Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison BechdelMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
This is a memoir, a story of the author's life focusing on her childhood in a quiet Midwest town, living in a large, ornately-decorated Gothic revival house with her high school teacher parents and a pair (?) of brothers... Just add Bechdel to the long list of modern authors whose last names I can't pronounce. I guess I can just call her Alison, or "Al," or "Butch".
To me this book was little more than a long line of overly ornate descriptions, a bit of oddly-misplaced literary stuffiness, and, above all else, excruciatingly dragged out and overdone self analysis. Why must everything, I asked myself, from Al's childhood be analyzed through the lens of her thirty-something college-educated dykedom? That she is gay and that her father turned out to be gay as well does not strike me as the perfect opportunity for garish overstretched comparisons. And that she has read so much does not give her an excuse for stretching those comparisons really thin, to relate her life to many books of our posterity.
At some point, Alison and her brothers are taken to some construction site and given a tour. On the wall of one of the temporary huts she sees some pornography, and, feeling uncomfortable, whispers to her brother to call her Albert and treat her like a boy. What follows is an honest to goodness line from the story: "My brother ignored me, but looking back, my stratagem strikes me as a precocious feat of Proustian transposition -- not to mention a tidy melding of Proust's real Albert and his fictional Albertine." I doubled over laughing like the bitch that I am.
The story is dominated by her father, closeted of course, an OCD-type, detached and disinterested. He had a love for the ornate -- and he loved his house, he could "spin trash into gold" (and of course he gets compared to Daedalus more than once). Alison stresses how she developed a liking for the utilitarian as a result, as a kind of youth in rebellion -- unfortunately, the OCD rubbed off completely intact, and if anything, this love for the utilitarian just makes things worse.
Alison reminds me of someone: this woman who lives at the end of my street, who has sharp features, glasses, and a never-ending scowl on her face. She and her significant other, a soggy old man who seems almost friendly next to her, have spent probably thousands of hours tending to their pride and joy, their little postage stamp of a lawn. They have probably spent good money on it, too: they have had the grass professionally replaced three times (and it still looks like shit, patchy and brown). Recently (the middle of winter, I remind you) while walking the dogs, my sister had the great misfortune of walking across their tree lawn while crossing the street. The curtain snapped open and that woman, as if alerted by some sort of "neurotic Spidey Senses," snarled out at us. Luckily, I called my sister back and she stepped back into the street just in time. Flushed with triumph, I had the cheek to smile and wave. She closed the curtain shortly after. People around here have called the police for less.
Not to count out the entire legion of short-haired, glasses-wearing women out there. Some of the best people I've known have had almost no hair, and making fun of four-eyes is not polite. But Alison... to me, her mind is too narrowly fixed, and her ideas, while occasionally encouragingly relevant and on the mark (google "The Bechdel Test"), are too heavily painted by her imperfect use of words. For me they are also masked, concealed behind their creator's body and mind, which I simply cannot traverse, or even... ahem, penetrate. And so, for once it seems best to me to simply "agree to disagree" with this Alison Bechdel character (assuming she can swallow the cliche, of course :D).
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