The title suggests that Daniel Clowes’s latest is a work of biographical fiction – and, to a degree, it is. A woman called Monica features in most of the nine chapters of this kaleidoscopic graphic novel. Abandoned by her hippy mother, she grows up with her grandparents, builds a career, then abandons it to uncover the truth about her mother’s departure – and the secrets of the mysterious cult she may have joined.
Yet Monica changes its colours like a skittish octopus. The chapters don’t simply carry the story forward. Instead, they chart the protagonist’s life in a wide range of styles – a free-wheeling drama, a ghost story, a rags-to-riches tale, an occult thriller and a retiree romance – broken up by tales of wartime friendship, hitmen, blue-skinned interlopers and cynical artists in which Monica appears only obliquely, if at all. There’s no back-cover blurb or introduction to tell us what to make of it all. The reader, like Monica herself, must play detective.
