Harvey

Originally written in French, Hervé Bouchard’s 2010 graphic novel Harvey won Canada’s Governor General's Literary Award and was translated into English the following year. Illustrated by Janice Nadeau and intended – with some debate – for a middle-grade audience, the novel is about grief and mourning as experienced by a pre-adolescent child. The story is quiet and sad, as the plot revolves around the way the protagonist experiences the loss of his father – and the way that loss merges with the boy’s favorite science fiction movie.

The book opens with a series of images that paint a picture of small-town Canada in the middle of the twentieth century at the end of a snowy winter. Harvey tells us the basics of the story we are about to see from a seeming distance: “This time of first spring is also the time for the races in the gutters. And it’s also the time when Cantin and I lost our Father Bouillon. And it’s the time when I became invisible. So there are lots of things to tell.” The melancholy detachment in Harvey’s voice continues as he explains what happened that terrible spring.

On a night he can’t sleep, Harvey makes his way out of his room and turns on the TV in the living room. He watches a late night sci-fi movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man, in which a character named Scott Carey finds himself getting smaller and smaller after a lab experiment gone awry. Immediately taken with this idea, the movie becomes Harvey’s favorite.



Later, Harvey goes to school with his brother, Cantin. The boys have a somewhat contentious relationship – Cantin is taller than Harvey despite being younger, and Harvey resents him for it. They live with their father, Bouillon, and their mother, who hates the cold weather and has a love of damning everything that annoys her.

After school, Harvey, Cantin, and their friends play in the slush on the street. They race toothpicks down the little rivulets of melting snow; Harvey draws a dot on his toothpick to represent Scott Carey, whom he imagines having shrunk small enough to sit on the toothpick. Harvey’s toothpick gets trapped against a piece of ice, but then eventually makes it way down the gutter to the sewer grating where it falls in and disappears – the book’s way of thematically presaging that everything eventually goes away.

When the brothers return home, they see a crowd of sad people around their house. Their father has had an unexpected heart attack and has died. They watch as an ambulance takes away their father, and Harvey notices the strange shame on the faces of their staring neighbors. A tubby priest tries to offer comforting words to the family but to not much avail.



Harvey and Cantin have a very hard time absorbing what has happened. They search the entire house, looking for their father, trying to come to terms with the idea that he really is gone. Visually, their whole world is changed, as their house is no longer drawn like a house, but is instead a large black box that imprisons three unhappy people who are withdrawing into sorrow.

A little while later, at the funeral, Harvey realizes that he is too short to see over the edge of the coffin. He assumes that this means he won’t get to see his father for one last time. Then, Harvey sees his uncle holding out his hands towards him, and he runs into his arms. The uncle lifts the boy up to his shoulders, and as Harvey sees his father lying in the coffin, the boy feels himself start to slowly shrink away.

The book’s last five two-page spreads are wordless, showing Harvey gradually shrinking smaller and smaller until he disappears. There is no note of happiness or uplift at the end – instead, this graphic novel ends in the middle of Harvey’s still-to-be-processed grief, making “a powerful argument for the utility of mourning.”



The illustrations strongly support the sad, slow feeling of the story. They are almost sepia-toned, with browns, grays, and ochers. The lack of bright colors or sharp lines helps make the images feel like memories being recalled, or memories forming. Patterns repeat and recur. For example, “the village rooftops are echoed by the diamonds on Harvey's father's sweater and these later drift upward (like his essence departing) and then form a starburst with a white void in the middle.” The graphic novel’s text appears to be written in pencil in grade school handwriting, with visible erasure marks and smudges accompanying the laboriously neat letters of someone trying their best to write well.