now available in softcover!
Fun Home
: A Family Tragicomic
by
Alison Bechdel
In
the burgeoning publishing category of hardcover comics memoirs,
Houghton Mifflin makes a strong entrance with Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.
This work is as forcefully felt a memoir as any yet published in
comics, but, more than
this, it has a strong claim to being the single most culturally
sophisticated work yet produced in this genre. The deeply cleansing
catharsis that it achieves is enabled by Bechdel's
extensive use of literary reference. She draws on a full
complement of her artistic forebears to create an elaborate
intertextual support narrative in a manner that is akin to that which
her father employed in his painstaking restoration of the gothic
revival mansion which is the central setting for the story.
Life as it is portrayed in Fun Home is never far from a literary antecedent and always at home in the text. Proust and Joyce provide the two main support posts of her narrative, while their Parisian contemporaries -- among them Colette, Fitzgerald and Hemingway -- are visible throughout, and a host of others from Homer through Kate Millet, including, most notably, Oscar Wilde, provide a wide variety of decorative flourishes -- both interior and exterior. While Fun Home is the most culturally grounded of any comics memoir yet published, this isn't to imply in any way shape or form that this is a dry or overly bookish work. Not at all. It is vibrantly alive. Alison and her parents are vividly rendered in both language and line. The narrative pacing, the flow of the images across each page, the delineation of the facial expressions, body language and fashion sense of the characters, the recreation of the ambience of her childhood home -- all are impeccable.
Fun Home tells a tale that is by
turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, that ranges in its telling from
piercingly insightful to willfully unseeing. It relates the clash
between her parents' cosmopolitan sensibilities and the small town
reality that becomes the setting for their physical existence; of their
inevitable flight into the pleasures and consolations of the text, and,
at least in her father's case, of the flesh as well. The fact of
her father being, in addition to his full time job of high school
English teacher, the third generation of his family to head the small
town's funeral home -- the "fun home" of the title -- is almost too
fitting. The entire book is rife with such parallels,
coincidences and synchronicities.
The structure of Bechdel's narrative
interweaves
the biography of her father -- as well as, although to a far lesser
extent, that of her mother -- with her own autobiography. Their
stories intersect and cross back and forth in time and space, creating
a crazy quilt of a story that one senses exactly captures the way these
experiences are organized in her memory, providing a singularly honest
self portrait.
It
is the question of sexual
identity (or, gender identity and sexual preference, if you prefer)
that is the gradually revealed center of the relationship between
father and daughter, and the book as well. This question
leads the reader inevitably to the classic quandary of the heritability
of
homosexuality. Bechdel
clearly presents us with a picture where both genetic predisposition
and
home environment play a role, but where one begins and the other ends
is left entirely open, allowing the reader the rare opportunity to confront this
question in an intelligent, neutral setting where her or his
preconceptions
can be clearly and calmly examined.
It is no mean feat to accomplish this. This debate
leads to
the ultimate -- and essentially Christian -- question of the primacy of
spiritual versus corporeal* paternity, with the
shared spirituality on
display here being comprised primarily of self-motivated interaction
with the great works produced by the aforementioned pantheon of
literary and artistic forbears.
All
in all, Fun Home is a wholly
absorbing portrait of the artist as a young woman that provides its
readers with an engaging experience liberally seasoned throughout with
original and unique insights into the human
condition, but that leaves us with one tantalizing question:
"Alison, why comics?" There is a gaping elision in this tale as
to how and why it came to be told in comics. Based on the
evidence given, one would assume that it should have taken the standard
written form, as aside from the standard cursory -- and entirely normative -- portrayals of her drawing as a child and a
single example of her doodling on a page of Joyce's Ulysses (an admittedly choice
metaphor) the only reference to comics in the entire work is the
seemingly derogatory example of one of her father's army bunkmates
reading an issue of Haunt of Fear
while her father occupied himself with the weightier-by-contrast fare
of a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. So, Ms. Bechdel,
should you ever decide to return to this work in the future for any
revisions, please consider this request that you provide a prologue
and/or epilogue that discusses your discovery that you were a comics
artist. Or, better yet, save this for the sequel.
Hardcover
240 pages
ISBN-13/EAN:
9780618477944
ISBN-10: 0618477942
_________________________________
*Bechdel's
employment of
"consubstantial" in place of corporeal is revealing in as much as this
term is at the center of this very debate on paternal primacy. When
it is theologically employed it speaks of Christ's shared substance
with God and the Holy Spirit as well as with mankind and so already
contains the essence of the question she is addressing: are human
beings primarily spiritual or biological creations? (back)
_________________________________
retail price - $19.95
NEW: softcover edition
retail
price - $13.95
copacetic price - $12.50
ALSO:
There's a wonderful
interview between Alison Bechdel and cartoonist Craig Thompson (Blankets)
moderated by Dave Weich for Powells.com in which Ms. Bechdel addresses,
in brief -- among
much else of interest -- the root of her decision to become a
cartoonist. Read it now!
prices and
availability
current as of 10 November 2010