This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Keeping Two by Jordan Crane.
My partner once collapsed in my arms. An ambulance was called and he spent several days in the ICU. Happily, no major medical interventions were required, he recovered quickly, and remains in good health.
But the memory of that instant, and the following days, has haunted me ever since. In part because I have long fought a habit of imagining worst-case scenarios and summoning forth those hypothetical emotional states, and the events of that day spawned dozens of new terrible possibilities to fixate on. Maybe this is an attempt at a sort of emotional inoculation, but if so, it’s one that couldn’t possibly succeed; one of the more haunting aspects of the incident was the unreality of it. The actual moment was infused with adrenaline and terror, and that caused a kind of dissociation that can’t be recreated under non-crisis conditions.
I hadn’t expected to find that mix of fear and awe transformed into a moving and beautiful statement about love, but along came Jordan Crane’s graphic masterpiece, Keeping Two.
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Experiences that intense have been felt by many, but I’ve rarely seen it convincingly recreated in art or literature. I hadn’t expected to find that mix of fear and awe transformed into a moving and beautiful statement about love, but along came Jordan Crane’s graphic masterpiece,
Keeping Two.
A tale of two couples facing stressors both mundane and extraordinary, Crane marries a simple but emotive visual style with a sophisticated understanding of internal states and their effect on interpersonal interactions. The storytelling is carefully crafted and able to show, with skill and subtlety, just how small triggers can lead to big emotions. As those big emotions bloom into numerous kinds of anxiety, grief, and recriminations, the consistent six-panel pages start to feel claustrophobic.
While the domestic scenes that open the book are superb,
Keeping Two takes a turn in its final third towards a catharsis that is nothing short of transcendent. Crane spent over a decade working on this book, and that effort resulted in an extraordinary graphic novel, one that succeeds in conjuring a remarkable kind of unreality that edifies rather than unsettles. I find it difficult — and probably counterproductive — to fully explain what I mean. You have to experience
Keeping Two; I’m confident that once you do, you’ll never forget it.