Review of Fun Home

I reviewed the book for TCJ when it came out. Ng Suat Tong says it’s more favorable in tone than my recent post. I know I didn’t bring up the business about Bechdel’s dad dropping out of grad school. But what strikes me is what a dreadful first sentence the piece has. I must have been paid by the preposition.

And now …
“Puzzle Palace”

Fun Home
is a set of seven essays about Bechdel’s memories of her father, a dominating but highly sissified man who led a secret life of chasing after boys while he raised his family and outfitted the family’s home as a sort of museum devoted to his particular aesthetic (cream settees, lilacs, “silk flowers, glass flowers, needlepoint flowers”). The book takes you inside a baffling childhood, one where not a whole lot could be counted on to hold steady, to match its official description. “My father began to seem mortally suspect to me long before I actually knew he  had a dark secret,” Bechdel writes above a picture of her young self watching Dad apply his bronzing stick. Bechdel herself was gay and didn’t know it until college. Until then, she lived with a sense that she and her father were misfits for their proper roles — “inverts” was the the term she adopted later, “the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.” While at Oberlin, she did some thinking and came out. Her mother then told her about Mr. Bechdel’s secret life and soon began talking about a divorce. A few months later Mr Bechdel was dead. He jumped in front of a truck, but he jumped backwards, so whether his death was a suicide is hard to say. Fun Home admits the question is open but states its preference: Bechdel thinks her father killed himself because she managed to tell the truth.

Fun Home puzzles over how Bechdel was cheated by the biggest figure in her life. Her father was an outsized personality, but to be around him was somehow to be in the presence of an absence. Fully as he lived it, his life was not really his, and everybody close to him felt the effects. “He really was there all those years,” Bechdel writes, ” a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwood, polishing the finials, smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.” Bechdel sees her father’s life as a slow retroactive suicide, and she says the beautiful mansion where he housed his family was tainted by his sexual self-hatred: “His shame inhabited our house as invisibly and pervasively as as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany.” In fact he turned his house into a kind of labyrinth. “Mirrors, distracting bronzes, multiple doorways. Visitors often got lost upstairs,” Fun Home says. Her father’s instinct was to baffle others and hide his real self. It’s no surprise that Fun Home is constructed as a set of riddles instead of a straightforward narrative.

     Bechdel kept her eyes open, and she has thought long and hard about what she saw. The book’s panels are full of painstaking physical detail (right down to headlines for newspapers, graffiti next to a dorm telephone and the dictionary entry for “queer cubbin”). More important, Fun Home is honest about painful moments and highly intelligent about tracing their roots. At points Bechdel seems to X-ray the life she and her family shared, to see it all right down to the bones. Not that the book is cold-blooded. It’s chilly, but it’s human. There’s humor and plenty of day-to-day detail about the family. Most of all, Bechdel seems to care a great deal about the lives she’s dissecting.

The approach is high-toned and literary, so expect allusions, symbols, hidden meanings, hidden jokes, obtrusive elegance. Each chapter in Fun Home wind its way about one aspect or another of the family situation: obsessiveness (“The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death”), the unspoken drive to hold back unwelcome secrets (“The Ideal Husband”), Alison’s creeping sense that she and her father are not what they’re supposed to be (the well-named “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”). The essays are so well constructed they snake you into their guts. The book is dense, but it’s a fast read and it locks the reader inside its atmosphere. The ink wash and the ever-present captions make the events feel like exhibits, and not in a bad way. It’s as if a person’s mind had been made into an ingeniously laid-out museum and we got to walk the halls. The tone of the place is hypnotically ruminative, grave, mordant. The narration is always at your elbow, and it’s silver-edged in the extreme. When it doesn’t connect, the writing gets a bit Bulwer-Lytton. (“It was a benign and well-lit underworld, admittedly, but Odysseus sailing to Hades could have not felt more trepidation than I did entering that room.”) But often enough it does connect, and either way the tone is set.

The drawing shows traces of Bechdel’s old Edward Gorey influence, which comes in handy. It’s childlike and also funereal, a good combination for the subject, but of course it doesn’t have anything like Gorey’s bizarre expressiveness. Bechdel’s figures are stiff, and their expressions don’t always rise to what’s demanded. Draw the smallest mouths in comicdom and you’ll get “elated” Mr. Bechdel, “manic” Mr. Bechdel, and young Alison (“limp with admiration”) all looking a lot the same, which is to say irate. The book’s greatest technical strength is its layout. Comics layout is a great craft for meshing, for guiding attention with interlocking sequences of forms and angles, and Fun Home does it well for page after page. The book has a certain suave command that prevails over any faults in the writing and drawing, and its source is the skill with which one subject is flipped into another. The layout is crucial to the effect.

