Fun Home – Alison Bechdel

All my doubts about the legitimacy of a novel that combined words with comic book style drawings were erased in Bechdel’s talented hands. Fun Home fuses these two modes of expression together beautifully – they supplement one another, with the words serving to explain, and the drawings to depict emotions. The story is about homosexuality in a family. The daughter (Bechdel) is a lesbian – she doesn’t become one, she’s born that way, and suffers no angst over that fact. Her father, though married with three children, would, if he had grown up at a different time, have chosen a man as a mate. He can function sexually with a woman, but, since that was not his preferred choice, he leads a furtive, closeted life. Alison’s mother turns away from the situation, devoting herself to acting in a community theater; she mostly has a sour, cynical expression. But she’s less developed than the father, and Allison’s two brothers play minor roles. This is a father/daughter memoir. He’s a strange fish, incessantly involved in projects around the house, often angry, morose. He teaches high school English and he also runs the family funeral home (which the kids call Fun Home). He’s quite well-read, and guides his daughter, in a rather dictatorial way, in her reading (some of which, such as Ulysses, she resists). While she’s in college, after having her first sexual experience, Alison writes home that she’s a lesbian (surprise!); both parents take it in stride. But not long after the letter the father is killed — struck by a Bunny Bread truck. Is it suicide? According to the driver, Bechdel jumped backward into his path. But it seems an odd way to kill oneself – there’s so great a possibility for a crippling injury. When Alison tells a friend that her father is dead, she does it with a smile, then breaks up laughing when she explains how he died. It’s a peculiar series of drawings, though I thought that she would react in that way; it was an absurd death. The last drawing in the book shows her, as a child, jumping off a diving board into a pool, and her father is there, ready to catch her. This is a strong image – the expression on his face – and it wouldn’t have had as much force if told in words. There’s much in this “Family Tragicomic”(the book’s subtitle) that is humorous, along with much that is sad.

A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin

My interest in this book fizzled on page 310 (where the bookmark has been sitting for weeks). Since I was only one quarter away from the end, and I had enjoyed and appreciated some of what I had read, why couldn’t I just truck on? This is a question I’ll try to answer. For starters, Berlin was (I use the past tense because she died in 2004) a short story writer. This collection, published in 2015, was culled from three decades of her work. She’s autobiographical – she appears (under various names) in every story, sometimes as an observer, sometimes as an active participant. She worked at many menial jobs, including that of a cleaning woman. She had a drinking problem, and three failed marriages. So she led a turbulent, eventful life that provided a lot of material. But there’s no progression in these stories. When we start one we don’t know at what point in her life we’ll be, nor where we’ll be in the next one. This may seem like an exciting aspect, but for me it wasn’t, especially since some stories are very good, some are fair, some are weak. I found that the ones in which she was an observer were better then the ones in which she was writing about her experiences (especially the amorous ones). In other words, this collection is a mixed bag, and it tired me out, the wondering where I would be in her life, and what I would get as to quality. Plus, along the way my interest in Lucia faded. I think others will be more open to her and to what this collection offers. It just wasn’t for me.

Tears of the Giraffe – Alexander McCall Smith

This is a feel-good novel, and what’s wrong with that? Its main character, Precious Ramotsze, is proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana. So the setting is Africa, the characters are African (with the exception of a client of Mma Ramotsze). The author lived in Africa, so he knows the setting and the people. He presents a very favorable portrait of both, which is refreshing. Morality is the issue in this novel: how should people treat one another, what is the good, the kind thing to do? There are two cases to be solved, and no punches are thrown, no guns are fired. Which I found to be another refreshing element. As for those cases, they offer few obstacles, and the resolutions result in no harm to anyone. There’s a major subtext involving Mma’s upcoming marriage to Mr. J.L.B. Maketoni, who owns the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. It will be a happy marriage because both are good, kind people. I enjoyed this short, well-written novel, one of a very successful series. I can see why it would appeal to many. Give it a try.

