Book Review: ‘Monica,’ by Daniel Clowes

If, as the poet Nayyirah Waheed writes, our mothers are our first country, then for Monica it’s a country whose calamities she has never gotten over. Unwilling (or unable) to form real attachments, bereft of all past and without much of a future, a 40-something Monica finally resolves to locate her mother and uncover the truth of her abandonment — and, in the process, discover who her father was.

Because this is a Clowes story, Monica’s quest for origins — for a stable self — takes her on strange and twisting paths. She traces her mother through the decayed revenants of the counterculture, ending up at a bizarre cult whose leader might or might not be her father. There are oneiric interludes: In one, Johnny is a hard-boiled private detective in a city that’s being engulfed by a mysterious disaster; in another, a young man saves his hometown from a supernatural invasion only to be rewarded in the worst way possible. The Gothic, noir, war comics, even a glimpse of William Hogarth — all appear, and all are made very weird indeed.

A pervasive air of apocalypse hangs over all these diverse proceedings, and it speaks to Clowes’s talents that he never lets the eschatological side of things overwhelm the story, or Monica. Our narrator might have no idea who she really is, but Clowes doesn’t lose track of her or her dogged human longing for a mother bond to call her own.

Monica’s quest, for all of its outré swerves, achieves something like a conclusion; she gets some of the answers she seeks, just not the ones she would have liked. “It’s quite a blow to discover after a lifetime of fairy-tale fantasies that you’re not really special,” she says. “Just the unwanted fetus … caught in a confusing historical moment.”

The novel’s final chapter finds an aging Monica “in a state of near-contentment, living sexless and invisible … waiting for social security to kick in.” But near-contentment is not the same as contentment, and answers are not the same as healing. A newcomer offers up the possibility of the kind of romantic bond that has eluded Monica her entire life, but despite all the years and all the miles, Monica is still her mother’s daughter. She cannot break free of “the black emptiness that might (or might not) overtake me if/when I stopped moving.” Nor can she break free, it seems, from her mother’s appetite for destruction.