Overdue Review: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

So today you get a book review, which I promised to write months ago and like a typical academic (even if only a wannabe) I am pretty late in producing. Course you all may already know all about this book, as it was on the best-seller list and got some awards and such. If you've already read it, I doubt I have anything profound to say that you haven't thought of. If you already intend to read it, I suspect I may have some spoilers in here, depending on what you consider a spoiler to be. But if you'd never thought of reading it, please read on.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

As its subtitle suggest, Fun Home is both funny and sad, an autobiography in graphic novel form, but with a level of narrative skill and seriousness that few graphic novels attain. Alison's dad Bruce is infuriatingly incomprehensible--obsessed with home renovation and largely unloving toward his wife and children. He is initially figured as Dedalus (from the Icarus myth), a clever artificer but seemingly cold and heartless. Yet as the narrative progresses, winding back and forth through time and developing the girl Alison's bildungsroman, a different picture of Bruce emerges, reconstructed after his death from stories and snapshots, maps, letters, reexamined memories and the books in his library--Alison gradually discovers his human side, and as she comes to terms with her own queerness, she comes to understand his as well.

There are many marvelous things about this book. It engages the Western literary tradition--from Proust, Joyce, and Fitzgerald to James and the Giant Peach, with lots in between--in a way that would be hard to carry off in another genre. But the fact that it's all a cartoon makes the literary excursions fun rather than pretentious. The characters relate to the books in a very human way: they flip through them, read them for class, misguidedly model themselves after them, find flashes of insight or just incidental and almost meaningless correspondences. A few frames showing Alison reading (Delta of Venus; Colette) with her hand down her pants struck me as especially honest--isn't every true book-lover occasionally a ...well, ahem, lover of books? (Or am I just projecting...)

Alison's character in the novel is drawn very androgynously (except when her father forces upon her that velvet and pearls that he admires so much). The effect of this, at least for me, is surprising and thought-provoking. It does something that mere words would have a hard time doing--brings it home to you how from page one, and on every page thereafter, her sexual identity is in question. The pictures do it, so in a way the words don't have to, and the narrative is freed to explore other questions, most pointedly that of parents and children.

Based on my own experience and discussions with others, I would say that straight people can sometimes find queer lit. a little alienating--even having "nothing against" homosexuality, heck, even being quite sympathetic, fully in favor of gay rights, etc.--sometimes we just feel like it's a party that only cool people get to go to and we're not invited. So reading about it is potentially like crashing the party. But Fun Home is a reading experience that puts no wall between gayness and straightness; it is a book about being human, and sexuality of whatever sort is a part of being human which refuses to be denied. Then too, Alison's voice is confiding--about everything from the tenderness of budding breasts to the initial terror of approaching her first lover. She writes as if to someone dear to her, and in the process makes you want to hold her dear in return.

One of my favorite parts of the book was the one illustrating the development of her OCD as well as how it was "cured." What she expresses really well is how calling a phenomenon like that a mental "disease" misses something profound about how our minds work. The whole disease was just a symptom and symbol of something deeper that took on a life of its own. Getting over the symptom was one thing, and understanding its underlying causes was something else, and the two did not (as Freud would idealistically hope) necessarily go together.

This rather scattered review in no way does justice to a wonderful book (and thank you to Syd from With a Y for sending it to me! your personalized mini-review in the front cover puts mine to shame, but then you ARE a pro...). I heartily recommend it to anyone, even people who might ordinarily find queer literature off-putting or hard to get into, and even people who don't ordinarily like graphic novels. It is a carefully structured, highly readable, fascinating and thought-provoking story.

A side note, something I am curious about, and would very much like to know if anyone knows the answer to: is there a direct relationship between this book and the television series Six Feet Under? Because the similarities are incredibly striking.
1) Father is a funeral director
2) Father suddenly dies, killed by a car
3) Family lives in a funeral parlor
4) Three siblings, two boys and a girl, one of whom is gay (of course in SFU it's one of the boys)
5) One of the parents is obsessed with flowers (here, the father; in SFU the mother)
6) One of the parents is obsessed with house-renovation (in SFU, the mother and in a metaphorical sense but still...!)

I admit I've only watched a season and a half of SFU, and possibly the resemblance is coincidental, but I'm just saying, it's eerie. The two are totally different in tone and genre and overall direction, but a number of the incidental elements are similar, as is the overall feeling of silence and constraint in the family atmosphere...