In fact, Fun Home shows how useful comics can to be to the high-gloss literary approach of hidden meanings and look-at-me elegance. Using both words and pictures provides more crevices for sliding in implications and secret jokes (the cucumber in the upper left-hand panel of a page in “The Ideal Husband” is not only lined up suggestively with Mr. Bechdel’s profile, it mirrors the spread legs of the randy Dr. Gryglewicz in the page’s lower right-hand corner). Also, the illusion of coherence is deepened when you have two sets of signs to play with. Not only do the words chime together, but the pictures chime with the words. Bechdel writes “my father’s life was a solipsistic circle of self” and places the caption atop a circle highlighting the small area on the map where her father spent his life. There’s no real connection between the caption’s point (that her father centered his life on himself) and the image’s point (that he lived and died in one town). But it feels as if there were.

I mention the “illusion of coherence” because Fun Home has an odd sort of fault. The book has substance and it’s elegantly done, but the elegance has been brought about through a certain amount of fraud. Most of the book’s transitions are enabled by a network of allusions to Camus, Shakespeare, Wilde, Proust and others. The allusions do great work as a kind of trellis, a technical convenience for laying out the good stuff, the facts and feelings. But as statements they don’t always add up to much. Mr. Bechdel was reading Albert Camus’s A Happy Death before he died, he had a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus from college, a college photograph shows Mr. Bechdel smoking, and Camus smoked. And so what? “But in a way Gatsby’s pristine books and my father’s worn ones signify the same thing — the preference of a fiction to reality.” Yeah, all right, whichever. When Greek myth comes in, it turns out Mr. Bechdel managed to be Daedalus, Icarus and the Minotaur. Maybe he was also King Minos and the guy who sold tickets out front.

Any literary bafflement aside, Bechdel had the brains and honesty to analyze a painful situation and to be true to the feelings that came with it. Life piled some atmospheric details atop the Bechdel household’s basic plight. Mr. Bechdel was an undertaker on the side, and we see the Bechdel children polishing caskets and viewing bodies. The house was still unrenovated and moldering in Bechdel’s early childhood, so she has potent memories of looking at Charles Addams cartoons. But all of that’s incidental. The heart of Bechdel’s book is about growing up in a home where the family’s common ground has been poisoned. Her father addressed her mother as “you”; her mother claimed there was no story about how they met. “My parents seemed almost embarrassed by the fact of their marriage,” Bechdel says. To survive emotionally, she remembers, all the family members had to fend for themselves. They retreated into separate capsules of obsession: music, model airplanes, Bechdel’s drawing, her father’s refitting of the house. “Our selves were all we had,” she writes.

Fun Home is fine work and sometimes unbearably poignant. Several chapters manage a last panel in which drawing, writing and layout come together to hit a high note. A girl lies by her father’s tombstone and looks at the sky. Father and daughter are seen through separate windows, together in a room but oblivious to each other. Call the scenes greeting cards for isolation, but the effect is still overwhelming, and it’s typical of this somber, skillful and heartfelt memoir.

16 thoughts on “Review of Fun Home

  1. I just put in an order for a used copy of FUN HOME. I read it once, along with lots of reviews, including this one and Noah’s scorcher. I put it off for a long time due to my ambivalence toward Bechdel’s pronouncements on gender/sexual identity issues.
    I read the TCj interview with Bechdel and she said something like “the family is a disease”- a clear indication to me that ideology trumps reality..
    it often seems like advocates like Bechdel make what seems to me like a self-defeating argument: My status as a gay individual is a matter of identifying the reality of my self.I’m the ‘a’ to your ‘b’, yet, if you have a problem with this, it’s because you refuse to acknowledge the varied expressions human sexuality can make for. So, her father is living a “lie”, the same lie she could have lived if she weren’t smart/brave enough to call herself an ‘a’. Her Father indulges in solipsism as a way to buffer himself from reality, while Bechdel, ironically, seems (from what I’ve read) only able to view her fathers’ “issue” through the lens of her issues with her own sexuality. Could it be that her father had issues that couldn’t be resolved by calling himself an ‘a’? Maybe some of the concerns that led him to choose the life that involved her being born into a family, as opposed to him calling himself an ‘a’, were not only legitimate, but righ, as in “good”?
    It almost seems like making that distinction, to an activist/advocate like Bechdel, is similar to some kind of baptismal rite.A clear-cut distinction must be made. I dub thee an a (even though you “b’d” my mother a few times, it seems..) Why can’t his experience be viewed as another varied expression, another legitimate way of life? A life like most, full of conflict and drama?
    Is it really a tragedy? Is it fair to even consider the idea that the father committed suicide because he refused to adopt the distinction that has given his daughter a sense of righteousness and meaning?
    Solipsism? hmmmm….
    I’m not so sure he did commit suicide, and even if he did, it seems exploitive to me to use his death in such a way. The literary illusions, the crafty layouts and narrative hooks; these seem to me to be used not to open up the greater mysteries of this one man, or to venture possibilities, but instead to conveniently offer to the author and reader alike the sense that they have an authority over the life of this man that is not only unearned, but impossible. So, what is ostensibly an humanistic effort ends up dehumanizing, as the mystery of her father, the man who seemingly did his best help create a good life for his daughter, is sacrificed to the ideologue’s notion of what ought to be.

