf Astoria is the classiest hotel along the Manhattan skyline in 1930s New York City. When a charming woman checks in with a high-society entourage, a bellhop and a maid get caught up in a series of mysterious thefts. The stakes quickly grow perilous, and the pair must rely on each other to discover the truth while navigating delicate class politics.
“The New Deal” is a book that delights in playing with expectations. On the cover we have the glamorous Ms. Nina Booth, the kind of character you’d expect to be a lead in a 1930s film. However, Ms. Booth is a supporting character. The real leads are the tiny figures in the background: Frank O’Malley and Theresa Harris, a bellhop and a maid at the Waldorf Astoria. If this were a 1930s film, they’d almost certainly be the supporting characters.
As a comic, “The New Deal” is good at mustering up a sense of other mediums. The art style, black and white with a blue wash, feels like black and white cinema, and thanks to Frank singing Fred Astaire’s Puttin’ on the Ritz, it even evokes a soundtrack. However, I’m far more inclined to think of it as a play. Almost the entire story is set inside the Waldorf Astoria with most scenes flowing straight into each other rather than simply jumping to a new location. Even the way characters step into the story feels like theater to me (especially Mr. Helmer and Ms. Booth), and throughout the book there’s an emphasis on body language and staging. Every time I read it, I’m put in the mindset of an Agatha Christie play.
I suppose this is not without reason. Agatha Christie had a great deal of affection for her characters and she delighted in using them to tease her audience’s expectations. Every character has secrets, and each has a side of themself they hide from the world. This is very much true of Jonathan Case characters in “The New Deal” too, and the palpable sense of joy in Case’s work indicates he’s every bit as enamored with his characters as Ms. Christie ever was with hers.
Case goes to great lengths to make us empathetic with his leads. The first chapter is told with Frank as the point of view character, and the second with Theresa. From then on it switches back and forth between the two frequently, but by spending a substantial length of time with each character beforehand and experiencing the way they view the world, we get a much stronger sense of them than we would if the story had intercut between them from the start.
When we first meet Theresa, it’s through Frank’s eyes, so we see only what she lets him see. But when we get to Theresa’s chapter, we see her vulnerability and her concerns—all the things that were invisible to Frank. We also get to see how she sees Frank. In Frank’s chapter he was an open book, a guy with his heart on his sleeve, but from Theresa’s point of view he’s shifty, and he keeps poor company. Frank may mean well, but he has the potential to create problems for Theresa through either carelessness or ignorance.
And Theresa’s world is not as easy-going as Frank’s. When something gets stolen at the Waldorf, Theresa is immediately the prime suspect simply because she’s black and nearby. Theresa knows she works in a world where she will always be thought of as guilty until proven innocent, and even then she may get in trouble because of the reaction her skin color provokes in some of the hotel’s guests. If Theresa lived as Frank does, she’d be fired in a heartbeat.
Then there’s Ms. Nina Booth. Right away we get a sense of who this woman is by the honorific she’s chosen in an era when anything other than Mrs. or Miss could gain a person’s contempt. She likes to ruffle some feathers. Unlike Frank and Theresa, Nina’s not a point of view character, so we get a sense of her from the different faces she reveals to people of different stations in life, and the way she’s contrasted against those of a similar station. When Theresa is serving in a room full of hotel guests, she’s invisible to them all, except Nina.
Continued belowI like this kind of story telling, because it puts an emphasis on observation, and in a caper like “The New Deal” it’s a key component in the story’s engine. We as readers are invited to ponder what a look implies, and when someone is showing their true face or their mask.
But it also lets us look deeper at the relationships between characters, not just the mystery at hand. Early on in the story, Frank is helping Theresa rehearse a play on their break. Keep in mind, this is early in the story, so we’re still learning who these people are and how they feel about each other. During the scene, the two casually share a cigarette. It is such a simple thing, but it says so much about their relationship. This is where Case excels in his storytelling. He stages his scenes in such a way that he can tell you important details about his characters without dialogue. He makes use of locations to inform behavior too. The way Frank and Theresa can interact on their breaks at the Waldorf is different to the way they can interact in the streets of New York.
Frank is aware of this, but not as acutely as Theresa is. Theresa gets judgement from all directions all the time; she’s knows what it feels like intimately. I think this is why it bothers her so much when she later realizes she’d misjudged Frank, especially since he was one of the few people that wasn’t judging her. None of this is said in dialogue, by the way. Case gives hints leading up to this moment, but when you arrive, it’s entirely up to you to read why Theresa feels so badly for the way she mischaracterized Frank.
There’s another scene in which Theresa makes her pivotal choice for the story, and again the motivation for this choice is left unstated. Theresa lives in a world where no-one censors themself for her benefit; a world where people casually discuss ‘Negroes’ and ‘savages’ right in front of her as if she wasn’t even there. The disregard is disgusting. So when Theresa is performing before her director, a man she had called a visionary, and he tells her to act more savage, it cuts like a knife.
Again, the reasoning for what she does next is never explained explicitly. We are simply presented with the moment and invited to extrapolate Theresa’s thoughts from there. Although I never find that a hard task because Case is such an expressive artist. His characters feel larger than life in the way they express themselves, and yet still grounded. And his dialogue is so perfectly on point, with each character having a distinct voice. (Nina in particular has some truly marvelous lines.)
The fun of the caper and the mystery was a big part of my enjoyment when I first read “The New Deal,” but even when I reread now and I know where the plot’s going to go next, I get tremendous joy in seeing Frank, Theresa, and Nina interact. If you missed “The New Deal” when it came out in 2015, track it down. Jonathan Case weaves this story with such confidence, you’ll find yourself effortlessly swept up in its world.
