Ethel & Ernest:

A True Story

by Raymond Briggs

Knopf, 104 pp., $21

The 30 minutes it takes to read this graphic novel, a recollection of the author’s parents’ working-class marriage, seem like many more. Ethel & Ernest is far from dense and never drags, but Briggs’ eye for detail is so fine and elusive that it’s startling to put this book down and realize that it spans more than 40 years of British social history. “History” seems secondary, really, to Briggs’ engaging depiction of the minutiae of shared lives: Ethel’s beffudlement in the face of 20th-century technological innovations, Ernest’s keen interest in politics, both parents’ horror upon being told by Raymond that he is dropping a coveted spot in grammar school to attend art school (“It’s such a shame. He might have gone to Oxford and Cambridge and got a nice job in an office,” Ethel says. “He could have been a foreman or even, maybe … a manager,” Ernest agrees). This alternately whimsical, dolorous book is always kinetic.

This article appears in November 5 • 1999.

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