  2. I think I’d probably agree with some of that. Speaking for her father, which she’s doing in some sense, does end up being dicey…and I found the book’s conclusions smug in some ways as well.

    I’m not sure calling her an ideologue makes a lot of sense to me. She has beliefs and those beliefs shape what she sees…but that’s the case for everybody, surely. The book really isn’t especially didactic or hectoring; it’s more about her relationship to her father than it is about her particular views of the closet, though obviously the two are intertwined.

  3. First- It should read “literary allusions”, of course.

    Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. I think t’s always much easier for those with contrary views on any given subject to see ideology behind their oppositions statements. To those in total sympathy to her views, it seems like obvious truth.
    I think there is a distinction to make between belief and ideology though.I think it’s in recognizing appropriate limits to ones idea of how things ought to be,why, and how. To Bechdel, her Father shoulda been an out, fabulous gay man. I see no tragedy in him not wanting to be so, even if I believe that he may have been happier if he had.He had the ability to make those decisions for himself, and he chose. I almost feel like his sovereignty, as an individual, has been stripped from him.

  4. I guess I just feel like your issue with her is that you disagree with where she’s coming from, rather than that she’s an ideologue per se.

    In any case, your criticism seems well put. I guess I’d just add that a lot of her discussion of her dad’s life is in reference to how it affected her — that is, his being in the closet had unpleasant effects on her life. It’s not necessarily fair for a child to judge a parent in that way…but it is, also, very natural, and also fair at least to some extent. Parents are responsible for their children in a lot of complicated ways; having a kid is giving up your sovereignty as an individual already, at least to some extent.

  5. Clearly, to Bechdel, her father “should” not have necessarily been an out, fabulously gay man, since this likely would have meant Bechdel’s own non-existence. This is something she notes in the book, and is the source of much ambivalence. In fact, she notes that his queerness may not be definable as “gay,” and perhaps she is projecting her own identity onto him. She’s smart enough not to turn the book into a big political statement…although obviously she has liberal politics on the issue.

  6. I didn’t remember that she mentioned that; it’s been a long time since I read it.

  7. Yeah, I don’t remember that either.
    I’m not suggesting that Bechdel doesn’t have a “right” to tell her story as she sees it, I’m just uncomfortable with how she handled aspects of it. I think it’s difficult to draw a clean line between a parents’ influence on a child, and each persons’ ability to make decisions or lead lives that break from said influence. I think to treat the familial relationship as though it is some kind of intractable, single organism- in other words to not make the distinction I mentioned, is something that is pretty unfair, imo. It’s too pat. And I think it does hve the effect of stripping sovereignty , something that a family, imo, should do it’s best to maintain without denying the deeply rooted influence family members have on one another. That line is crossed more severely, I think, in Bechdels’ implication that her father killed himself, in part, because of her ability to come out. That’s something that I’d never feel comfortable doing.
    If what Eric B. wrote is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, I still think that Alison would encourage queers, including her father, to come out. She believes that is the more healthy and good option in a general sense.

  8. Hey Uland, good to see you again. One thing to bear in mind is that Bechdel lived out the experiences described in her book. You might think a man might be happy enough marrying and raising a family while chasing boy-tail on the side, and it’s true that one guy or another might be happy that way. But a lot of men wouldn’t and the evidence in the book suggests that Mr. Bechdel wasn’t, that in some way he wished he had come out. Bechdel talked with her father, she read his letters, and she lived with him thru what sound like 18 years of a highly tense and frequently unhappy family life. She vass dere, Charlie.

    If you can point to evidence backing your suspicions, that’s one thing; otherwise I’ll stick with my estimate of the book. Everyone’s an unreliable narrator, but that doesn’t mean any given narrator is unreliable in a way that suits our preconceptions.

  9. Oh yeah, eric b is right about Bechdel’s noting that a gay-liberated dad would have been a dad who didn’t produce her. I’d say she acknowledges the problem more than explores it; still, for me that was enough.

  10. My points have nothing to do with “happiness”. That’s not really a measure I’m concerned with. My point is that he made his choice, and it’s something that you can either respect or not. I see no reason not to, as I’m not so sure his “issues” would’ve been rectified by employing Ms. Bechdel’s ideas about how it ought to be, or, for that matter, the pursuit of “happiness”. Mr. Bechdel felt, for whatever reason, that the life he’d chosen for himself was worth more to him than pursuit of pleasure. It’s clear he was conflicted and had major lapses, but he made his choice nonetheless. It’s not a tragedy, in my view, that he chose what he chose.I think it may have been just as tragic for him to have gone the other way; the other side of the conflict lost out, and it’s clearly the side that he fought for for many years. I think that should tell us what he valued, even if he wasn’t able to do it as well as he would’ve liked to .

  11. Easy to say happiness doesn’t matter if you weren’t there. The choice Mr. Bechdel appears to have created a good deal of misery. Why shouldn’t that matter to his daughter, especially since it seemed to matter to him too?

    Where is your evidence that Mr. Bechdel chose the straight life for its positive virtues and not because he was afraid? Your only argument is that he lived his life in the closet: “that should tell us what he valued, even if he wasn’t able to do it as well as he would’ve liked to.” But his sticking with the closeted life doesn’t, in itself, tell us why he stuck with the closeted life.

  12. -As far as Allison being there and me, uh, not, I guess I’d say that we can only go on what she tells us, but if the reader can’t make the leap from what we’re being told to the conclusions we’re meant accept, it’s something I see no reason not to mention. It’s a story, after all; it’s what the author is telling us about what happened and nothing more.

  13. Tom- In response to your second post:

    This is sort of what I mean by respecting his sovereignty; it came down to him, his choice. What reason do you have to believe that it was out of fear? He certainly had very little fear in taking on eccentric interests, nor was he somehow intellectually or culturally sheltered from ideas about a larger gay world out there that he could be a part of. But he didn’t. He didn’t want to. He could have, but he chose to basically not ruin his family life. Was he “afraid” of ruining his family life? Probably. Because he valued it.
    The only reason I see to believe that his narrative “should have” gone the other route is because that is the dominant gay narrative today. It’s Allisons’ and it’s the one with the most cultural weight behind it. Like most ideas with the most cultural weight behind it in our culture, it seems to be ‘about’ the attainment of some kind of “happiness” that is everywhere in general but nowhere in particular. There are plenty of miserable, openly gay people. It’s not because they’ve been damaged by a or b, it’s because people have a tendency to be miserable. I’m not comfortable making the assumption that her Fathers’ troubles would have ceased, if only…
    One social force that seems to me, at least, to transcend this nowhere happiness sale, is family. It’s sort of a basic Western value, Tom.
    We can’t know what he thought. We know what he did. I’m not attributing my own values to his choices, I’m respecting his decision.

  14. Hi, Uland. Your line of approach here is entirely unexpected by me, which is probably good. Let’s see if I make sense on Fun Home when the other guy doesn’t share my assumptions.

    On one point it sounds like we might be talking about two different things. You: Mr. B’s decision not to come out of the closet after having his family. Me (and I think the book): his decision to have a family in the first place, to try to live as straight when he was gay.

    The above doesn’t make our differences go away, but I think it reduces at least some of the element of second-guessing you find in the book. (If second-guessing is the right term. I mean this feeling you have that Bechdel simply disrespects her father’s life choice and is using her book to make a case against that choice. If I have your objections right, of course.)

    Okay, how do I know Mr. B chose the straight life out of fear? All I can say is that the available evidence points that way. Scared people are unhappy; he appears to have been unhappy. And, on seeing his daughter come out, he didn’t ask what the hell was wrong with her and reproach her for abandoning the mission of creating a family and keeping the human race going. He wrote to her about how much he admired Kate Millett for speaking out about being gay. He tried to go with his daughter to a gay bar.

