Crackpots: A Novel [Paperback]

Sara Pritchard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2003

When we first meet Ruby Reese she’s a spunky kid in a cowgirl hat, tap dancing her way through a slightly off-kilter 1950s childhood. With an insomniac mother and a demolitions-expert father, her entire family is what the residents of her small town would call "a bunch of crackpots." Despite the dramas of her upbringing, Ruby matures into a creative, introspective, and wholly beguiling woman. But her adulthood is marked by complex relationships and romantic missteps -- three unsuitable marriages, dramatic crushes, the complicated love between siblings. As Sara Pritchard deftly guides us through Ruby's story, from the present to the past and back again, a portrait of a remarkably resilient woman emerges. Suffused with humor and melancholy, imagination and insight, Crackpots heralds the debut of a skilled and sensitive storyteller.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Having published fiction under the pseudonym Delta B. Horne, Pritchard won the Breadloaf Writers' Conference's Bakeless Prize for fiction with this first novel. As prize judge Ursula Hegi (Stones from the River) notes in her foreword, the book's dramatic tension arises from its differing perspectives on protagonist Ruby Reese, 52 in 2002, and an episodic narrative that flashes backward and forward in time. Introduced in the womb, Ruby is the eccentric pigtailed movie extra who plays the trombone while her mother gives piano lessons; the fourth grader who burns the house down after her single prize poem "The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi's Dead Mother" was criticized for misusing the word stag; and the youngest of a family that is termed "a buncha crackpots" by its Pennsylvania neighbors. Her brother, Mason, is a sometime degenerate who never lives up to his jazz potential, while her sister, Albertine, remains bookwormish and resolute despite her mother, a superstitious insomniac, and her father, a reticent survivor. Aging aunts and ill-named neighbors haunt Ruby's defining relationships-with her violent first husband, Boo; her second husband, a Swede nicknamed Oskar-the-Mumbler; and her third husband, Miles, a poetry professor she follows to Portland-relationships that ultimately (and gently) reflect her obsessions as a youngster. Individual vignettes are telling and vivid, and the more intimate moments are engrossing. Some readers may find Pritchard's moves between the first, second and third person affected, but the dialogue is tight and the observations lyrical, and they hold Ruby's world together beautifully.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The writing is dazzling...In the middle of tragedy she makes you laugh out loud." The New York Times Book Review

“Individual vignettes are telling and vivid, and the more intimate moments are engrossing . . . the dialogue is tight and the observations lyrical, and they hold Ruby’s world together beautifully.”

Publishers Weekly

"Nimbly kaleidoscopic." Kirkus Reviews

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; None edition (August 17, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 061830245X
• ISBN-13: 978-0618302451
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,081,987 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

SARA PRITCHARD is the author of the novel CRACKPOTS, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003, and the linked-story collection LATELY. Her stories and essays have been published in numerous literary journals, including GREEN MOUNTAINS REVIEW, NEW LETTERS, ARTS & LETTERS, TUSCULUM REVIEW, CHATTAHOOCHEE REVIEW, NORTHWEST REVIEW, BELLINGHAM REIVEW, and elsewhere. Sara's awards include the Bakeless Prize for Fiction in 2002 for CRACKPOTS, the Alexander Cappon Award for Fiction 2008, and a 2009 Pushcart Prize for her story "Two Studies in Entropy." Sara's new story collection, HELP WANTED: FEMALE, will be published by Etruscan Press in 2012/2013. She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, and teaches in the Wilkes University Low-Residency MA/MFA Creative Writing Program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Terrible Challenge of an Original Voice, September 1, 2003

By 

Biggest Fan "DMD" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Crackpots: A Novel (Paperback)

Marketing is a funny business. What's seen as hype is often an honest attempt to cut through the competitive quagmire and alert a real, breathing, human being about the fact that there is something out there, poised and ready to fulfill him. That book promotion falls back on lines like, "The New Salinger" or "The New Mailer" uncovers a sad fact about publishing: The business of communications rarely communicates effectively itself.

If it could, you would hear about Crackpots on late night TV. Every dinner party would be talking about Ruby Reese and her trombone and her brilliantly remembered, perfectly detailed 1950's childhood. Somewhere between fantasy and memoir, these pages are full of the kind of stuff your head holds on to when your brain can't take in a moments more pain. The wrapper from a candy or the smell of caps from a child's gun can take on an importance almost equal to the death of a parent when we are pushed to a limit of emotional overload. It's the way we protect ourselves from feeling too much. All of us have experienced it but no one I've ever read has captured it as deftly or with more lyrical resonance than Sara Pritchard does here in Crackpots.

There have been no big newspaper ads for Crackpots. There is no bookstore display with words like 'gripping' or 'riveting' in bold type splashed all over the cardboard. Obviously, the publishing machine has no idea what to do with a talent of this dimension.

Pritchard is not the New Salinger or the New Mailer or the New AAMilne. She is not the New Anything. She is very much herself and hooray for that. Crackpots is a work of the most tender and delicate personality. It is a completely unique voice and the voice of a natural storyteller who lets the reader know how the past felt and smelled and tasted. If there are moments when you wonder how much of this tale could have been true, you don't wonder for a minute that whatever the facts, this is certainly how it felt.

The New York Times has hailed the arrival of Pritchard on to the national literary scene and we join them in doing so. Now, if only someone would tell the rest of America!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars innovative and fun, May 10, 2004

By 

chiyeko (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crackpots: A Novel (Paperback)

Sara Pritchard's Crackpots reminds me of a line from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five: "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." Ruby Reese, too, has come unstuck. Crackpots is a novel about her life, that starts at her birth in 1950 and ends on December 31, 1999. The path between is anything but straight. The novel jumps from memories of Ruby's childhood to her marriage to an abusive man, back to childhood, forward to a second marriage. Ruby, Pritchard's fictionalized version of herself, has lead a full life by the time she is fifty: she loses most of her family to either death or addiction, gets married three times, gets divorced three times, and owns at least three people's share of pets. As the time shifts, so too the narrative technique as Pritchard alternately employs first, second, and third person narration as Ruby matures. These innovations are interesting and, for the most part, work well, the one exeption being mild annoyance at reading "you walk down the hall," or "you see your mother." This book is funny, and a good fast read. It is a solid debut novel, and I truly hope Ms. Pritchard can avoid the autobiographical writers trap: a lack of subject for a second book after they've written out their lives.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars so worthwhile I read it twice, May 1, 2004

By A Customer

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This review is from: Crackpots: A Novel (Paperback)

Sara Pritchard's skill in linking words is so excellent it's almost distracting. Because of this, I immediately turned to page one and started reading the book again once I read the last page. I enjoyed it possibly even more the second time.

It's not a fast read, which is fine, because it gives you time to savour her words, sentences, and stories.