Camille Jourdy’s marvellous new comic book begins with a train journey: a young woman, Juliette, is leaving Paris, and heading for the small town where she grew up. Exhausted by the city and the seething anxiety from which she has suffered ever since she was a girl, she longs for the awkward embrace of her somewhat complicated family: her divorcee father, now lonely enough to be on the dating apps; her mother, an amateur artist with bohemian leanings who has recently taken yet another younger lover; her older sister, Marylou, who though in possession of both a husband and two small children, is also having a one-day-a-week affair with a man who works in a fancy dress shop (he comes to her for joyful afternoon sex in her greenhouse, disguised as a bear, or a wolf, or a ghost).
From here, Jourdy spins out an exquisite soap opera of a graphic novel, a story she tells in both traditional strips – if you’re a fan of Posy Simmonds, you’ll fall instantly in love with these – and in a series of extraordinarily beautiful, Matisse-inspired watercolours of the town where the action takes place (it’s never named, but Jourdy spent her childhood in Dole, near the Jura mountains: think red roofs, geranium-filled window boxes and old-fashioned, slightly louche bars). What follows is often plangent; by the time Juliette returns to Paris, more than one heart will have been broken. But Jourdy also has a gift for farce, and her book is at moments richly comical. The scene in which Marylou’s lover, wearing one of his ridiculous costumes, is discovered hiding under her son’s desk is masterly.
Juliette’s family love her, but they’re all so busy, caught up in their own lives. How should she spend her days? Soon after her arrival, she meets Georges, a dishevelled loner who spends his time between his squalid flat and the Tropicale bar, where he drinks too much, struggles to win darts tournaments, and picks up women. Georges takes an unaccountable shine to Juliette – usually, he prefers relationships without strings – and uses an abandoned duckling they find in the park as bait to ensure she continues to visit him (he adopts it). Unlike everyone else, he isn’t tired of hearing about her panic attacks, her sudden conviction that she can’t find her pulse and is about to die. Will they fall in love? This, too, is complicated: Georges isn’t exactly marriage material.
I’m absolutely mad about this book, the best graphic novel I’ve read so far this year (its translator is Aleshia Jensen). So many longform comics want for a shape, a real sense of narrative. But Jourdy knows exactly where she wants to take us, and how. Oh, but the detail involved in her rooms and streets! Every frame is drawn with such artistry and care, a work of art in its own right. I can’t think when a cartoonist has ever paid such attention to simple domestic objects, or made them so psychologically revealing. And yet there is a gorgeous simplicity at play here, too. It hardly matters that her characters are often inarticulate: she has the skill to make their faces speak fathomless volumes. Sad and funny and somehow profoundly French, all I can tell you is that Juliette is vraiment génial: a book to be read, reread, and pressed on everyone you know.
Juliette by Camille Jourdy (translated by Aleshia Jensen) is published by Drawn and Quarterly (£23). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