The Finishing School – Muriel Spark

Spark was eighty-six when she wrote this book (her last), so I’m not inclined to be overly critical of an author who has given me so much pleasure. Her prose is impeccable, but her characters and plot are weak. The two writers in conflict give Spark the opportunity to again visit the world of publishing – and she’s still cynical about it. Usually successes don’t bite the hand that feeds them, but she does. Not hard, in this book, but she gives it a nip. The seventeen-year-old, overly self-assured Chris has written a long historical novel; he gets attention from publishers (none of whom has read the manuscript) because of his youth and good looks. Rowland, his creative writing teacher at College Sunrise (and a blocked writer), is jealous to the point of psychosis. This premise bumps along in an unlikely fashion. Not outright boring, but I read it with a minimum of involvement. Anyway, a few words about the book itself, which got a deluxe treatment by Doubleday. It’s 181 pages long, but that number is misleading. In size it’s a miniature – its dimensions are no more than a trade paperback. And the pages have large margins and the spacing between lines of text is also large. To top it off, there’s no justification of the right margin – it’s ragged, and there’s not one hyphenated word. (It looks like what you’re reading now.) I’ve never seen a published book constructed like this one, and I found it distracting. After a lifetime of novels with conventional formats, why did Spark allow this oddity? Of those past novels, I need to close with special thanks for The Bachelors, The Driver’s Seat and Momento Mori.

I just discovered that I had posted a review of The Finishing School back in 2008. I didn’t recognize I had read it before because neither time did I find it memorable. Here’s that previous review – unenthusiastic yet kindly:

The Finishing School - Muriel Spark

This is a long short story packaged as a novel. The author, nearly ninety, doesn’t have the wicked bite of years ago; her attitude toward her flawed characters is one of mild amusement. Her subject is publishing and the relationships between writers, focusing on their machinations to achieve success. Though cynical (I liked her use of the word “crap” to describe the novel that has long been the mysterious center of attention), this is no New Grub Street. Still, I enjoyed my leisurely stroll with Dame Muriel.

Dirty Snow - Georges Simenon (French)

The French title translates to The Stain on the Snow, which is better. But this novel is so bad that the word “better” shouldn’t be used when reviewing it. In an interview Simenon stated that he didn’t plot his books – he just let things happen – and he wrote them in one sitting and didn’t revise. In this novel the central character, Frank, does things that he doesn’t understand, and neither did I. To the virgin Sissy he has an irresistible appeal (I have no idea why). I had enough when I got to the scene where he rigs it so that another man can have sex with her (the room will be dark so she’ll think it’s Frank). Stupid, huh? The people in the story are mechanical windup toys. William T. Vollman wrote the Afterword; to him Frank is an enigma, and he finds great significance in this. What balderdash!

Portuguese Irregular Verbs - Alexander McCall Smith

Diverting and mildly funny. Recommended for a quick, light read.

Coming Up for Air - George Orwell

Orwell had no sense of compromise. He depicted the world and its people as he saw them, and what he saw was not pleasant. In this book we’re in the mind of George Bowling, a fat, forty-five-year-old married man with two children and a mortgage. He has false teeth (the book begins, “The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.”). He’s a salesman, barely getting by financially. He doesn’t much like his wife, nor his children, nor his job, nor his life. He doesn’t believe in anything spiritual, thinks that things in the present are much worse than they were in his boyhood, and he foresees the future (Orwell wrote this on the verge of WWII) as even more bleak. He goes back in memory to his early years. Though life for young George was often ugly and emotionally arid, this segment is a beautifully-wrought evocation of the past. Being inside George’s mind does get hard to take – where are his higher feelings? Love, charity, kindness? They only appear in flashes. But – here’s the tough part – it dawned on me that George is the common man; instead of being fed platitudes about human nature, in George we get the unvarnished truth. At the book’s end he visits his boyhood town, and if the reader expects any pretty codas – a reunion with the love of his young manhood, his catching that big carp in the deep, hidden spring – we must remember who we’re dealing with: Mr. No Compromise. The sweetheart is a hag, the deep spring has been drained and is now being used as a dump. Even the simple values people lived by have been undermined by the forces of progress. He returns home; he had lied to his wife to make the trip, and she’s onto the lie; on the last page he’s enduring a tirade of accusations (mainly of unfaithfulness, which is not true); he knows this badgering will go on for months. And that’s it. Orwell leaves us with nothing. Nothing but an unlikely hero of fiction, walking through his life. *