Paul Has a Summer Job by Michel Rabagliati

The story of another life becomes immediately relatable when it focalizes around the mundane: picking a tomato, crossing the street, eating dinner. This experience is quasi-universal, and it was this detail that made me, a millennial at the beginning of their career, interested in learning more about this anomic boomer. But for a book that could easily become a series of complaints about loneliness, aging, and a fading career, Paul at Home is much more: it’s an exacting chronicle of the everyday, a work of big-hearted humor, and a memoir that’s as much about the potential of the future as it is about the bittersweetness of the past.Īt the beginning of the book, Paul is in the grocery store searching for a single tomato for a meal he plans to cook for his mother. We watch as Paul visits specialists for his cracked tooth and sleep apnea, as he tries to connect with his young adult daughter, as he struggles to rekindle his elderly mother’s enthusiasm for life.

This newest book would be “the most autobiographical by far and definitely the most depressing of the series!” Whether or not Paul at Home is autobiographical, it certainly trucks in the melancholy: Paul, whom Rabagliati’s dedicated readers have seen through a lifetime of adventure and self-discovery, now lives alone in a walk-up in Quebec, long past his prime as an artist and trapped in the eddying currents of late middle age. In 2017, the Canadian graphic artist Michel Rabagliati told the magazine Taddle Creek that he was at work on a new entry in the ongoing Paul series, a collection of graphic novels describing the life of a canny young Canadian not dissimilar from Rabagliati himself. Number of Kinder Surprise Eggs depicted at the grocery store checkout: nine Number of times the events of the past overtake the reality of the present: too many to count.Ĭentral Question: Is it possible to find the universal in the particulars of a grumpy middle-aged cartoonist’s depressing life?

Paul Has a Summer Job by Michel Rabagliati