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

Last week a pernicious cold gave me the perfect opportunity to lie guiltlessly on the couch and read my tight little ass off. I really enjoyed Carl Hiaasen's silly Florida romp Nature Girl, and found exquisite writing and the occasional clunky plotting device in Claire Messud's hugely praised novel The Emperor's Children.
Then one of my favorite books of the year landed in my hands courtesy of my friend Linda's Yuletide generosity. Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is a memoir in the form of a graphic novel. Like Craig Thompson's 2003 illustrated novel Blankets, it far exceeds the expectations most readers have of the comic book format. It is philosophical and it tackles controversial themes. It is also completely absorbing and laugh-out-loud funny.
Bechdel -who writes the lesbian comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For - largely focuses on her father, a closeted homosexual who teaches English and runs a funeral home. Soon after Bechdel came out of the closet herself, her father killed himself by jumping in front of a Sunbeam delivery truck. She harbors a guilty suspicion that her actions somehow triggered her father's desperation, but in retracing her family's history it becomes apparent that her father had long led a troubled secret life involving sex with teenage boys. Meanwhile, Bechdel's mother is a frustrated artist stuck in housewife Limbo.
Fun Home is packed with literary allusions that may frustrate readers who haven't studied Henry James, Oscar Wilde or James Joyce. The book never gets too bogged down in its braininess, though. Bechdel can be hilarious, particularly when she's documenting her obsessive-compulsive tics. In one panel a teenage Bechdel soaks in a bathtub, manipulating the faucet with her toes so that she has absolute control of the drip tally.
If Fun Home whets your appetite for intelligent and compassionate graphic novels, you should also try Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series about growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution.