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Washington Post

Alison Bechdel makes a welcome return to fiction in ‘Spent'

No artistic border is more poorly defended or muzzily mapped than the wavy line that separates self-consciousness from self-parody. Too many of the greats stumble unintentionally across the divide, and when they do they rarely return. The wisest artists are those who make the journey with eyes open and head held high. How else would we know when they're winking? Witness Alison Bechdel in her charmingly shaggy new graphic novel, 'Spent,' her first proper work of fiction since she ended the 25-year run of her beloved comic strip 'Dykes to Watch Out For' in 2008. Here she is once again her main character, as she was in her graphic memoir 'Fun Home,' but the fictional Alison is the creator of a series called 'Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For.' Like the real Bechdel, this one lives in Vermont and is married to a woman named Holly (based on the artist Holly Rae Taylor, who is responsible for the vibrant colors of 'Spent'), but her friends are almost all fictional characters drawn from the cast of 'Dykes.' They're older now than they were when Bechdel last checked in on them, but they remain recognizably themselves as they aspire to thrive in the interregnum years of the covid-19 pandemic and the Biden presidency. Bechdel's return to fiction — even in an autobiographical key — is welcome, not least of all because graphic memoir yielded increasingly diminishing returns for her. 'Are You My Mother?,' her follow up to 'Fun Home,' was a denser book in every way — intellectually, narratively, formally — than its predecessor. Cluttered with lengthy quotations from British psychoanalytic theory across pages sometimes overcrowded with panels, it resembled an endless footnote appended to an already abstruse tome. 'The Secret to Superhuman Strength,' in which Bechdel retold her life story by discussing the kinds of physical exercise she did in different decades — call it a bildungsmuscleroman — aimed for a lighter tone but still overloaded the bar with plates. Both books are really about Bechdel's attempts to follow up 'Fun Home,' which lends them an exhaustingly self-referential tone. 'Spent' satirizes that impulse from the start. The fictional Alison is the author of 'Death and Taxidermy,' a memoir that reimagines the real Bechdel's schoolteacher father as a rogue taxidermist. (An excerpt from the book within the book demonstrates that it looks an awful lot like 'Fun Home,' though its themes are much sillier.) As 'Spent' begins in 2022, an acclaimed television series adapted from 'Death and Taxidermy' is increasingly going off the rails — its own version of the protagonist has just eaten a burger, to the vegetarian Alison's horror. Seeking to reassert herself, Alison is struggling to write her follow-up, '$um: An Accounting,' a book that will, she modestly hopes, 'put the final nail in the coffin of late-stage capitalism.' One problem: She's not entirely sure what 'late-stage capitalism' actually is. Alison's creative frustrations are less the spine of 'Spent' than one recurring gag spilling out of a horn of plenty. With its cast of familiar, aging lesbians, 'Spent' sometimes reads as if Bechdel had relaunched 'Dykes to Watch Out For' in AARP: The Magazine, its story ambling peripatetically between characters and situations. The results are often wry and sometimes raunchy. In one plot strand, a married, barely heterosexual couple from 'Dykes' cautiously opens their relationship to another woman. As things heat up ('Spent' is refreshingly graphic about postmenopausal sex), they settle on the term 'throuple' to describe their arrangement, on the grounds that 'polycule' sounds 'like a skin disorder.' Alison, meanwhile, has to push down jealousy after Holly, who becomes an internet celebrity when a video of her chopping wood goes viral, starts flirting with the alluring veterinarian who keeps stopping by. As Bechdel knows well, queer enclaves in liberal college towns are all alike in their insistence on difference, and she skewers those routine eccentricities as lovingly as ever. When almost all the characters gather for an 'anti-colonial Thanksgiving,' one is delighted to find that the old electric carving knife still works. 'Is that really necessary for Tofurky?' another asks. Alison and Holly are perpetually preoccupied with their finances, but they still spend on groceries with comedic profligacy, partly because they can't imagine going anywhere other than the organic co-op, where three bags of provisions run them $480. Despite its self-reflexive conceits, 'Spent' largely eschews the smirking pomp of metafiction. Yes, the fictional Alison is friends with the real Bechdel's characters, but no one ever comments on that fact — she seems to have simply slid into the place that Mo, her longtime alter ego, occupied in 'Dykes.' Lois, Ginger, Sparrow and the rest are here instead, one senses, as stand-ins for Bechdel's real friends, and the veneer of fiction gives Bechdel that much more permission to go broad as she takes aim at the proclivities of lefty Vermonters, herself included, who long to reclaim their old activist passions but can't quite escape the comforts of Burlington and its environs. Alison's artist's block, similarly, seems to have less to do with Bechdel's own attempts to repeat the triumph of 'Fun Home' than it does with — to put it both earnestly and hyperbolically — the struggle to do anything worthwhile in a dying world. Despite that, Bechdel's visual style is freer and lighter than it has been in years. Panels flow fluidly into one another and occasional splash pages vividly capture the communal tempo of Vermont life at cookouts and farmers markets. Her characters are crisply rendered, but her linework has a slightly wavy quality that imbues her drawings with the improvisatory tone of life as it is lived rather than plot as it is planned. Not much happens, but you don't need it to: The real pleasure of 'Spent' derives from watching its characters go about their lives, and imagining that Bechdel might continue their stories for the rest of her career. To the extent that there is an organizing story here, it is a book about people who need to get over themselves so that they can better look after one another. Holly slips into egomania as she watches her view counts on social media rise and fall, formerly revolutionary parents grapple with the radicalism of the next generation, Alison tries to respect her MAGA-minded sister. Ultimately, the very thing that threatens to grate in 'Spent' — the self-involvement of its characters, Alison in particular — is what makes the book so rewarding. In teasing herself and her friends, Bechdel finds a new way to have fun with both. That attitude, in turn, opens up forms of sweet-minded sincerity, and 'Spent' shines most in fleeting moments when its characters tenderly push one another, often with simple acts of care, to overcome their obsessive impasses and paralyzing dreads. We may not, Bechdel suggests, be able to help ourselves any more than we can save the world, but we can always look after those we love. Jacob Brogan is an editor with Book World. A Comic Novel By Alison Bechdel Mariner. 257 pp. $32