Much has been said and written about the healingpowers of art, but in this lengthy (300-plus pages) work of sequential artandby far the finest, most emotionally absorbing work of any type that I’ve readthis yearSmall, an award-winning children’s book illustrator, takes hisreaders through a harrowing childhood and adolescence in which disappearinginto art is not only an escape; it’s a matter of survival.
It’s hard to imagine a more dysfunctional familyoutside of the realms of fiction. Small’s father, a radiologist, is stilted andwithdrawn, barely a presence around the house. His mother, a closet lesbian,rules the roost with stern looks and a type of cruelty exacted by smolderingsilence, broken only occasionally by words aimed like darts. His grandmother isso disturbed that she locks her husband in the basement and sets fire to thehouse. His brother copes by beating on a kettledrum. David has his art.
Their stories and backgrounds are told in sparingbut detailed vignettes, complete with beautifully rendered illustrations asstark and chilling as Small’s youth. The book gets its title when David, at 14,develops a lump in his throat. After surgery supposedly performed to remove acyst, he learns that he’s lost a vocal cord and his thyroid gland, leaving himvirtually speechless and with a huge, zipper-like scar on his throat. Hisfather eventually confesses that, in repeatedly X-raying David throughout hischildhood, he is responsible for his son’s cancer. David can’t even scream outhis anger.
The road to recovery is nightmarish, taking yearsand dragging David through a process of self-discovery that would make all butthe most abusive parents shudder. David’s journey is a lonely one, filled withdespair, anger, horrific dreams, bitterness and anxiety. When he eventuallyconfronts his parents about his cancer, which had been hidden from him, all hisfather can say is, “The fact is you did have cancer… But you didn’t need toknow anything then… And you don’t need to know about it now. That’s FINAL!”
David seeks the counsel of a psychiatrist, presentedin the character of a white rabbit straight out of Alice in Wonderland,who sees the emotionalwasteland that this teenaged boy has become. The psychiatrist is kind butdirect: “You’ve been living in a world full of nonsense, David,” he tells him.“No one had been telling you the truth about anything. But I’m going to tellyou the truth… Your mother doesn’t love you.”
The rest of the book details how David deals withthis knowledge and how he resolves his family conflicts, including aheart-rending scene at his mother’s deathbed. Growing pains should never be soexcruciating, and, as David Small illustrates with the force of a powerful kickto the gut, family truths can cut the deepest.
In some ways, this book reminded me of TobiasWolff’s This Boy’s Life, or, in the graphic memoir vein, ArtSpiegelman’s Maus, both being magnificent accounts of artists’confrontations with their roots, their youths. These books are nothing short ofnecessity, of catharsis, of the kind of healing that can be accomplished onlythrough artistic bravery.
We’re lucky that David Small had his art.
