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SPECIAL ISSUE | THE OTHER SIDE OF SUMMER; Skeletons in the closet; Fun Home A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel Houghton Mifflin: 232 pp., $19.95
[HOME EDITION]
| Publication : | Los Angeles Times- Los Angeles, Calif. |
| Author : | Jill Soloway |
| Date : | Jun 4, 2006 |
| Abstract (Document Summary) |
| The study. Oooh, that study, which Bechdel's father called the "library," is one of the many great fictions of his life. Here's where the graphic part of the graphic novel concept really pays off. It's all there in exquisite rendering. The picture Bechdel draws is better than the one I would have sketched in my brain had I been only reading. It's even modified with little labeled arrows pointing to the way the wallpaper is FLOCKED, the curtains are VELVET, the statue is of MEPHISTOPHELES and the man on the lampshade base is DON QUIXOTE. In the 1970s, while my parents were doing musical theater in Chicago, Bechdel's parents were doing "The Importance of Being Earnest" at the local theater in a town called Beech Creek, near the Allegheny forest. Bechdel uses the geography of this area -- in particular, the ridge that cuts it off from the rest of rural Pennsylvania -- as a metaphor for her father's closetedness. She often imagines that this man who created such detailed artifice -- making dead people look lovely, calling a room in his house the library and teaching high school because he liked "teaching" as opposed to "high school boys" -- might have had a life that turned out differently had he been able to escape the gravitational tug of Beech Creek. Luckily, Bechdel was a compulsive journal keeper, one who wrote and drew all along. Everything is there in vivid detail. A chapter called "The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death" is breathtaking in its portrayal of a dream she had a couple of nights before her father's death. In a part of the woods called the Bullpen, she begs her dad to hurry up, but when he gets to her, the sunset is gone. Turn the page and Bechdel scolds both herself and us for getting so drawn in. "If this was a premonitory dream," she writes, "I can only say that its condolence-card association of death with a setting sun is maudlin in the extreme." hide... | | The study. Oooh, that study, which Bechdel's father called the "library," is one of the many great fictions of his life. Here's where the graphic part of the graphic novel concept really pays off. It's all there in exquisite rendering. The picture Bechdel draws is better than the more... |
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