Charmingly shaggy ... 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 ... 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.
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...gives Spent a sweetness that makes even its cheapest shots feel good-natured ... Bechdel keeps the jokes coming at the pace of a good Simpsons episode ... 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.
I found myself needing to get past a mildly annoying coyness that comes with the what-is-real-and-what-isn’t territory ... Very funny and very self-deprecating. Bechdel writes wryly about her own inconsistencies ... here’s something charming and funny on practically every page of Spent ... Even this crank knew that whether Spent is a novel or a memoir-ish doesn’t matter. Fictitious or not, the characters face problems that are very real.
Bechdel achieved the alchemy of memoir at its best, making her singular experience so specific and vivid that it became generalizable ... Signs of real-world doom crop up everywhere in Spent, including in Alison’s dreams. Yet as the novel winds down, a palpable calm arrives.
The flow of all this can occasionally become unwieldy, and at times it’s hard to locate the book’s center of gravity. But the reader never gets truly lost: Bechdel weaves the plot strands together in an entirely navigable way ... Very much about the overwhelmingness of today’s world ... One of the joys of Spent: its depiction and embrace of the intimate lives of the over-60 set.
Bechdel appears once again to be trying for the light, fun book she’s longed to write. This time, she’s come closer than ever to pulling it off ... Evokes the nimble, screwball silliness of Bechdel’s early career ... Polished, intricately detailed, and bursting with bright color ... A light, fun book demands a comic resolution, and craft serves as an inclusive ideal to bring the novel neatly to a close. But Bechdel’s habitual mode of tragicomedy might have better suited the story she’s trying to tell ... The result is a book that seems ambivalent about the very values it professes to uphold.
Playfully fictionalised ... Yet Spent is anything but a book about a writer’s lonely lot. Alison’s liberal community bustles with gossip and life. There are vets to befriend, new neighbours to meet, anticolonial Thanksgiving dinners to attend and speeches to give against book banning ... A celebration of and a rumination on where she has landed in late middle age, and how some of her fictional creations might live alongside her ... That doesn’t mean first-time readers won’t enjoy it. Bechdel’s acutely observant line drawins—here enriched with warm colour by the real-life Holly— lend themselves wonderfully to the alternately comfortable, intimate and awkward interactions of her cast as they gather around tamari-roasted turnips and fennel flambé to shoot the breeze. There’s always been a spark to Bechdel’s work, despite its often serious themes, and writing about herself from a greater fictional distance seems to have given her more room to have fun. Dramas and mishaps unspool with a lightly comic charm that belies the darkness in the world outside ... Yet it’s longtime fans who will get the most from Spent. There’s a real joy to seeing characters return, their shapes a little baggier, their hair greyer, but their spirits the same. If you’ve treasured sharing Bechdel’s days spent hunched over her diary as a pale and anxious child, or cycling up the Adirondacks as a fitness-mad thirtysomething, it’s poignant to meet an Alison whose fierce self-analysis has mellowed a little ... Spent isn’t perfect. At times Alison’s world, with its 'Shmetflix' and 'Schmamazon' and 'sage and sawdust' gluten-free stuffing, seems broad pastiche. There are stretches where you feel like you’re watching comfortably off semi-retirees cosplaying as agricultural workers. Yet while Spent may lack some of the raw power of Bechdel’s earlier work, this wise and playful tale has deep roots .... It’s a neat epiphany and a lovely summary of the craft of comics, and it feels thoroughly earned.
We might conclude that Bechdel’s lesbian is doomed to hypocrisy. Or we might say, more interestingly, that lesbianism is a case study in the paradox of political commitment ... Not Bechdel’s best work, but it is an improvement over her more recent books ... A welcome return ... Alison is so committed to her ideals that even acting them out feels like a grievous compromise; better to keep them on the wall.
A sharp, hilarious and humane look at social and cultural politics ... Bechdel’s signature wry humor, keen observational skills and masterful storytelling take center stage in Spent. The narrative is driven by richly drawn, down-to-earth characters each with their own hurdles.
Self-deprecating and delightful ... Bechdel takes a gentle approach toward her well-meaning characters, but wields a razor-sharp scalpel when it comes to the indignities of modern life. For Bechdel’s fans, it’s a dream to see her skewer fame with such hilarious precision.
