The book, which in July became the first graphic novel to be long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, had been sold out in bookstores for months, and the copies available at the festival had come directly from Drawn & Quarterly’s main office, in Montreal. When I arrived at the book fair, Drnaso was chatting with an older man who had just bought all the remaining copies of “Sabrina” at the kiosk. She has called it “the best book-in any medium-I have read about our current moment.” “Sabrina” is the intimate story of one man’s suffering, but it also captures the political nihilism of the social-media era-a time when a President can dismiss the murder of a journalist by saying of the perpetrator, “Maybe he did.
The breadth of vision displayed in “Sabrina” impressed Zadie Smith, who had started reading Drnaso on Ware’s recommendation. “They are not reference material,” Ware warned. He told me that he had followed the advice that the celebrated graphic novelist Chris Ware once gave to aspiring cartoonists: throw out your yearbooks. “I have a morbid curiosity in me,” he said. “Sabrina” depicts an eerie world of orderly tract homes, tidy parking lots, and empty streets, where roiling emotions have been displaced onto computer screens, and where powerful people make reckless pronouncements based on bottomless skepticism.ĭrnaso, who lives in Chicago, has spent many hours in the darker corners of the Internet. The Internet first denies him the privacy of his grief, and then, when the fringe weighs in, upends his certainty about Sabrina’s fate. Strangers learn of awful news before he does. Did Sabrina just leave him, or was she kidnapped or murdered? He flees the mystery, and the attendant media frenzy, seeking refuge with an old buddy in Colorado Springs.
His hair, which is thinning, was hidden beneath a black baseball cap.ĭrnaso, who is twenty-nine, was promoting “ Sabrina,” his graphic novel about a young man in Chicago who is devastated by his girlfriend’s sudden disappearance. Drnaso (pronounced “dur- nass-oh”) has small dark eyes, a wan complexion, and a narrow black mustache that seems to have been sketched in by a fine-nibbed pen. The kiosk’s vertical supports, its horizontal banner, and the table where he was sitting formed a squat rectangular panel, with his upper body at its center. This past September, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, the graphic novelist Nick Drnaso signed books at the kiosk of his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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