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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Drawn from life. The clean, Clowesian lines of Adrian Tomine’s illustrations are deceptive: in its chronicling of the breakdown and possible salvaging of the relationship between Ben and Miko, two Berkeley-dwelling Asian-Americans, Shortcomings rummages through love at its most muddled and recriminatory. Miko thinks Ben, the ambitionless manager of a university cinema, has an obsession with white women that goes beyond his porn collection. When she is accepted for an internship in New York she suggests they take a break from one another. So Ben awkwardly puts himself in the game, egged on by best friend Alice, a grad-school lesbian busily working her way through Mills College’s student body. Tomine’s ear for dialogue and the subtleties of his artwork are both excellent, managing to make an intensive study of Ben’s wallowing without making us resent his self-involvement. There’s plenty of humour, too, but most impressive is that Shortcomings is a story about love that doesn’t have a shred of sentimentality on its bones. Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine, out now published by Faber.
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