Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
With the plethora of nightmares plaguing our society — tax cuts for the rich, the exuberant wealth of the 1%, eggs being $10 — the more left-leaning of us seem to agree that capitalism is the issue. We walk around with our chests puffed and our chins back, feeling satisfied with ourselves for (correctly) diagnosing the centuries-old system as the root of all our issues.
But what do any of us actually do about it? What can one person possibly contribute to society to combat the system so ingrained in, well, everything?
Alison Bechdel’s newest work, “Spent: A Comic Novel,” follows Alison Bechdel — a fictionalized rendering of the author, with the same name, face, past books and partner — as she attempts to answer these questions on her pygmy goat farm in Vermont amidst the pandemic, a setting that allows Bechdel creative liberty in both her plotlines and illustrations.
Like the real Bechdel, Alison — I’ll be using these names to represent the real-life and fictional versions, respectively — is an author. Her first memoir, “Death & Taxidermy” (a clear reference to “Fun Home,” Bechdel’s 2006 ‘tragicomic’), has been turned into a prestige TV show. With the success of the program, Alison has become quite comfortable financially. As such, the character’s claims to humility seems misguided at best, deceptive at worst.
Alison’s friends Ginger, Sparrow, Lois and Stuart — characters from Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For” comic strip — live together on a nearby commune. Although none of them will quite say it outright, Alison is convinced they see her as a sellout. And … they might be right. Alison, who grew up lower middle-class and once protested the evils of Jeff Bezos, now gets to sit at home, drawing and writing (and ordering way too much from Amazon Prime) while the world goes up in the flames we’ve witnessed in the past five years, from monkeypox to the genocide in Gaza.
Alison knows she isn’t really good at anything other than what she does for a living, so she decides to write a book about how to break free from late-stage capitalism. “Spent” follows the author as she struggles to get out of her own head, stop blaming herself for everything going wrong around her and enjoy what’s still good, all while writing “$UM: An Accounting,” the book’s reference to itself.
What “Spent” does so right is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. As the two versions of Alison Bechdel converge through thinly-veiled parodies of the real details of Bechdel’s life, it’s clear she allowed herself to have a lot of fun writing this novel. During her book talk on May 27 in San Francisco, Bechdel described the hard yet liberating process of writing fiction — getting to make things up instead of being stuck on telling absolute truths. You may be disappointed to hear that, no, Bechdel and Holly do not run a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont (a patron actually asked this question during the talk, and the response warranted a few sarcastic groans of disapproval).
The novel is perfectly set in between the worlds of real and fake – many details might seem exaggerated to emphasize the heinous political polarization we’ve reached as a country, but any queer reader can see these characters are rooted in real principles. Whether by living together in a huge commune or exploring polyamory, Alison and her friends take it upon themselves to challenge the atrocities imposed on them by the powers that be. Bechdel has a special power to write characters that do just as much as they are.
As she draws and writes her gang of wacky lesbians (and one ex-lesbian turned bisexual wife to a man with a fantasy of being a lesbian who wants to experience manhood — it’s complicated), Bechdel both pokes fun at and expresses her deep appreciation for the expansive world of queerness. This glowing portrayal gives me hope that the whimsical confusion that comes with butchness will stay with me well into my 50s and 60s.
Past readers of Bechdel are definitely in for something new, yet just as important as her previous works. We see the nuances of queer relationships and how they change as we age through hilarious dialogue between eccentric characters, and Bechdel’s childhood is thoughtfully revisited through her interactions with Sheila, her Trump-supporting, zany sister. Bechdel, both in message and in form, captures the spirit of early 20th-century authors like Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, emphasizing that connection is, above all else, what makes us human.
Bechdel has made it so that her name carries huge expectations every time she reintroduces herself into the book market, and she somehow never manages to disappoint. As she depicts a cast of characters well into their middle ages still figuring out what it is they love in the world, “Spent” is an amazing reminder that we have agency in this world, regardless of whether we’re college dropouts or farmer’s market organizers — or writers.