My enjoyment of Walter Scott’s brilliant Wendy books, in which a millennial arts graduate with a self-destructive streak as wide as the Yukon River pings like a pinball around various Canadian cities, is at this point almost indecent. Truly, I could not enjoy them more if I tried. For one thing, they’re so painfully funny, hovering as they do between slapstick and existential crisis (like everyone else in the world, Wendy is addicted to her mobile, and thanks to this, her life – a bit like her art – is increasingly abstract). For another, they’re kind of valiant. Scott, a practising artist himself, satirises our topsy-turvy culture with a daring you won’t find elsewhere in publishing. Poor old Wendy. Some days, she has only to open her mouth for the identity police to descend, demanding to know her pronouns.
In her latest adventure – this is the fourth book in the series – Wendy’s comic strip, Wanda, is nominated for the coveted National FoodHut Contemporary Art prize. But if stardom now appears at last to be within sight, the path towards it is far from straightforward. Gen z simply will not play nicely with her. “More cis woman nonsense,” reads the first comment below the interview she does (with an overworked intern via Zoom) to mark her shortlisting. “The amount of unchecked privilege this artist flexes, I am literally shaking,” reads the next. With the exception of her longstanding friend, Winona, who’s also made the prize list, her fellow nominees are little short of terrifying. What to say to the much-pierced Zima, “a 3-spirit artist of Indigenous and settler descent known for their seed-mailing collective”? What on earth to make of the forthcoming collaboration of Moonstone (“Zendaya follows me on Instagram”) with Crocs?
Is Wendy getting old? Maybe she is. In a bar, she meets two fans, on whose youthful marrow she metaphorically feasts as she gets ever drunker, until one of them, exhausted by her talk of “vibe shifts”, asks her to go home (“Litchi has C-PTSD and if the topic changes too often, it’s really destabilising for them”). Having sublet her apartment in Toronto while she visits New York, she returns to find her tenant, an ex-student called Kaylee, utterly transformed: “I have a gallery now and a solo show next week,” the young woman announces, coolly. “It’s been crazy. I’ve had to hire assistants.” Meanwhile, her presentation for the FoodHut prize, which comprises (OK, she was desperate) some slow-mo mobile phone footage of herself while extremely drunk, strikes even the idiotic Sandy, who’s compering the award, as a career suicide note.
Loneliness comes in like the tide, her world reduced to a shared studio and the blue-green screen of her phone. Where is everyone? What has happened to the Wendyverse? Zav, the man with whom she once kidded herself she was in a polyamorous relationship, is long gone. Her frenemy Tina has had a baby with Jeff, the guy with whom she used to be obsessed. Even Winona is moving to Berlin. Abandoned like this, what will happen to our silly but sweet-natured heroine, a character beloved of Roz Chast and Zadie Smith alike? Scott has said that The Wendy Award will be the last volume in the series, but I refuse to believe it. In her confusion and her cowardice, Wendy is – only now can I see this clearly – the authentic voice of a bewildered generation. We demand, at the very least, a brand new multimedia installation.
The Wendy Award by Walter Scott is published by Drawn and Quarterly (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
