Keeping Two by Jordan Crane

Each reader brings a different perspective to a book. A lot of the discussion about this book has focused on the central couple's squabbling - about how couples fight each other, that snippiness you get with someone you love and don't want to really hurt but still want to win when you're exasperated with each other.

And that's in there, to be clear. But it's not as central, to my mind.

Instead, I read Keeping Two - a magnificent, encompassing, deep graphic novel Jordan Crane put out last year - as a meditation and exploration of catastrophizing, of all the ways we think through what is happening now and what might have happened and how will I go on if it's really the worst.

We open with a couple in a car, coming home from what was supposed to be a restful holiday weekend. Connie and Will are grumpy: maybe at that point where they're just a bit sick of each other after so much time together in close spaces. Traffic is horrible - stop and go - and Will is driving too aggressively, following too close. Connie is reading a story out loud, some kind of literary novel about a couple (like them, not like them) and the tragedy of a pregnancy.

Crane uses that novel as a way to show the reader how to read Keeping Two: flashbacks, dreams, fiction, imaginings will be presented with wavy panel borders. Reality has solid straight borders. It's a small difference, easy to mistake, so the reader has to pay careful attention as panels bounce back and forth between real and imagined. The mind can slip into fantasy at any moment - a stream of thought moving from what is to oh god, what if at any time.

It begins slowly. They do get home, before too many pages. They're still snippy with each other, but clearly love each other - the couple in the novel are nastier, saying more cutting, thoughtless things, in a worse situation.

One of them goes out to pick up food for dinner; the other one stays to wash up the dishes left in the sink. And time passes.

Again, this is a book about catastrophizing. About those intrusive thoughts of they've been gone too long and what could have happened and what if they're lying dead in a ditch. (In my family, the term is usually "if I get hit by a bus.")

So reality is intertwined with the novel - we see the end of that couple's story, and Connie pointedly says that story ends at a moment of inevitability but before we know what really happens, so the ending is our decision, each individually - and with those worries and intrusive thoughts, all the horrors we all imagine all the time. (We do, right? It's not just me?)

It ends brilliantly. That's all I'll say about that part of it. I do wonder if Connie's point about the novel's ending is a clue about this ending, though I have to be very elliptical to avoid spoilers. There's no obvious impending threat for Connie and Will, as there is for the novel's couple - but something happened, and has not been, um, addressed before the last page, and so could have complications for one of them - potentially very serious complications. I don't think that's a "Lady or the Tiger" ending, the way the novel is: I think Crane's ending is more straightforward - as evidenced by the fact that the last dozen pages have consistently solid borders: they're together, in reality, living now.

Well, except. The very very end, the iris out. The panel borders disappear entirely, hidden on most of one full-page panel and gone on the closing double-page spread. It's beautiful, emotionally satisfying, a perfect moment: a clear ending for Connie and Will.

All the catastrophizing is over, for this moment at least. Everything is all happening at once. And they are together for it.