OUR EXPANDING UNIVERSE by Alex Robinson (review)

Alex Robinson’s Our Expanding Universe may just be one of the most difficult graphic novels to review because the major components of the book succeed as individual parts but just do not quite congeal.

Generally, I always tread carefully when I see something that interweaves the history of the earth or space into what would otherwise be a work of realistic fiction.

Occasionally, it works, as seen with Richard McGuire’s Here, but more times than not, the combination of everyday life with the magnificent wonders of the universe creates a recipe for a pretentious disaster.

While Our Expanding Universe does not triumph like McGuire’s acclaimed book, it also did not cause me to recoil as I read the parallels between the expansion of the universe and the expansion of a group of three friends.

Billy, Scotty, and Brownie live in New York City and have managed to cross paths and develop a tightly knit friendship despite their contrasting temperaments and dramatically different paths in life.

Billy works as the manager of a dog care center and is happily married to Marcy, who has recently acquired the itch to have children. Scotty is a teacher and is married to Nitu; the two have a son and expect a second child on the way. Brownie is a freelance writer, video game reviewer, and divorcee hell bent on never procreating nor committing to any long-term relationship.

Despite their differences, the three meet up regularly to play four square in a local park, but that tradition begins to fade with the baby craze creeping into the group. Scotty’s already minimal social life will get further reduced with the second child, and with Marcy insistent on having children, though she and Billy may or may not have the resources and living space to do so, the days of the four square meeting ritual and the halcyon lives the group had when it began are limited.

To compare the microcosm of Billy, Scotty, and Brownie’s growing distance as Billy and Scotty start having their own families, Robinson splices in segments describing the nature of our universe (and the surrounding universes) to grow exponentially further apart. As the three men’s lives evolve, we see in the comparative shift of the universe, suggesting that with growth comes distance, regardless if the unit is a human or a star. While drawing this similarity between families and universes, these segments about the vastness of space also give us a sense that the cosmos cares little for our minuscule, trivial activities.

Although comparing and contrasting more personal, intimate interactions to something far larger than human existence could have been a good idea, the conceptual distance between the universe and Billy, Scotty, and Brownie’s lives feels too far, making the metaphor of the work too heavy handed and the transitions between the in space sections and the fascinating and engaging conversations of the characters too abrupt and too aloof from each other. In creating Billy, Scotty, and Brownie’s world, Robinson takes such nuanced and delicate care of dialog, small moments, and expressions that each transition to the universe teachings pulls you too far out of the natural flow of the majority of the book.

For that desired comparative effect, I would have preferred a more integrated juxtaposition between the men’s lives and the nature of change, and I think an excellent candidate for that would have been the progression of the park where the three meet. In one of my favorite moments of the novel, the four square court shifts, and the area is transformed into a child-safe zone where only adults with children can roam to reflect the surge of intense parenting developing in the past decade. In this small moment, we got a glimpse into the evolution of a non-human entity that we’ve wrangled into our believing is in our possession but will ultimately return to become a blank piece of earth or a speck of dust floating in the galaxy. The park would have been a perfect comparison because the humans in the book believe they can shape the park and the people who visit it, and as a result, it does see some cosmetic changes based on societal needs, but alas, the park sits on a tiny part of the earth, which will always change, and there is nothing better to remind you of that transience if you see the park transform into a tile in a superhighway or the ground of a sea in the future to come. 

So, what is Our Expanding Universe without the universe?

Beyond the comparison of the evolution of a group friendship to the evolution of the cosmos, the book acutely observes modern family dynamics and critiques the obsession and callow motivations of thirty-somethings to have children even though their circumstances and their personas convey that procreation is not a wise decision. Through dialog and some monologues from Brownie delivered in a variety of formats ranging from a script of a party to dialog layered over video games Brownie and Billy play, Our Expanding Universe captures the flows of a variety of conversations and how they ebb and flow between the serious and the trivial, and this energy in the dialog drives you to read on (even if you kind of find the characters despicable…) because Robinson has expounded on a distressing trend of parents who do not know why they want to have children but do anyway without getting on a pulpit.

Thanks Alex for giving a reasonable and perceptive voice for people who have decided in this day and age to not have their own biological children; let’s just leave space out of that discussion for now.