I say this as if I'm deeply familiar with his work: I'm not. I've seen his stuff here and there, am vaguely familiar with the name. But Ripple: A Predilection for Tina is, as far as I can remember, the first substantial work of his I've ever read.
But the fleshy thing is pretty obvious. See his website for more details.
I thought Ripple was a fairly recent work; the edition I read had a 2017 copyright date. But Wikipedia tells me that was an expanded reissue; the book itself is from 2003.
Ripple is Martin's story. He wants to make serious words-and-art books - something like classic picture books, but for adults - and that's never quite clicked. He'd also be happy doing basically the same thing in a gallery-painting setting; that hasn't worked out for him either. Instead, he draws other people's insipid scripts for what look like dull unimaginative books for children - it's a living, but that's about it. He's in his late thirties: the narrative doesn't say it, but that's the age where dreams have to either start turning into something solid or they die forever.
And he learns that he won a major grant that he'd mostly forgotten applying for. He has to create a gallery show of unsettling, erotic fine art - one he will call "The Eroticism of Homeliness."
But first he needs models. He passes out cards with his phone number; the first person who responds is Tina, a frumpy, chubby younger woman with ruddy cheeks, wide-set eyes, and a front-tooth gap. She is perfect.
And of course Martin falls for Tina, in a weird unexpected way, as she sits there naked in front of him, posing. This is the story of their short relationship - those posing sessions, what they tell each other and what they do together. It is not healthy. It is not as truthful as it should be. Martin over-intellectualizes everything - which Tina does not understand or respect or care about in the slightest, though she does try to indulge him at first.
But they are two radically different people, heading in different directions, who just happened to intersect for this moment. Martin is an intellectual and an artist, more than a little passive. Tina is louder, cruder, more forthright and physical.
Martin has a theory of a transcendent moment - that's the Ripple of the title. Again, he over-intellectualizes everything, so he tells Tina about it in far more detail than she cares about. But she's interested, or we think she is. And they get to that point, in their weird, asymmetrical, unhealthy relationship - they have an extended experience of something larger...which of course is a moment, and so it ends.
The relationship - such as it is; it's half-transactional and half based on Tina indulging Martin - also ends, badly, as we all saw it had to. But it happened. And Martin got his gallery show out of it - and a book much like Ripple, in his fictional world. Not quite the book we just read, but something like it.
Cooper's art style is perfectly suited for this story; this wouldn't work drawn by anyone who makes pretty people. This is a story of sweaty people, with extra rolls of flesh, blemishes, stray hairs, people who don't know where to put their hands and feet, people who stumble and stammer and make weird faces. It is not pretty: that's the whole point.
No comments:
Post a Comment