Seek You by Kristen Radtke

One of the standard kinds of nonfiction is the "here's a trend; what does it mean?" book. It can be serious or tabloid-y; breezy or deep; based on research or vibes. But I don't think it's been presented in comics form much, if at all.

Kristen Radtke, though, seems to be carving out that as her niche. Her first book, 2017's Imagine Wanting Only This, was largely a memoir - a genre very common in graphic books for the last thirty or so years, post-Maus - but also an examination of what it means to want things, and how we know what we want.

Her second book came out four years later, and had many of the same elements in a different mix: less memoir, more research, more rigor. Seek You feels like a book that could have been done in prose, possibly by someone like Mary Roach, but the comics format adds depth and focuses attention in ways that prose can't. (Every format has its strengths; the same story can be told well in opera, film, or lyric poetry but it won't be told well the same way.)

Seek You is about loneliness, in particular the oft-remarked "epidemic of loneliness" in American life. Radtke's touchstones include scientific research (especially the monkeys of Harry Harlow), ham radio, laugh tracks, gun culture and the image of the cowboy, the rise of the Internet and mobile technology, romantic comedies and the image of the princess, changing ideas about child-rearing in the 20th century, and Casey Kasem's long-distance dedications. It's explicitly in the line of modern books starting with Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, that say "Americans are more separated than ever; here's the reasons I think matter most." There's a bit of politics in it, but not a lot: there is clearly an element of politics over the past two generations that has deliberately fomented anger and distrust among Americans, which directly led to increased loneliness. Radtke points to that, more visually than in her narrative, to note that it exists and is one strand of this story.

Radtke starts with specifics and builds up to her central theme: this is a book about connections, if mostly about the lack of them, how they have thinned out over historical time and inevitably thin out towards the end of a person's life. It's broken into sections in clusters centered around the senses, about ways to connect - Listen, Watch, Touch. The sections connect loosely to form the full picture - and I mean "picture" deliberately; Radtke uses the comics format to include images the reader will recognize, explicitly or vaguely, as she tells her overall story.

Some books in this genre have an answer, a solution to the problem they examine. Those tend to be the more facile ones, and often the bestsellers. Radtke has some ideas, and some thoughts, and plenty of evidence and details, but she doesn't have a fix to this problem - it's not something that can be fixed quickly or easily. But she does explain what we know, and where the answer likely might be.

Seek You is focused on Americans - the subtitle is "A Journey through American Loneliness" -  but I think the problem isn't purely American, or even more American than general. But Radtke is American (as so am I), and a book can't be about everything, so it's a natural focus.

A different version of this book, by someone else, might have compared nations, and national spirits, to examine which are the most lonely, and what that means. Radtke, instead, wants to chart American loneliness over time - has it been this bad before? who was lonely then and who is now? how personal is it and how systemic? She does this well, with a lot of research informing a fairly long (350 pages), fairly wordy graphic novel - it's serious and thoughtful without being weighty.

If you've ever felt alone, and wondered how to change that, Seek You is a good book for you - Radtke has a lot of ideas, and a lot of research, and a lot of pictures, and a lot of words that might help.