The Animators - Couverture rigide

Whitaker, Kayla Rae

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0812989287 ISBN 13 : 9780812989281

Editeur : Random House Inc, 2017

A propos du livre

Extrait

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Kayla Rae Whitaker

PROLOGUE:

INTRODUCTION TO SKETCH

IntroductIon to Sketch was held In Prebble hall, a building Professor McIntosh called “Ballister’s dirtiest secret” during our first class. Prebble was an ancient, pipe-clanking fortress on the edge of campus with heating problems, leaky ceilings, and those 1930s wall radiators we used to melt crayons on in grade school. “You pay fifty thousand dollars a year to attend this institution,” he said, “and they stick you in a hovel for four years. It’s because they hate art.”

The tuition comment didn’t hold much weight for me. I was on scholarship. My peers talked about skiing in Aspen and summers in the Hamptons. Ballister was their safety school when Stanford and Duke eluded them. They spoke with the opaque, offhand world knowledge of the privileged. My first weekend there, I watched a girl at a party barf into a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse. Terrified of the cafeteria’s clamor, I had taken to eating three meals of ramen noodles a day in my dorm room.

I went to Ballister because of the visual arts program, because they’d given me their Poor Appalachian Kid scholarship, and because it was as far away from home as I could manage. I had chosen art because I needed something to make use of the bright lights that had existed in my head for as long as I could remember, my fervent, neon wish to be someone else. In high school, I sampled my way up and down the artistic spectrum methodically, like the good student I was, hoping I’d land on something that sparked me: I sketched, I constructed shadowboxes, I threw some rudimentary pots, trying a little of everything, committing seriously to nothing. Too scared, at that point, to put myself at stake for fear of failure. The revelation, maybe, that I had nothing to give. I had yet to encounter anything that made the risk seem worthwhile. I came to Ballister hoping that being there would put an end to my floundering. That I would finally buckle down and find what I was supposed to make, and that it would mean something.

I had taken the Amtrak train twenty-two hours out of Maysville, Kentucky, to the tiny upstate New York town in which Ballister was located. Ballister was, I was surprised to learn, not too terribly removed from Canada. My parents’ geographic sense of the north wasn’t much better than mine. They didn’t believe me at first, when I told them I was five hours from New York City and hence out of harm’s reach. Before I left, my father cleared his throat and thumped me on the back like I was another man. My mother gave me a fierce hug, something with a degree of pain to it, and said with her chin hooked over my shoulder, “Don’t you come back pregnant.”

My parents met working in a factory that made lawnmower parts. The brand’s claim to fame: George Jones had once drunkenly straddled its luxury model while pursued by the Texas State Police. They were resigned to their jobs, to each other, and to us, their children, who had all the fish sticks and Nintendo we needed. They watched Wheel of Fortune with three feet of space between them on the couch. They fought often, and loudly. Neither had gone to college; they hoped I would become something useful, like a CPA.

The closest I had come to finding something that lit me up was in a summer gifted-and-talented program, just before my senior year. In an art course there, I made a graphic novella of the night my mom threw an ottoman at my dad, laboring over how the glass patio door shattered, shards tumbling in an arc of beauty into the green holler bottom below. I painted a textured oil backdrop to simulate the night air wadding itself into a tornado: the Horror of ’89, which touched down that very night in regions of East Kentucky, West Virginia, and the golden triangle of Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol, Tennessee. The instructor, upon seeing it, complimented me but grimaced. Said, “I like the little cartoons, but how about we fit your skills into a more serious framework?” And pushed a pamphlet for architecture school at me.

McIntosh scared me as much as the rest of Ballister did. He was a serious artist, or had been at one point—a sort of eighties gallery darling whose decline had acted as a chute into teaching, a profession for which he had no real passion. “Oh yah, McIntosh is intense,” said the senior VA major who’d given me a tour at orientation. But McIntosh was more than just intense. He was a carnivore who loved to eviscerate freshmen, a real crinkle of joy seaming his mouth as he did. We were instructed to bring a sketch to the first class for discussion, and McIntosh made a blonde with perfect posture, daughter of a D.C. diplomat, tear up when he put her sketch of a woman striding down a crosswalk on the projector. “I want you to pay attention here,” he told us. “This is a case in point as to the importance of exactness in your line work, and the price paid when you become sloppy.” He took his laser pointer, made circles around the figure’s smudged face. “What a deeply confusing expression. This woman looks constipated. Was that your intention, Margaret?” He put his laser pointer down as she began to sniffle. “Well, don’t feel discouraged. This is Ballister. There’s always room for one more prelaw student.” I felt lucky when he glanced at my sketch—an old lady who’d ridden the train with me until Charlottesville, Virginia, asleep with an opened bag of Planters in her hand—wrinkled his nose, and said only, “In bad need of discipline.”

