Few genres of fiction feel as instantly relatable as the coming-of-age story. There’s a reason why (uncensored) American schools have made required reading of JD Salinger, Harper Lee, and even William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and it’s because adolescent readers can see a bit of themselves in Holden Caulfield, Scout, and – yes – even Ralph or Simon on their violent island. Reading those stories at a young age inspires a sense of being seen, no matter how divorced a young person is from the narrative circumstances of the novels. Further, they inspire what I would argue is the primary purpose of narrative fiction: the development of human empathy, of putting oneself in another’s shoes and experiencing a tribulation unlike one’s own.
That empathy and relatability tends to last long after a reader ages out of adolescence, for a myriad of reasons. For one, a sort of adolescence has grown longer with each successive generation, as cultural, financial, and sexual security becomes harder and harder to achieve. Those post-war novels were written by a generation expected to find careers, spouses, and adulthood at what now seems to be a ludicrously young age, while Millennials and Gen Z-ers have moved far out of range of those expectations. The coming-of-age story has been extended well past one’s college years, well past the establishment of career. This trend might have started as early as the 1960s and ’70s, but it made itself indispensable in the ’80s, and became the default in the ’90s of Generation X.
It’s that generation’s coming-of-age that is the focus of Italian cartoonist Manuele Fior’s Hypericum, out in translation from Fantagraphics this week. Set in an indeterminate year in the early 1990s, the graphic novel follows Teresa, a young Italian woman abroad in Germany as she takes an internship at a major history museum just as they receive and begin to process the raided treasures of Egyptian pharaoh, Tutankhamen. Eager to throw herself into this professional opportunity, Teresa immerses herself in the journal of Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered Tut’s tomb.
In any great coming-of-age story, however, it is never quite the narrator’s goals that carry the most significant narrative weight. In The Catcher in the Rye, it is grief that drives Holden even as he throws himself into more and more self-destructive adventures to avoid thinking about it.
In Hypericum, the dual forces of Teresa’s chronic insomnia and her inability to speak German lead her to be blindsided by Ruben, a fellow Italian, and the lone person with whom she can bond. Ruben’s life is the epitome of adolescence suspended, and Teresa is swept up in his listless, city-wide ambling, discovering the post-punk lifestyle of squatting in tenements and shoplifting Faith No More and Sonic Youth CDs.
Theirs is a perfectly turbulent, passionate romance, in which Fior captures the thrill of a new city, a new body, a new life. There is a youthful freedom to Hypericum, as Teresa becomes adrift and allows life to happen to her; even as she establishes herself in her position at the museum, the book focuses on petty squabbles and touching post-coital intimacy.
As Howard Carter experiences the frustrations of his discovery—tunnels to be dug, stone walls between his team and the glittering treasures of the past—Teresa experiences the frustrations of her isolated life, her illness, and the squabbles with a man-child that seem to prevent her from achieving her future. Is this love or is this failure?
Even when Ruben offers her a possible solution to her problems, whether that be a place to stay, or a homeopathic aid for her insomnia (St. John’s Wort, hypericum perforatum), Teresa’s staunch inability to accept firmly illustrates her as someone not yet able to come of age. For a moment, near the end of the book, we’re confronted with the possibility that Teresa might not accept the clear path ahead being presented to her: an offer, as her internship ends, of a permanent position at her museum. The route to adulthood, in the form of career, financial freedom, and a feeling of belonging.
It says something that a postscript closes the book, a flash-forward to September of 2001. The events that marked an arrested development for the Millennial generation mark the closure of struggle in Teresa’s Generation X life: she is allowed, finally, to sleep as the noise of true terror is broadcast to her by the television of her firmly adult friends.
Hypericum is a lovely, powerful addition to the coming-of-age tradition, a book that deserves a spot on shelves next to those adolescent books that shaped us. Teresa’s life is one that we feel we’ve lived, no matter how far from our own lives it is. Like the very best of the genre, it makes an older reader smart with remembered longing and is sure to make young readers yearn for experience.
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