Graphic Novel Features an Oregon Town Whose Fathers Have Gone to War

By Jenny Shank, 10-14-09

Last night I read Danica Novgorodoff‘s graphic novel version of Benjamin Percy‘s prize-winning short story ”Refresh, Refresh” (First Second, 138 pages, $17.99)—it took a while before I could peel myself off of the couch after finishing it.  As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue, Percy’s story about what happens to the soldiers’ families left behind remains powerful and topical.  Percy grew up in Bend, Oregon, and much of his fiction takes place there.  Novgorodoff’s illustrations capture a small Oregon town set against the wilderness, where joining the military is one of the only viable employment options.

Novgorodoff based her graphic novel on the screenplay by James Ponsoldt, which extends the original story.  The graphic novel uses some of Percy’s original language from the story, which first appeared in The Paris Review in 2005 (and won that magazine’s annual prize for best story, as well as a slot in the Best American Short Stories), and was the title story of Percy’s 2007 short story collection published by Graywolf Press. 

But in the graphic novel, the words are secondary to the images, dominated by the color of Army green, and the figure of the predatory military recruiter who is posted in the town, doing a good job of convincing all the men to enlist.  While the husbands are away, the recruiter tries to sleep with as many of their wives as he can.  This sets up the devastating final conflict between the three teenage friends at the center of the story and the military recruiter whom they blame for sending their dads to war.

There are certain haunting images from this graphic novel that will stick with me for a long time—such as Novgorodoff’s illustration for the line, “This is what we all wanted: to please our fathers, to make them proud—even though they had left us.” In it, the townspeople wave flags as the military bus bearing the fathers away pulls out toward a distant mountain and the teenage son of one of the soldiers stands alone, watching it go.  When one of the characters learns his father has died, Novgorodoff illustrates his emotions with stark black-and-white ink washes that suggest the horrors of war.  There’s one image of three tiny soldiers trudging across the land that is heartbreaking.

The serious subject matter of “Refresh, Refresh” aside, it’s always fun to see a short story take on an extended life as this one has.  There have been a number of shorts stories set in the West that this has happened to, such as Annie Proulx’s 1997 story “Brokeback Mountain,” turned into the 2005 film by Ang Lee, and Sherman Alexie’s 1994 story “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” which Alexie incorporated in the screenplay he wrote for the 1998 film “Smoke Signals.”

As for the movie version of “Refresh, Refresh,” James Ponsoldt wrote the screenplay for it, which won the Lynn Auerbach Fellowship at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in 2007.  Benjamin Percy reports that the movie, which Ponsoldt will also direct, is in pre-production.  After scouting locations in central Oregon, Percy says they are “looking to shoot in the coming year.”

• Montana State University in Billings hosted the third annual High Plains Book Award ceremony last week.  This year the Emeritus Award went to one of my favorite writers, Louise Erdrich.  I think I’ve read every piece of fiction Erdrich has written, and she just keeps getting better.  Check out last year’s The Plague of Doves or her recent The Red Convertible: Collected and New Stories 1978-2008 for proof.  If someone were to twist my arm and make me pick which one of her twelve novels was my favorite, I’d probably have to go with 2001’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse--Erdrich does twisted Catholic stuff better than anyone.  Erdrich’s first novel, 1984’s Love Medicine, was listed among the possible NEA Big Read choices, and Billings is reading it together this fall.  Good choice, Billings.

The other High Plains Book Awards this year went to Leif Enger’s So Brave, Young and Handsome for fiction, Margot Kahn’s Horses That Buck for best first book, Peter H. Hassrick and Elizabeth J. Cunningham’s In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein for best nonfiction, and Craig Arnold won the award for poetry posthumously for his Made Flesh.  Arnold, who was a professor at the University of Wyoming, died earlier this year while hiking in Japan.

• The annual Moab Confluence book festival and workshop kicks off on October 22nd.  This year’s theme is Eating the West, focusing on “local food and sustainability.” The authors to be featured include California peach farmer and writer David Mas Masumoto, “Arab-American writer, lecturer, food and farming advocate” Gary Paul Nabhan, ecologist and writer Susan J. Tweit, food writer Deborah Madison, and nature and food writer Ann Vileisis.

Moab Confluence is doing something different than any festival in the region in picking a distinct theme for each year instead of hosting whatever regional authors happened to have published books that year.  Don’t get me wrong—the latter approach works well too, and the Montana Festival of the Book, probably the best regional festival of that sort, is coming up later this month in Missoula.  (I say “probably” because I haven’t attended all the other festivals—I have been to the Montana Festival of the Book, though, and it was heaven for a bookish person such as myself.)

• Finally, check out Luke Baumgarten’s interesting profile of Spokane-based novelist Jess Walter for The Pacific Northwest Inlander.  Walter’s novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, which I reviewed last week, is getting a lot of raves.

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