SPENT: A Comic Novel, by Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel, the protagonist of “Spent,” is a sellout. She is not exactly the same person as Alison Bechdel, the author of “Spent,” whose previous books include the graphic memoir “Fun Home,” an adroit reflection on her relationship with her mortician father. But there are similarities. The fictional Alison also wrote a memoir about her secretive father who embalms dead bodies, but hers is called “Death and Taxidermy” — which should give you an idea of this book’s tone (silly) and its aim (introspection).
Our heroines are Alison and her wife, a sunny sculptor named Holly (who resembles the author’s own wife, Holly Rae Taylor, an artist who did the coloring on “Spent”). Complicating their life on a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont is a crew of old friends who live nearby, several of them in the same house. There’s Stuart, the sweetly irritating middle-aged man who wears a utility kilt and a Bernie Sanders T-shirt; his stoic wife, Sparrow; their kid, J.R., who drops out of Oberlin after getting disillusioned with their asexual polycule; everyone’s pal Lois, who acts as a sort of tour guide to other people’s sexual hangups and fetishes; and so on. Though it’s the lightest of comedies, the book’s biggest question is a laudably difficult one: Can you be a good progressive if you’re a safe and privileged member of the upper middle class in a society tainted by oppression and selfishness?
It’s an urgent question for Alison: After devoting years to her syndicated, minimally lucrative comic strip “Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For,” she’s sold the rights to a prestige TV series based on “Death and Taxidermy” that’s now streaming on “Schmamazon.” She and her friends watch with mounting horror as the showrunner, Çedilla Ümlaut (I laughed), turns Alison’s most personal work into provocative, sophomoric nonsense. She’s being exploited, but she’s also being paid generously.
Charting the group’s adventures in leftist activism, polyamory and animal husbandry, Bechdel pulls off a delicate balancing act. It would be easy to make excuses for these lovable but almost transcendently annoying people preoccupied with their own comfortable lifestyle, or to nastily mock them. Bechdel does neither: Her genuine affection for her characters — with the possible exception of the one who bears her own name — gives “Spent” a sweetness that makes even its cheapest shots feel good-natured. It’s hard out there for a lesbian PETA member in rural New England, where a fan of Holly’s YouTube channel might approach her outside Home Depot from a truck with a bumper sticker that says, “MY OTHER CAR IS A GUN.” And it’s endearing to see Stuart trying to celebrate the kids’ nascent political awareness with a tattoo of a Kropotkin passage that takes up most of his back (“it was the shortest quote I could find”).
Bechdel keeps the jokes coming at the pace of a good “Simpsons” episode, and with the same self-referential reflexes, unnecessary erudition and jokey signage in the background. (The book’s own 12 “episodes” borrow their titles from headings in Karl Marx’s “Capital.”)
“Spent” is not quite a sequel to Bechdel’s long-running domestic-comedy strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” a witty, inclusive contribution to the serial form that flourished in newspaper comics from “Walt and Skeezix” to “For Better or for Worse.” But it’s not not a sequel, either. Bechdel’s earlier mouthpiece, Mo, has been replaced with a fictionalized version of the author herself, but most of the cast — Stuart, Sparrow, J.R., Lois — first appeared in “D.T.W.O.F.” (Here I feel obligated to reassure you that there’s absolutely no need for you to do any homework before reading “Spent.” It stands on its own.) J.R. was only a toddler when the curtain came down on the strip in 2008; now our old friends have to share their farm-country paradise with “Covid refugees from Brooklyn” (“Dude, I hate to bring this up, but the goats have been kinda loud,” one says to Alison), and to deal honestly with the fact that they’re all, well, aging.
If these characters are sad and bewildered by the state of the world, their frustration feels like a reassurance to readers who share it, and perhaps a gentle reminder that it’s easy to confuse being socially conscious with being self-serious. But there’s also the uncomfortable fact that a black-and-white strip about boomer radicals that ran in alternative newspapers for 25 years has been gentrified into a full-color hardcover published by Mariner, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (In “Spent,” Alison frets over whether to sell her new book, “$UM,” to Megalopub, a publishing house “owned by the conservative billionaire family that hit TV show is based on.”) If that strikes you as a little suspicious, maybe even hypocritical, well, have both Bechdels got a book for you.
SPENT: A Comic Novel | By Alison Bechdel | Mariner | 257 pp. | $32
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