Globetrotting Cartoonist Heads Home In 'User's Guide'
These are petty crimes rooted in mere thoughtlessness, of course, the kind of glancing collateral damage family members inflict on one another all the time. But Delisle deftly contrasts his cartoon avatar's self-involved and self-satisfied actions with their lingering effects on his guileless, po-faced kids. In "The Little Mouse," Delisle gets so worked up by his son's demanding more money from the French equivalent of the Tooth Fairy that he accidently gives the game away in the final panel: "Next time I'm gonna give you this [one-cent coin] here instead of two euros!" The change in his son's expression is subtle – he opens his mouth slightly – but in that tiny shift we can see a long-held belief crumbling to dust.
The brevity of each vignette highlights Delisle's acute sense of timing. In "The Monkey," he allays his daughter's bedtime fears ("There's no such thing as child snatchers," he tells her. "That's all there is to it.") The next panel is silent, as we see an expression of relief cross the girl's face. In the next panel, Delisle stands in the doorway of his daughter's room, regarding her thoughtfully. Now that Delisle the cartoonist has given us readers a beat to absorb this quaint domestic scene, Delisle the dad can proceed to screw it up, as he does in the very next panel.
"There's that story about the monkey, though ..." he says, and proceeds to recount a horrific newspaper story involving a monkey, a baby, and a fall from great heights. The strip ends with the girl staring up at the ceiling of her darkened bedroom, terrified.
In "The Pretty Picture," the book's highlight, his young daughter brings him one of her drawings. At first, Delisle praises her efforts, but the longer he looks, the more his professional eye kicks in, as the girl looks on impassively:
"And ... Uh ... I don't want to be too critical, but you've got to work on your drafting a bit. You're going to have put in some effort, or else don't even bother chasing after publishers. Look at the perspective here ... Hasn't anybody told you that things get smaller the farther away they are? This is completely haphazard. I can't tell where anything is. It's not a very complex concept, you know .... I know what you're going to say ... You're going to tell me it's your "style" and that you did it on purpose. Well, kiddo, let me tell you, there's a hell of a difference between drawing like a hack and having some kind of style. Not everybody's Art Spiegelman, you know."
If A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting is significantly more slight than Delisle's travel memoirs, it's brighter and funnier as well. And it shares with his previous work a keen appreciation for the clash of cultures; this time, however, the cultures in question are those adults and children, and the damage that ensues is played for a rueful laugh.
Read an excerpt of A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting