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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This autobiography by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, deals with her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and proprietor of the local funeral parlor (the former allowed him access to teen boys). Fun Home refers both to the funeral parlor, where he put makeup on the corpses and arranged the flowers, and the family's meticulously restored gothic revival house, filled with gilt and lace, where he liked to imagine himself a 19th-century aristocrat. The art has greater depth and sophistication that Dykes; Bechdel's talent for intimacy and banter gains gravitas when used to describe a family in which a man's secrets make his wife a tired husk and overshadow his daughter's burgeoning womanhood and homosexuality. His court trial over his dealings with a young boy pushes aside the importance of her early teen years. Her coming out is pushed aside by his death, probably a suicide. The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best. Bechdel presents her childhood as a "still life with children" that her father created, and meditates on how prolonged untruth can become its own reality. She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* This is a father and daughter story. Bechdel's mother and two brothers are in it, of course, but Bruce Bechdel had the biggest impact on his eldest child and so is naturally the other main character in her autobiographical graphic novel. Emotionally and physically reserved, to the point of brusqueness, he busied himself restoring--and then some--the Victorian-era house he bought for the family in the Pennsylvania town in which he was born and lived virtually all his 44 years. He enlisted the kids for never-ending interior and exterior modifications of the place in what obviously was his major creative outlet. For a living, he taught twelfth-grade English and ran the small undertaking business that occupied part of his parents' house and that the kids called the fun home. Bechdel doesn't even hint about how ironic she and her brothers meant to be, because she is a narrative artist, not a moralist or comedian, in this book and because she has a greater, real-life irony to consider. After disclosing her lesbianism in a letter home from college, her mother replied that her father was homosexual, too. Alison suddenly understood his legal trouble over buying a beer for a teenage boy, all the teen male "helpers" he had around the house, and his solo outings during family vacations to New York. Bechdel's long-running Dykes to Watch Out For is arguably the best comic strip going, and Fun Home is one of the very best graphic novels ever. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
read it in the bath in one go,
By saskia noordzij (montreal) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Hardcover)
utterly compelling, charming, sad and humourous. compelled to keep reading,i stayed in my bath until i was completely pruney, till i reached the very last page. it was well worth emptying the hot water tank.while i have enjoyed her comic strip over the years, bechdel is clearly a much more talented, nuanced artist than "Dykes to Watch Out For" would indicate, both in terms of her visual acumen and her subtle use of structure and dialogue to capture the vagaries of memory and grief. highly recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Voyeurism Invited,
By
This review is from: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Paperback)
Ever since I can remember, I''ve loved to see inside people's homes. Maybe it's a bit of voyeurism, or the half-hidden belief that if I can see the interior of their home, I may be given a greater understanding of the true nature of their interior self' or maybe I''m just nosey.Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is a voyeur''s delight. Bechdel invites the reader into her childhood home to snoop, poke and prod at the most intimate core of family experience. No door is locked, nothing is off limits and all is revealed in the harsh glare of her formidable analytical critique. In the spotlight is Bechdel's relationship with her father; a critical, aloof, closet homosexual, more comfortable in the realm of academic philosophies and surface artifice than the often grubby and disorganized dwelling of emotional human relationships. Bechdel weaves a family tapestry filled with the excitement of discovery, the sorrow of unfulfilled need, the grief of dreams adrift and the acceptance that comes with understanding. Her story is entwined with mythological patterns that spiral back and forth between the personal and universal creating a tightly crafted 'family tragicomic'. Bechdel's art re-enforces the impact of pattern with the use of sparse, unadorned line-work, softened by flat washes. Her accessible, whimsical line style gives the reader some breathable room to absorb the almost palpable sorrow of need and loss central to the theme of father and self. A generous, intelligent autobiography, Bechdel's readers are saved from slitting their wrists in grief through her satiric sense of humour. Furniture polish is 'incipient yellow lung disease' (no really, 'it's very funny in context) and her ability to bring a black jocularity to the most sorrow-filled moments keeps you turning the page. There is a strength and courage needed to publicly reveal so much intimacy with so little gloss and cover-up ' and as such, I can allow Alison Bechdel the occasion retreat behind the screen of intelligentsia to distance the emotional impact of revealing her naked interior self to the world. With Bechdel, at times I needed a dictionary. Sometimes I required a post-graduate degree in philosophy. However, these obstacles are easily forgiven - because Alison Bechdel let me see inside her home, opened all the doors' and turned on all the lights.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful Father Portrait,
By
This review is from: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Paperback)
As Art Spiegelman proved with Maus, father memoirs can take graphic narrative form. Courageously original and lovingly honest, Fun Home is a coming of age story'a story of lesbian self-discovery'which also outs the father posthumously as a closeted gay man and a possible suicide. In intertwining her father's story with her own, Bechdel is conscious of being as ruthless as her father was in 'his monomaniacal restoration of our old house.' She, too, is a Daedalus, who answers 'not to the laws of society, but to those of [her] craft.' Profoundly personal, Fun Home is also mythic. From the opening page onward, it is a rich affirmation of Stephen Daedalus's closing words in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 'Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.' This affirmation is triumphantly validated by 'the tricky reverse narration' of Fun Home's final panels, in which Bechdel's artistically resurrected, epic father is there to catch and save her child self.
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