Desire decimates in The Fool, The Absolute Madwoman

LaweyD's latest pushes fascination to its darkest extremes.

Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Vivan Nguyen’s The Fool, The Absolute Madwoman, available now.

The Fool, The Absolute Mad Woman opens with the opulence of a Powell and Pressburger scene — and matches The Archers’ big framing and wide blocking, to boot. The towering, handsome mansion and palatial gardens that surround it are beautiful, but the lone woman crossing them does not notice. Vivian Nguyen (better known online as LaweyD) lifts the panels to reach the high ceilings of the estate. The resultant negative space reads modern and baroque, nouveau even, but with tiny, measured details filigreed around all the edges. Money. A paradise of high living, exquisite patisserie, fine and elegant clothing. The perfect location for murder.

A chance encounter sparks the thought. I like her coat. Paths cross again, and the idea uncurls. I like her style. Take another step. Then another. I like her. The worrisome issue here is with Alea’s ardor comes imitation. I will take her coat and make it mine. Where does that path lead? How do you take someone’s style? What follows?

Here I am, doing the untrustworthy narrator’s job for them. The woman with the stalker who wants to take her life to take her life — that’s normally told from the perspective of the person being stalked, the one in danger. Kaitlynn, the woman with the coat. But this is Alea’s story. So the slipping from bad to worse, maybe, isn’t the fall from innocence the way she tells it, so much as the mask falling away. The relatability of desire is a trap, a costume, a coat to be worn.

And yet, there’s more to the desire than duplication or possession. Alea wants to be the other woman because she wants to be wanted that way, and she wants Kaitlynn to want her. Or for her to want her in the form of her imitating her. I need to become you so that transformed I-You can be desired by you with the intensity that I want you now. Enough to become you.

If the reader pretends the manipulation and thirst for power isn’t happening, ignoring the why — as Alea hopes they do — the dinner date with the page wreathed in rose blossoms could be read as romance.

The Fool strikes an exceptional balance between elegant and restrained. Nguyen favors very simple forms, a real austere economy of line. And as the figures have an amorphous, gestural simplicity to them that evokes fashion plates more than comic books, so too the lapidary details that make jewelry fine find their way into Nguyen’s art. An eye for fashion that captures the drape of a dress as key to its allure. The patterns that fill panel backgrounds are of damask dress and Persian carpet, flocked wallpaper for the luxurious things on display. Fool could be maximalist romance like Hagio’s Poe if it weren’t so retro-stylized Polyp Mazzucchelli.

The story weaves between the mundane-yet-fascinating and the profane-kept-secret. The visuals and the story echo themselves without repetition, the second turn revealing facets that were previously unseen but always there. Kait, the foil, is allowed to be more true to who they really are than Alea behind the mask. And the more Kait is allowed to manipulate, to become Alea in a sense, mask off, the more sensitive and akin to their fabricated persona Alea becomes. It’s hard to find the truth when everyone is lying and so much is omitted. Hard to see the blood on the walls with the lights turned off.

This exchange of power feels like it’s happening because of the same fear that, when dreaming, acknowledging it will cause you to wake. What describes the tension most is told through the women’s body language. Alea sits first, leaves first, leads their walk, wound tight, locked in. Kait with the coat lounges. Tense as a hare and cool as a cat.

The body language communicating power and confidence is a part of Nguyen’s overall voyeuristic presentation of the book. It’s a comic about seeing what we want, after all. The eye covets the possessions themselves, but also the intimacy of their adornment. To unfasten the collar button at the nape of her neck. The reader is inescapably submerged in sapphic sensualism. Desire as the physical pull that lights the nerves on fire. Surely this relatability is genuine, not a part of the costume. How am I supposed to ignore how reading this book makes me feel?

A house beneath clear skies, tall and grand as the hill it sits on top of. Her house is couched in manicured greenskept landscape and the summit of a hundred stone stairs. A shadow falls over it; the clean, straight lines warp and wave as the women plunge into reflection. They walk back and forth, first she leading the other, then the opposite. Her house is small and low, slung among trees that grow at the edge of a wide flat field. The sky is everywhere and it is blacker than night could ever be.

Perhaps it’s dangerous to cast a spell when you want someone so bad you wish to erase and replace them, when what you want is for them to want you like that, too. As a metaphor goes, you can chase the Möbius strip of desiring to be desirable forever. But in practice, a second woman, a separate person, be careful what you’re summoning. Someone’s got to go.

The Fool, The Absolute Madwoman is available now. For ordering info, click this.

Self-Published / £19.00 / $25.32
Written and illustrated by Vivian Nguyen.