    That’s the evidence she gives. It may not match your sense of things at large, of the nature of straight and gay. But very often facts don’t match our sense of how they should be. That mismatch is not in itself a reason to dismiss the facts.

    Of course you can read thru Bechdel’s book with a notebook and pencil and look for reasons to doubt her version of things, for discrepancies, for rhetorical tricks, for areas that she doesn’t want to talk about. There are some loose ends there. If you see a case to make, go ahead and make it.

    Okay, the role of family. My sense of Bechdel, after reading her and reading about her, is that she feels a few different ways about the family. She has a lot more ambivalence about it than you do, but she’s not out to abolish the thing and she doesn’t see the family, in itself, as being the enemy. My advice would be go to back to that TCJ interview and look hard at the quote you remember, the “family as disease” quote. The exact words and context might produce a different effect than you remember — it’s easy for these things to take on a new life in memory.

    Finally, my personal starting assumption in the matter of Mr. Bechdel’s life is that, if your foot hurts when you run, then you’re running the wrong way. If the way of life you choose produces misery, then you have chosen the wrong life. Maybe this belief is an offshoot of some modern therapeutic ideology that I accept without thinking about. But life just seems hard enough, and people are so different from one another. The idea of a way of life being right for one person and miserable for another seems natural to me, and so does the idea that each person should choose the way of life that doesn’t make him/her miserable.

    Mr. Bechdel’s “wrong” choice made Alison Bechdel’s life possible, which is one reason I use quotes for “wrong.” Sizing up somebody else’s life is probably impossible to do right: there are too many sides to consider. But Bechdel seems to know as much. I don’t think I would have liked the book otherwise, since I’m not interested in gay liberation advocacy.

  15. No, I think you’re right about a lot of things here, Tom. I’m so interested in the book because it’s basically a family drama. This one includes “the gay issue”, but plenty of family dramas don’t, and they also tend to involve family members feeling conflicted or deeply unhappy.It seems like children in families without gay parents often grow up and come to believe that, at the root of their family dynamic, there is disfunction, and that disfunction is often conveniently blamed upon one parent, or both, making the “wrong choice”. If you’re parents stay together, yet seem unhappy, they “should have” divorced. If they divorced, it’s chalked up to some kind of intractable wrong choice.
    But- and this seems obvious- it’s never that simple. I don’t think, to Mr. Bechdel, it was as simple as coming out or not. I don’t think Allison ever comes out and says that, but it is presented as the central question surrounding his conflict. It’s hers; she is an “invert” and so is he. Regardless of the choices he made, she has him pegged. He didn’t cop to the reality that she was able to.
    I just don’t buy it.
    I’m not sure where the idea that he would- if he valued family- react to his daughters’ coming-out in a negative way. That seems too binary to me. It could very well be that he remained confused about his “real” orientation throughout his life, or it’s something that he chose to not delve into as much as Allison thought was necessary.
    I don’t see why, in full recognition of how multi-varied human sexuality can be, and in recognition of an individuals ability to make determinations of that sort for themselves ( or decide not to), that it is safe to say that he, as an “invert” ought to have done ‘a’ or ‘b’.
    It’s not didactic; it’s dressed in convenient allusions and not-so-subtle narrative cues. After all, it wouldn’t work as the “tragedy” it’s billed as, if there weren’t a clear misstep, or fatal, obvious flaw.
    I don’t think it’s that obvious.
    It isn’t so much that I doubt the veracity of certain incidents, it’s that I’m not willing to believe that she, someone who is clearly invested in viewing sex/gender in ways that she has clearly stated as a “Dyke to watch out for” ( It’s telling to me that her college experience essentially radicalized her, and allowd her to see her family in a “new” ( i.e, correct) way), is willing to make room for possibilities that don’t fit the theory.
    I think she needed to arrive at a narrative that she could live with; she made a choice that defined her from that point on.Her Father couldn’t do it. That’s the real tragedy, from her perspective, I think.
    Again, I’m not willing to assume that that was the obvious, right and good choice.
    It’s more tragic, to me, that his choice is being presented by his daughter as a tragedy.

    -I’ll reread the interview once I get that copy of the book in the mail.
    If it reads differently to me, I’ll let you know.

  16. Okay, we’ve got two different views here, but I guess we knew that. I’m kind of Bechdeled-out from reviewing Essential Dykes, but I’ll also take a second look at her interview and see how it hits.

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