In 2018, Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina was longlisted for the Booker prize, the first graphic novel in its history to be so. And no wonder. Drnaso’s story, about a missing woman and the effect her disappearance has on those close to her, deals with subjects many traditional novelists continue to be wary of tackling, gun control and conspiracy theories among them. Unlike many seemingly of-the-moment books, however, its power has only grown in the years since. Four years on and, following the US Capitol riots, it reads, at moments, like a prediction (Drnaso lives and works in Chicago). Go back to it, as I did the other day, and you will, I guarantee, find it at least twice as terrifying as you did the first time around.
Thanks to this, my stomach lurched a bit when I picked up Acting Class, Drnaso’s first full-length outing since Sabrina. Is it as wildly successful as its predecessor? In truth, I’m not sure that it is. But my queasiness was hardly misplaced. In this book, Drnaso again distills quite brilliantly aspects of 21st-century anomie and alienation, on this occasion through the prism of a group of lonely and awkward strangers who sign up for an acting class run by a highly controlling but seemingly unqualified teacher called John Smith. Who is this mysterious guy? And why is this crowd – among its members are an anxious single mother and a bored married couple – so willing not only to trust him but to believe he is going to change their lives for the better? Drnaso’s narrative operates in the bewildering space between the reader’s instinctive scepticism – John stinks to high heaven of charlatanism – and the naivety and desperation of his crowd of misfits.
