| |
Review of
Alison
Bechdel 's Fun
Home: A Family Tragicomic 
Houghton
Mifflin, 2007
By Porter
Shreve
I must be one of the few writers under forty-five whose childhood desk
didn’t spill over with comic books, or whose work doesn’t find room
for Super Goat men, amazing adventurers, or families that resemble the
Fantastic Four. So I’ve been late to catch on to the graphic narrative
craze – okay, perhaps a little reluctant. But if Fun
Home: A Family Tragicomic is even remotely representative of
the genre then the scales have fallen from my eyes. This memoir by widely
syndicated comic strip writer Alison Bechdel (of Dykes to Watch
Out For) is not only impeccably drawn, but also full of taut, lyrical,
highly literate language, clearly the work of someone who spent her
childhood in books. Her father divides his work schedule between running
a local funeral home, teaching high school English and obsessively restoring
the Victorian house where the family lives in small town Pennsylvania.
“I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children
and his children like furniture,” Bechdel writes. One reason for her
bookishness is that it gives her access to the codified language of
her repressed parents, and as a writer she uses this language to show
connections between her own family and the lives of writers and characters
in literature: Fitzgerald’s self-destruction mirrors her father’s, Isabel
Archer’s failed dreams are too much like her mother’s, and her reading
and rereading of Ulysses contains many clues about her father’s closeted
homosexuality and its consequences. “His shame inhabited our house as
pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany,” Bechdel
writes. And shame may or may not have killed him, when one afternoon
at age 44 he steps in front of a Sunbeam bread truck. Suicide or accident?
The author has her opinions, and it’s this sorting out and coming to
something like understanding that makes Fun
Home so heartbreaking and artful, a graphic memoir that could
have been told no other way.
Porter
Shreve is the author of the novels The
Obituary Writer and Drives
Like a Dream. His third novel, When the White House Was
Ours, will be published next year. Co-editor of the anthology Contemporary
Creative Nonfiction: I & Eye, he directs the creative writing
program at Purdue University.
|