Summer Reading in Memoriam

Well, suddenly there seems to be not a lot happening in my neck of the woods — I mean, not literally nothing, but nothing to write home about, so to speak. It does seem to be fall all of a sudden, weather-wise at least, so I may as well catch up on recommending various summer reading I did.

For my twenty-third birthday (as the handwritten note on the first page attests) a friend of mine in NYC gave me a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, his midlife autobiography. I proceeded then to not read it until this August, basically due to a snap judgement back in '03 that it wouldn't make good subway reading. Happily, I was really wrong on that count — perhaps not literally, as I don't ride subways anymore, but it's certainly a good read.

Most of the book takes place in the prerevolutionary Russia of Nabokov's youth, where he grew up in a progressive-minded noble family, and his writing unwinds remembered scenes in lyrical detail. Chapters are arranged more thematically than chronologically, though they do proceed generally forward in time; Nabokov clips in and out of the time at hand freely, maintaining a sense of a faded present tense, viewed from some distance.

Nabokov states that he is trading only in actual things remembered, and despite Nabokov's voice being fairly frequently attached, in fiction at least, and such as I understand it, to the phrase Unreliable Narrator, I prefer to take him at his word here. His butterfly-mania expresses itself through a liberal speckling of butterfly and moth memories throughout; this is a deft touch.

Reading Nabokov is just a joy, too — that brilliant fluidity with language that runs deep, into a fluidity with the ideas behind the language. (He wrote Speak, Memory in English.)

Back when I was in East Haven I spent a week of bedtimes taking in a chapter of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home before falling asleep. This is beautiful and sad, complex and very rewarding. And kind of unclassifiable: "cartoon memoir" might do it — "graphic" strikes me as the wrong word for Bechdel's sensitive & lively drawing style — her own subtitle for the work, "A Family Tragicomic," seems to say it right, and also gives an idea of the melancholy wit in it.

Bechdel has for twenty-or-so years been drawing a weekly comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, which doesn't appear in your Sunday paper for reasons that probably don't have to be explained. Mandy had a few compilation books kicking around, and I'll be the first to attest that you don't have to be a lesbian with scathing hard-left political views to enjoy them. The strips are serial, and Bechdel has an extremely talented way with creating realistic characters in small doses. She also intertwines humor, poignancy, and scathing hard-left political commentary better than you'd think possible. (In the most recent book this was getting a bit talky, but, these are trying times. If you want to sample DTWOF, try something from the late nineties, before Bush was elected.) She also draws really, really well.

In Fun Home, Bechdel turns this sensitive cartooning skill to her own life, fixing on the event of her father's death while she was in college. He was killed in a roadside highway accident near their home in central Pennsylvania; Bechdel believes this was a suicide, prompted by her own emphatic coming out a couple of weeks prior. Family life had always been strained — "Fun Home" is a bitter incarnation of a play on words her family had used for the family business, a funeral home passed from grandfather to father — and Bechdel centers her father's death in a wide-ranging evocation of her youth and her family.

Compared to the other cartoon/graphic/what-have-you memoir pieces I've read, Fun Home is much more organic — like Speak, Memory, it maintains a feeling of things being remembered from the present, as opposed to being recounted from an standpoint in the past. It's also intellectually saturated, with Bechdel drawing comparisons between her father and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Proust, and Joycean characters, among a few others. This takes a little getting used to, but it's not a stylization and it's not as pretentious as it sounds. Bechdel states at one point that, her relationship with her father what it was, this is the closest communion she can draw with him.

The intellectual charge also has an emotionally astringent effect, which neatly tempers the washes of blue ink that provide the pages' only color. Visually the book is gorgeous, and the loving detail that goes into Bechdel's drawings is something else. Here and there Bechdel creates a tableau that really packs a punch, too: the final page in particular is visually surprising, and transfixing, and moving.

Read 'em both! That's what I say.