North Country

The graphic novel is an excellent medium for the growing-up story, but works best when it focuses on plot rather than circumstance, on movement rather than Wordworthian spots of time. This book, full of eerie images from an impoverished and abusive '70s childhood, resembles a tone poem. It lingers in reminiscence and summary—fine for the psychoanalyst's couch and male teens quietly wallowing in self-pity, but it doesn't make a story that transcends its adolescent origins. White is a fine artist with moments of real meaning (for instance, a man in one panel, morphing to a teenager in a man's clothing, morphing into a little boy, all three with the same luggage), but he fails to put these images together into a narrative. He might produce a fine second or third book, but the audience for these jewel-like pastels and cold white images of the winter wastes of New England feels limited to men who remember, too vividly, their bad Vietnam-era childhoods. It doesn't help that much of the narrative is grim and wordy, reading like a rough therapy session. Some of the panels, especially those dealing with a suicide, are so evocative as to be transcendent, but this is largely a book of unrealized promise. (Oct.)