Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic qualifies as the best single graphic novel written and illustrated by a woman, and that's not an honor "by default." Female cartoonists and creators like Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi gradually have carved out a respected niche in the comic book genre, a field for generations dominated by male sensibilities. No matter who created Fun Home, the memoir would be a major book, in which the dance of word and picture evokes complex emotions more powerfully than text or image could alone.
For years, Bechdel has produced "Dykes to Watch Out For," a sapphic comic strip whose clean drawing style and long-running storylines prove reminiscent of Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury." Bechdel's craft makes a significant advance for Fun Home, which traces the shadows cast over her childhood by her father, an emotionally remote, closeted homosexual. In the opening chapter, her father's loving, obsessive restoration of the family's gothic revival home sharply contrasts with the emotional sterility for the two adults and three children who live there. Bechdel puts a blue-gray tint over her illustrations, as if she's drafting a blueprint of the household tensions.
Appearing at Outwrite Books on Sept. 26, Bechdel thoroughly digs into the history of her own adolescence and family scandal. Fun Home's narrative incorporates such documents as her childhood diary and documents from her father's legal troubles. Bechdel ingeniously speculates how fissures in her family life shaped her homosexuality, artistic sensibility and other facets of her character, and at times she departs from the melancholy content for an amusing observation. Her father worked at the family-owned funeral home, nicknamed "the fun home," and Bechdel counts parallels between her girlhood and "The Addams Family."
The simplicity of Bechdel's writing style contrasts with her ornate word choice and elaborate literary references to Proust, Wilde and Joyce. When she recounts a youthful visit to New York City shortly after the Stonewall riots, she wonders, "Might not a lingering vibration, a quantum particle of rebellion, still have hung in the humectant air?" Fun Home turns such reveries of writerly self-consciousness into an advantage. It's like she's paying tribute to the influence of her book-obsessed father, and how literature provided a precious point of connection. Alison Bechdel's father withheld himself from his family, and may even have taken his own life, but Fun Home concludes that, at the very least, he helped to give his daughter her voice.
Fun Home. Alison Bechdel, Houghton Mifflin Co. 232 pp. $19.95.
