Noah speaks out:
Fun Home more or less defines middle-brow, I think, at least for me. I found it really boring and predictable — earnest anecdote, earnest anecdote, moment of clarity, moment of ambivalent trasncendence, earnest anecdote…I felt like she might as well have just cut and pasted the thing from random scenes from This American Life. Yeah, there were literary references, but every time she dropped one I heard the thud. And her art does nothing for me.
Ouch! This might hurt even worse if I had ever listened to This American Life. Did David Sedaris use to do broadcasts on that show? I really liked Naked, but the book doesn’t remind me much of Fun Home.
I’ve read Bechdel’s book a few times and admire it. I think it’s intelligent and largely honest, and because of it I learned about life on the inside of a very strange and painful family situation. Making sense of a person’s life always appeals to me. I can’t really defend the art — the last decade of Dykes to Watch Out For is much better — and I can’t defend a lot of the prose. Bechdel drifts into the sort of heavy-footed word tread that causes me to make snide references to Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In fact, considering how carefully worked the book is, with its tight layouts and its apportioning of themes into enigmatic, puzzle-palace chapter-essays, it’s a comedown to reflect on how much of Fun Home’s aesthetic impact comes from simple atmospherics: the gray-green wash, the sense of remove created by having present-day captions hanging over silent scenes from the past, the mystery that comes from treating your subject as mysterious and not as a topic to be laid out and explained.
If I sat down with Alison Bechdel and spent eight hours talking about her dad and her upbringing, I might get just as much or more than I did from reading her book. But I got plenty from reading Fun Home, and I liked the book’s atmospherics. (This response, or pair of responses, may be typically middlebrow: Just give me the gist of it, but I don’t mind that other stuff as long as it’s fun.)
Bechdel strikes me as a one-armed tennis player who manages to have a good win-loss record. Very few people can have leveraged such modest creative ability into such decent results. But she did it. She’s intelligent and she looks at life from a distance that I find interesting.
I mentioned that Fun Home is not entirely honest. Out of all the problems in her father’s life, she downpedaled one: he appears to have been extremely fragile and he shaped his life to avoid risk. A couple of dots appear, but they’re not connected. She explains his return to his little hometown as the result of his rootedness in the landscape. I don’t buy it. I believe the real explanation is a nervous breakdown suffered while at graduate school. He loved books and in those days dropping out of grad school meant going into the army. Yet he dropped out. Why? My guess would be that he couldn’t hack the idea of measuring up or not measuring up at what he really loved — the same reason he didn’t move into the swim of gay life in a big city. Just a guess, of course, but as long as Bechdel leaves that clue hanging out there — the passing mention of her dad’s quitting the grad program — I’m going to throw my guesses into the mix.
In person I might be able to say, “Oh, come on, Alison” and get to the bottom of things. But it’s still fine by me to have the book version of her story.
In that Fun Home looked like one for the book clubs, readers feeling flattered when they get the allusions, I put off reading it. When I did, I found it measured and honest, and now I want to revisit it.
Oddly, considering the middlebrow discussion, it reminded me of another lesbian-father story: Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim. It’s a formally inventive, demanding (highbrow) film-essay with a number of similarities. I actually prefer Fun Home, my formalist prejudices confounded.
A note on the father: I read it as a small-town person with the imposter syndrome. He can’t imagine himself making the leap so he sabotages it, which is maybe a bridge between “rooted in place” and “nervous breakdown.”
I should say that, while I didn’t really like Fun Home, it could have been a lot worse as autobio comics go. It’s infinitely better than Jeff Brown, for example. Maybe faint praise, but there it is.
Noah, it’s okay if you don’t like the book. I read Comics Holocaust and thought it was pointless. Of course I admire anybody named Ryan willing to make a Holocaust joke. If you’re going to transgress, go balls out and deny yourself cover.
“A note on the father: I read it as a small-town person with the imposter syndrome. He can’t imagine himself making the leap so he sabotages it, which is maybe a bridge between ‘rooted in place’ and ‘nervous breakdown.'”
Hey Bill. Your theory sounds plausible to me, but who knows. In the book, Bechdel claims simply that he liked the scenery too much to leave it. Hard to believe she would present an argument so lame, but I’ve read the passage a few times and that’s what it comes down to.
“I mentioned that Fun Home is not entirely honest.”
Well, non-fiction never is, izzit? Everyone’s an unreliable narrator.
I REALLY like Fun Home. I dunno what brow it is, but I’m a craft guy and on the level of straight-ahead narrative craft it’s pretty miraculous. Instead of a straightforward this-happened-than-this-happened chronological story, she’s grouped her story into these little thematic balls, and covers the same time-span over and over, just re-emphasizing different things. I’ve never seen a story told quite like it.
Really? You feel it’s that innovative? It seems like a fairly standard narrative tactic, especially in memoir, to move in and out of different past events, playing with chronology. I’m pretty sure Nabokov does it. And Bechdel’s handling of thematic transitions struck me as pretty clunky.
Though, obviously, mine’s a minority opinion….
Tom, that is a lame argument. It’s not like she stuck around for the scenery herself, though, so maybe it sounded good to her.
Everyone’s an unreliable narrator.Woah, grad school flashback.
Noah + Tom: Why didn’t you write an extended piece about Fun Home’s mediocrity years ago when the book first came out? It was precisely the kind of thing that was needed. All those positive reviews didn’t make me want to revisit the book but your comments do. And I’m saying this even though, nitpicking aside, I feel that Fun Home was one of the best comics I’ve read in the last few years.
Another book/memoir which needs this kind of truthful negativity I feel is Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life which has been ridiculously overrated by the comics press/normal media. Hardly a negative word to be found.
Hey Ng! I’ve enjoyed some of your old review in the Journal. Thanks for stopping by!
Can’t speak for Tom, but I did think about writing about Fun Home at the time, but I wasn’t blogging yet and no other opportunity came up. So just happenstance, really.
“Noah + Tom: Why didn’t you write an extended piece about Fun Home’s mediocrity years ago when the book first came out?”
We were collaborating on our stage musical about Steve Ditko’s Charlton years, ha ha. Anyway, I don’t think Fun Home is mediocre. I think it’s very good but with some flaws. I did write an extended piece about the book when it came out: a review for TCJ. Which goes to show that, out of any three TCJ reviewers, the only one who will know about a given piece is the one who wrote it.
The Fun Homereview touched on all the negative points mentioned in my post except (I think) for the role of atmospherics. If I remember right, I simply described the atmospherics instead of implying they were a crutch. But what the hell, they’re effective.
Mainly I wanted to lay out what was going on in the book, to unwind the narrative and examine the story Bechdel was telling about her family. A middlebrow impulse, of course.
Tom: Oops, I just read your review. Since Tom is too modest to tell us which issue, let me do the honors – it is in TCJ #278. My excuse is that I wasn’t reading TCJ at the time even though I was buying issues.
Anyway, my impression is that the TCJ review was pretty glowing while your current defence seems more packed with reservations and negatives.
Fair enough. It’s all in the emphasis, I suppose.
“Really? You feel it’s that innovative? It seems like a fairly standard narrative tactic, especially in memoir, to move in and out of different past events, playing with chronology. I’m pretty sure Nabokov does it.”
Well, I’ve never seen it.
Not just comparing “now” and “then,” or “then” and “still, then, but later” but jumping back and forth over the same period of time… That’s new to me. I’m reasonably sure, at the very least that it’s never been done in memoir comics.
Mostly I’m defending the editing here – All the scenes were the right length, I never got bored, and there was a lot of information crammed into a small amount of pages.
And, come to think of it, the STORY as well. The reason I dug Fun Home more’n Jeffery Brown or Ariel Schrag’s stuff (to choose to recent examples) is that it’s more inherently interesting to me. She grew up in a funeral home? Neat! Her dad was a closet gay dude and was schlepping the ppol boy than he killed himself? Pathos!
“All the scenes were the right length, I never got bored, and there was a lot of information crammed into a small amount of pages.”
I’ll buy all that. The book is a good read, and good reads don’t happen by accident. I also agree that the story being told is very interesting.
But I’ll keep my 2 cents out of the debate over the book’s structure. For my part I have no idea if it’s original or not.
Yeah. I’m not super well read in memoir – I took a class in it, but it’s generally not something I seek out on my own – and I’ve never read Nabokov.
So I totally buy that it’s not completely original – But I’m also fairly sure that it’s not a structure that’s used that often.
(Sidenote: Ariel Schrag is a much better artist, though.)
Another book/memoir which needs this kind of truthful negativity I feel is Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life which has been ridiculously overrated by the comics press/normal media. Hardly a negative word to be found.Hey, I’m working on it. I’m already on the record with Good-Bye, but in print, so only I know about it.
Noah,
I’m not exactly sure how citing Nabakov as a precedent for looping achrolonogical narrative structures proves Fun Home’s “middlebrowness”: Nabakov’s hardly the poster child for mediocrity. Even if other books have used this particular convention before, it’s hardly so common that it’s become a cliche. One needn’t reinvent the wheel in every single book to be of value. And in this particular case, the revisiting of the same events with varying emphases suited the subject matter very well, the question of her father’s sexual identity /attempted suicide emerging or receding depending on the reading of events.
I also think Allison took great pains to establish herself as an unreliable narrator who’s too close to events to paint an “objective” picture, and to use images and captions in counterpoint to each other. For better or for worse, I don’t see very many cartoonists working in the way that she does. That may not be quite the same as inventing her own visual language in the way that, say, Chris Ware does, but I don’t think it’s something to lightly dismiss, either.
“I also think Allison took great pains to establish herself as an unreliable narrator who’s too close to events to paint an ‘objective’ picture, and to use images and captions in counterpoint to each other.”
Interesting point. Do you mind giving some examples?
Me, I thought the book was excellent, but I think I’m probably pretty easy to please. You Utilitarians often strike me as much smarter (or more highbrow?), so while your criticisms of stuff like this might make sense, they’re often not something that affects me. I guess I’m the guy who has to be taught why his taste isn’t very good.
I dunno, maybe I fall into the camp of those who can congratulate themselves for getting the literary references, but I think I liked the characters, the way she tried to connect to her father and contrast her open homosexuality with his closeted life. I find that sort of thing fascinating, and I thought her exploration of their relationship to be quite elegant. Of course, I don’t think I’ve read a whole lot of memoir, in either comics or prose, so maybe this is all standard stuff or something. It certainly clicked for me.
By the way, not that this is supposed to be proof of anything, but my wife, who doesn’t read a whole lot of comics (even though I’m always trying to push them on her), also loved it. Take that as you will.
Well, among the hooded crowd, I think Tom and Miriam like it, Bill’s on the fence, and I didn’t — so we don’t really have an anti consensus, I don’t think….
Tom, I think you’re spot on about my dad and his experience with grad school. I don’t think he had a nervous breakdown, but he certainly freaked out when faced with stiffer competition. I definitely did not follow that path to its proper end in Fun Home. At the time it seemed just too complicated, like it would drag the narrative off track. But of course that’s probably an indication that it was worth pursuing.
And thanks for corrective critique, Noah et al. Really. The praise gets a bit wearing. I’ve been rather surprised that no one called FH pretentious before.
The description of me as a one-armed tennis player is eerily apt—I often feel like that. And lemme tell you, it’s fucking exhausting.
Hey Alison. Thanks for the gracious response. I think you’re the first person to actually thank me for writing a negative review!
Wow, that’s great. Jesus.
Alison, if you’re still around, the reason your dad crossed out everything except “August” on the kid’s photo — he was making “August” the picture’s title.
Also, you’re in Vermont, I’m in Montreal. If you’re ever up in town, please get in touch. I want an autograph for my copy of Essential Dykes. Email: tomcrippen@gmail.com
I swear I’m not hitting on you!