February 13, 2007
Alternatives to Sex
Dummy that I am, I waited until it came out in paperback to read Stephen McCauley's latest zinging novel, Alternatives to Sex. But, at long last, I have indeed finished it and can say: If you want to laugh at the way we live now, because the only alternative is to cry, read this X-acto knife of a book.
I've already lent my copy to a pal, so I can't quote from it at length, but two examples that stick in my mind:
1) The protagonist drinks some wine, which "warms up little pockets of sentimentality" all over his body;
2) A beautiful boy toy is described as looking perpetually exhausted, "as if there's something wearying about lugging around the burden of beauty."
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 07:15 PM
February 02, 2007
Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel hardly needs my help in spreading the word about the brilliance of her graphic (as in: full of drawings) memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic: the book was a New York Times bestseller, appeared on heaps of book-of-the-year lists (how it heartened me that someone who has made her career writing a comic strip called "Dykes to Watch Out For" nabbed #1 book of the year from Time magazine), and is now a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. But having just read the book in one sitting, laughing out loud (on the subway, so that people stared), crying (actual tears that made me unable to see the page), I want to add my voice to the chorus of praise.
A synopsis of Fun Home doesn't begin to convey its empathetic and erudite humor, its endearing self-awareness, its heart-wringing black humor, but: it's about Bechdel's relationship with her father, a funeral home ("fun home") director in small-town Pennsylvania, obsessed with home-restoration, who, when Bechdel announces during college that she's a lesbian, reveals that he, too, is gay -- and who a few weeks later throws himself (Bechdel believes) in front of a Sunbeam bread truck and dies.
I have never been able to read a graphic novel or memoir before -- have never gotten past the first few pages. But Fun Home is a work of genius that demonstrates how much story can be told with so few words, when those words are backed by the perfect illustrations.
Read this book!
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 04:33 PM