During the third class, McIntosh put another one of my assignments up on the projector. It was a sketch I’d done of a dog chained to a stake in a yard. I didn’t realize it until it was on the wall, but the yard appeared to be on the side of a mountain. It took me the distance from my chair to the screen to realize it: I had drawn Kentucky. I looked at what I’d done, glowing large in front of the class, and felt homesickness wrapping itself around my throat, my eyes growing hot until McIntosh said, “Good. Some rather inspired pencil work here, and here.”

It would be the only nice thing he would say about me all semester. I was shocked out of crying. Everyone turned, subtly, to look.

The only person I’d spoken to on campus for more than fifteen minutes was a boy from Kansas named Zack. Zack was also a VA major and was obsessed with M. C. Escher. Accordingly, I was in love with him. I incorporated his form into the bright lights of what I supposed my future would be, staking all my hopes on him. My drug of choice at eighteen: the quiet devouring of boys in my head. In the secret back pages of my sketchbook, I had even drawn him.

Zack was also in McIntosh’s class. My eyes automatically drifted to the left, where he sat at a neighboring table. If I hadn’t looked in that direction, I might not have seen Mel.

She was perched at a high table with her upper body craned over the desk, wiry arms and legs folded like a praying mantis, looking at me through frayed blond bangs. One dirty Chuck Taylor pressed the floor, bouncing nervously. She looked sleep-deprived—rumpled clothes, an evident ink stain on the knee of her jeans, little lines around her eyes the rest of us didn’t have yet. This was the girl over whom McIntosh went into raptures the first couple of classes—she was, apparently, his sole exception to inhaling freshmen. Session one, she brought in a sketch of a man on a front porch, raising what looked like a mug in the shape of a cowboy boot to his lips, and there was this look the man was giving, so salty you could almost eat it. Funny and sly and even, in the cocked eyebrow, a little angry that someone thought they could spy on him like that. “Expression,” McIntosh trilled, rocking on his heels. And we could see it, too, even if we didn’t know how to say it—it was excellent. Steady, confident lines, delicate shading. It was work that had a good enough idea of itself to be playful.

Her second sketch was a color-smeared cluster of kids in torn T-shirts, safety pins, snarls, all collectively clobbering the hell out of each other. Punks, genuine enough to make me lean away in awe. The look was harsh yet soft, dreamy and glazed, curves creamy. The group fought as a cloud of dust, the result of their scuffling, rose above their shoes. “A little overboard with the blending,” McIntosh said, “but the look of it is really something. And there’s a degree of fun here, too, yes? Some daring? Who were these people, Ms. Vaught?”

“Just some kids I hung around with this summer.” She had a funny voice, deep with the puncture of broken glass. It made me look up for a second before I went back to my sketchbook.

In my first weeks at Ballister, I kept my ambition secret. I wanted so badly to be more than what I felt. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be great, even. But I was cowed by the knowledge that everyone else here did, too—people who’d come from bigger places and better schools than I had, people who’d traveled and had training and experiences and seemed, in a strange way, more like people out in the world than I’d ever been or, I feared, ever would be. Seeing their work—good, bad, comparable to mine—only ever made me think of what I could do, if I could do it better, and not with a sense of confidence or competitiveness, but fear.

When I looked at Mel’s stuff, I felt something different. I didn’t know how to quantify what I was seeing in words, but I could feel it. She was naturally, easily good, and when I saw things she had done, I felt a curiously pleasurable pressure at my middle. It was an expansive, generous feeling. Before I saw her, even, I saw what she did.

Class ended. I watched Zack pick up his backpack and head out the door in the direction of the dorms, and saw one of the girls in class who did work I called, in my head, Hallmark crap—beatific faces, brave seascapes—catch up to him, blond hair bouncing against her coat.

Then I heard that broken-glass voice next to me. “Nice work up there today.”

 

I turned. Mel was pulling a denim jacket over her skinny shoulders. She smiled, ticked her head back in recognition.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I like seeing McIntosh clam up,” she said. “Like, when some- thing floors him and he doesn’t have any Sorbonne stories in response and he’s forced to just shut the fuck up. Doesn’t that give you joy?”

“I do like it better when he’s not talking.”

There was a cluster growing behind us—Margaret, the diplo- mat’s daughter, a boy named Edward whose mother was some sort of photography bigwig at Vogue, and a girl from Mexico named Reva whose family was rumored to run a drug cartel and who was wearing a bracelet studded with what I assumed were real diamonds. Just a few in the parade of intimidation that was Ballister. They’d all been pulled in by Mel; were surreptitiously following her, in fact.

“We’re gonna try this bar downtown,” Mel said. “Wanna come?” My sister had given me a gift before I left Kentucky. She’d never had much use for me—for most of our lives, the fact that we were related was her chief shame—but when I accepted the scholarship and we both knew I would soon leave for a place she’d never been, she began to look at me with new, slightly awed regard. The night before my train was scheduled to leave, she tossed me a little square wrapped in paper and said, “Here’s your going-away present.”

It was a fake ID, a very poor one, but in the days before holograms and magnetic strips, it was laminated and had the Kentucky Commonwealth logo on it, so it would do fine. The brunette in the picture looked nothing like me and was named Nicole Cockrell.

“Let’s see your fakie,” Mel said on the way to the bar. She leaned over, pushing her horn-rims to the top of her head. I was struck by the way she smelled—like men’s deodorant, low-grade and spicy. She pulled her fake out, we compared—she was Jocelyn Stone—and she went, “Heh heh.”

It was mostly me Mel talked to that night. The rest of the art kids eventually left, but we stayed, huddled at the bar with Miller High Lifes. “They can’t hold their liquor yet,” Mel said, wagging her hand at the door. “Kiddies.” I didn’t tell her that I could count on one hand the number of times I’d gotten drunk.

I saw the corner of a brightly colored book sticking from her bag. Deadbone Erotica. On the cover, wonky neon lizards cavorted with large-breasted Amazonian women.

I plucked it out, looked it over. “What’s this?”

Mel raked her hand through her pageboy. It was the longest I would ever see her hair. Two weeks later, she would hit it with cerulean Manic Panic and walk around Smurf-headed until Christmas. Then she shaved it all off and bitched about the northern winter teabagging her scalp.

“That’s fuckin rad is what that is.” She leaned over and tapped the Deadbone cover. “You like comics.” It wasn’t a question.

I flipped through. It was drawn in a bubble style: weird, druggy shapes. I had just started paying attention to method, color, how things were rendered, the technical shit they wake you up to in school that you can’t help but see everywhere after. The comic was alive, bright and blasted. But there was something else drawing me in—the yellowed paper, the deep, musty smell. It was like cutting down a tree and counting the rings within. A creepy awareness of the years passing.

“I bet you’re more of a Warner Brothers fan, though.” Mel tilted her beer at me. “I can tell. From your stuff. You do that thing, too, where there’s this, like, acknowledgment that crazy exists. Like it’s out there and pretty close by, actually, but you don’t have to draw it for us. We get the hint.”

“I used to watch some Looney Tunes,” I said slowly, trying to gauge whether I was about to say something of friendship-disqualifying weirdness.

“Right on.”

What I didn’t tell her: I actually spent every Saturday morning watching Looney Tunes, then the uncensored, wartime Merrie Melodies marathons that aired on weekend afternoon cable. Nazi smashers, vintage high-speed chases through Technicolor deserts. I could still remember how offended, how personally smote, I was when Nickelodeon first censored those cartoons: blurring or blocking the oversized pistols, the entire screen fuzzing at the shot that made Daffy Duck’s feathers fly. I was already a purist. A devotee, of some sort.

The dust clouds in Mel’s picture. Those were WB takeoff clouds, to be sure. Funny and a little bit eerie at the same time. I knew I’d seen them somewhere before.

But saying this would have felt like speaking volumes. It was more effort than I could expend, for how afraid I was of chasing Mel off. So all I said was “Yeah, they were awesome.”

“So do you draw comics?”

“I used to. And then I went to this summer arts program. And the prof there told me to study architecture.”

I said t...

Revue de presse

“A wildly original novel that pulses with heart and truth . . . That this powerful exploration of friendship, desire, ambition, and secrets manages to be ebullient, gripping, heartbreaking, and deeply deeply funny is a testament to Kayla Rae Whitaker’s formidable gifts. I was so sorry to reach the final page. Sharon and Mel will stay with me for a very long time.”—Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest

“Unusual and appealing . . . The Animators covers familiar debut-novel territory: the search for identity, the desire for success, the bewildering experiences of small-town misfits leaving home for the bright lights of New York City. But Whitaker turns these motifs on their heads simply by changing the direction of the road and populating it with women.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A mix of Beaches, Girls, and Thelma & Louise . . . a ‘complicated,’ ‘sensual, sexy,’ raw nerve of a ‘roller coaster’ through a ‘tumultuous’ friendship . . . If you let this story happen to you, you’re gonna love it.”—Glamour

