What’s the best artistic/literary format for conveying the feel of the slacker lifestyle? Two slacker stories by Lucy Sante and Matt Madden.

I just happened to read two different stories about slackers, set about 20 years apart: I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante and Odds Off by Matt Madden. Sante’s book ranges over the decades but the part that’s relevant here is the discussion of Sante and her friends in the late 1970s / early 1980s, where they were fluidly moving between jobs, relationships, cities. It was something like the later “slacker” lifestyle but with hard drugs, not just pot and alcohol. Madden’s book takes place around the year 2000 and it’s the next generation, but they’re still living that slacker lifestyle, just in a way that suits the later times.

I don’t have so much to say about the books themselves–each is excellent in its own way. It’s a complete coincidence that I happened to read them one after the other, and then I noticed that connection. Perhaps if you juxtapose any two books, you’ll find interesting links between them.

OK, there’s one thing I would like to add . . . It strikes me that the “comics” (picture storybook) format is the best medium for portraying slackers. I’m not quite sure why that is, but I can think of a lot of other comics and bandes dessinées that have portrayed this sort of scenario–groups of friends in their 20s or early 30s with unsettled personal and professional lives. For some reason it seems to work best in the graphic storytelling format.

Fven in the examples I’ve just read, Madden’s story matched form to content very well. Sante’s book was great in its own way, but its use of straight prose (with the occasional photo) wasn’t so effective in conveying the slacker period of her life. The prose worked well for childhood memoir, recent events, and for sharing her innermost thoughts, but when it came to the description of young-adulthood, a lot of it came off a bit like name-dropping. Not in an obnoxious way; it’s just that I think a BD would’ve worked better, with its show-not-tell format.

Maybe that’s the point. A prose novel can deliver interiority like nothing else, but a comic or BD can be better at conveying the shifting interactions of a group of people. It’s the nature of pictures to given an external view, which is essential in conveying unstable relationships, which in turn is a central theme of the “slacker” genre.