"Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0618477942, $19.95)

Alison Bechdel's father had an eye for the slightly perfect. As an English teacher, he sought to improve his students by making them read the world's great books; as a third-generation undertaker, he took pains to restore the looks of the deceased; and as an avid remodeler, he disbursed the full measure of his passion to make his home a Gothic revival showpiece. Growing up watching him lay flagstones, apply gold leaf, and add ornament to ornaments, Bechdel came to realize: "He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not." This ingenious slight of hand manifested even in his death, an apparent accident that his daughter suspects was a clandestine suicide.

Bechdel is best known for her long-running cartoon strip "Dykes to Watch Out For," which appears in alternative newspapers nationwide. Fun Home, her first long-form work and the first graphic art project published by Houghton Mifflin, has become the break-out graphic novel of the year. With its careful lines and green-gray ink washes, she relates a double story, a father-daughter story full of mordant humor and the everyday ghastliness of HBO's "Six Feet Under." The Fun Home of the title is actually the family funeral home, which sheltered Bechdel's grandmother and the occasional visiting corpse. But it's her father's sweated-over gingerbread manse, a structure more Addams Family than Norman Rockwell, that best symbolizes what she comes to see as his intricately disguised life.

Minus her father's military service in Europe, Bechdel explains, he spent all his days in the small Pennsylvania hamlet in which he was born. Wedged between sharp Appalachian ridges and peopled largely with blood relatives, its close-knit structures became more suffocating than comforting, a condition reflected in the chilly monasticism of the Bechdel house, where familial inmates met for meals, then scattered to their individual pursuits. Dominating and directing the whole household, her father was an effete Fuhrer in cut-off shorts, a difficult man who closeted his emotions and threw himself into manic pursuits: reading, landscaping, embalming—and seducing his teenaged male students.

Bechdel lodges two stories under one artful roof, describing her father's complicated and conflicted double life of obscured sexuality alongside her own experiences growing up and coming out as a lesbian; his elaborate self-confinement contrasts the greater freedom she found as a member of a younger and more mobile generation. Whether she's describing her father's obstructed life or chronicling her own youthful explosiveness, her tone is self-deprecating and wary of wading into muddy melodrama yet always intent on plumbing each murky pool of unspoken family truth.

Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel's cartooning suits her autobiographical subject perfectly: Every figure is natural, every face (whether living or dead) sits right, and each emotional beat falls as it should. Her knack for humorous timing captures the strange hilarity of everyday life, yet she steadfastly pursues the serious matter of uncovering her father's hidden self. All this makes the book a superior graphic novel and one of the stand-out memoirs of the year. She's reportedly hard at work on a sequel; if it's of similar quality, it can't arrive too soon.

Review by Mark David Bradshaw, November 23, 2006