“The Animators is inspiring in its freshness and its authenticity, one of the most original and raw books I’ve read in a long time. I look forward to more Whitaker novels to add to my library.”—The Dallas Morning News

“A compulsively readable portrait of women as incandescent artists and intimate collaborators.”—Elle

“Smart, funny, and vibrant, beautifully capturing the intricacies of friendship . . . a vital read.”—Nylon

“An engrossing, exuberant ride through all the territories of love—familial, romantic, sexual, love of friends, and, perhaps above all, white-hot passion for the art you were born to make . . . I wish I’d written The Animators.”—Emma Donoghue, author of Room and The Wonder

“The Animators is a heartbreakingly beautiful, sharply funny, arrestingly unforgettable novel about love and genius, the powerful obsessiveness of artistic creation, and the equally powerful undertow of the past. Kayla Rae Whitaker writes like her head is on fire.”—Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of The Great Man

“[A] tender, lively début . . . [Kayla Rae] Whitaker’s nimbly created characters are as vibrant as the novel’s title suggests.”—The New Yorker

“Abiding friendships . . . are rarely portrayed with such nuance and humor as in this first novel, a nimble comedic turn edged with shadow.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Memorable, sure-handed, and absorbing.”—The Boston Globe

“Brimming with electricity . . . Whitaker has crafted one of 2017’s first page-turners.”—Paste

“Well-wrought and evocative . . . [Mel and Sharon’s] partnership, which is at once fervent and wonderfully unsentimental, gives The Animators its soul.”—The Washington Post

“This novel is the holy grail; it’s the rare novel that explores and examines the deep friendship and professional lives of two women [and] keeps that focus.”—The Baltimore Sun

“Difficult to forget long after finishing the last few pages . . . [This breakout novel] fills a literary gap, which has been waiting for a tale of millennial female friendship and love without tacky genre borders or stereotypes.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[An] outstanding debut . . . Whitaker skillfully charts the creative process, its lulls and sudden rushes of perfect inspiration. And in the relationship between Mel and Sharon, she has created something wonderful and exceptional: a rich, deep, and emotionally true connection that will certainly steal the hearts of readers.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Unexpected and nuanced and pulsing with life . . . Sweeping and intimate . . . Empathetic but never sentimental; a book that creeps up on you and then swallows you whole.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Kayla Rae Whitaker writes breathlessly and beautifully about the power of deep, true friendship and the ways in which people—and friendships—change over the years. . . . Mel and Sharon jump off the page as real, fully formed characters, and spending time with them is total treat from beginning to end.”—BookPage

“[A] stunning debut.”—Variety
 
“Suffused with humor, tragedy and deep insights about art and friendship.”—People

“Whitaker captures the human frailties that beset everyone—jealousy, anger, insecurity, trauma, the search for love—and weaves them into a compelling story of friendship, self-destruction, and salvation.”—Library Journal

“Visceral . . . utterly compelling . . . with the nonstop tension of a soap opera.”—Booklist

“Riveting . . . [The Animators] grabs you by your intestines and doesn’t let go.”—Interview

“Whitaker’s vivid debut traces the lives of friends who bond over their rural Southern upbringings, then become an avant-garde animation duo with a cult following and uncomfortable fame.”—Entertainment Weekly

“The Animators is about obtaining escape velocity and the sometimes painful process of claiming ownership of one’s story and converting it to art. . . . [It’s] nuanced and raw and heartbreaking, true in a way that only the best work of the human imagination can be.”—Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette

“A grand slam home run . . . You will laugh and cry. . . . Gripping from start to finish.”—The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

“A vivid, intensely rendered portrait . . . This bright debut reworks the familiar buddy novel into a story of two young women united by ambition, artistic talent and enterprise.”—Sydney Morning Herald

“A wonderful, heart-squeezing story . . . about friendship, family, and facing trauma.”—BookRiot

“A beguiling story . . .  Whitaker takes us behind the onionskin drawings and slick celluloid, behind the Brooklyn booze and artsy raves, behind the Kentucky white trash and cheap cigarettes to the personal angst and longing that finds some relief in friendship, love and art.”—Shelf Awareness

“Every artist must come from somewhere; this is something you try to outrun, even as home fuels the creative engine. The Animators is a novel about a pair of cartoonists, but it’s also about the complexity of creative friendship, about balance and jealousy, growing into yourself and living with your talent and trying to actually, impossibly get along in this cracked and unjust world. The result is unapologetic and raucous and compulsively readable; it is potato-chip-friendly and deeply, generously wise.”—Charles Bock, author of Alice & Oliver

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Inc
• Date d'édition: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0812989287
• ISBN 13: 9780812989281
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 384
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarie