Week 8: Fun House: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (Mariner, 2006, paperback)
Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel begins with images of a father playfully spinning his daughter in the air with his legs. Bechdel uses this happy moment as counterpoint to the rest of the novel, which depicts the emotional distance between her and her father. The irony that each of them struggles with their sexuality—the father’s relationships with young men and the daughter with other women—emphasizes the distance between them.
Bechdel relates her coming-of-age narrative as a black/white graphic novel, yet this is no comic book or superhero tale. This is a reality presented through text and visual, with moments of graphic sex paired with stories of Greek gods. At the heart of the novel is Bechdel’s attempt, through the story of her youthful struggles and her father’s untimely (or perhaps timely, as Bechdel wonders) death, to understand herself, her sexuality and her father. The visuals and text, as in any successful graphic novel, play off of each other, each giving us insights that the other cannot. When the text is elusive in details, the visual is specific (such as Bechdels’ first sexual experiences); when the visuals cannot go beyond the surface, the text provides us metaphorical contexts (such as the father-son myth of Daedalus and Icarus.)
Bechdel’s story is gripping in its honesty, its literary depth, and its visuals. We share her frustrations with a father that, as she says, “treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture” (14). His obsession with the aesthetic provides insight into a man attempting to manage an image, on the surface, when he apparently cannot control the urges beneath. Yet Bechdel’s presentation is not as much as anger at her father’s distance but of frustrated incomprehension—what drove her father to this life? Her search for answers is revealed through her own life; and we can tangentially uncover her father’s motives.
I highly recommend this novel. It weaves together the narrative strengths of text and visual to bring us into her father’s manufactured world and her own dawning recognition of herself.
Next week . . . Liason by Joyce Wadler.