(what happens)

Fun Home

I first came across Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic when Amazon recommended it as I checked out on another comics purchase. I had heard her name, or glimpsed it on a blog somewhere, and the Amazon readers’ reviews were so positive, that I decided to take a chance and buy the book.  I’m so glad I did, as this is among the best examples of comic art that I’ve come across.

I discovered, in the few days that I waited for my copy to arrive, that the book has been reviewed very positively in all kinds of places (including Time magazine calling it the best book of 2006).

The story is woven around a telling of Bechdel’s father’s story — his aestheticism, his misadventures with young men, his death (likely suicide) in a collision with a bread delivery truck.  Although Bechdel’s own life is told — especially aspects of her sexuality — really, the fundamental aspect of the book is her relationship with her father.

It’s a wonderfully allusive, intelligent book, a very good example of how words and images can work together, and work intelligently against one other, each medium subtly reinforcing or undermining the other.  I love Bechdel’s attention to etymology, her several returns to words’ and phrases’ origins and history to draw out precise meanings and allusions.  And her various references to great books and writers — Proust, Camus, Joyce, Fitzgerald — are interesting and add to the depth of her text.

Which makes it sound like a heady read… Which it is.  But it’s also a deeply moving story — above all, it is this.  It’s great to find a book that tells its story so intelligently and so movingly at once.  And especially so when the story loops back into the unexplainable bond between daughter and father, the deep truth that ‘he was there to catch me when I leapt,’ despite everything else that he was and wasn’t within the family.

Bechdel’s drawings are sensitive — there’s a clear sense of a particular person being represented, especially in the case of her father — but also now and then extremely comic.  In the portraits of her father, I have a sense of him being quite lovingly evoked, as if she recalled him as she drew him — in the sense that she called him back from the dead.  Throughout, the drawings are coloured in pale blue-green washes — at one point, she describes the exact moment at which she abandoned colour in her artwork.

‘Fun Home’ is a shortening of Funeral Home, the setting for much of the story.  There is fun in the book, but above all I found it to be deeply touching.  Bechdel is a great storyteller, and this is a great book.