Customer Reviews

Crackpots: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

My Great Grandma Larose, or Babcia, as we called her, was like a museum exhibit to us when we were young. She lived in the backroom of my Grandmother's house, her daughter, and was wheeled out only on special occasions and holidays. The parade route from her back bedroom to the dining room table was littered with myself, my sister, and our four cousins, all spectators under the age of ten, awaiting the arrival of our new specimen.
What drew us to her with such ferocious curiosity and intrigue, was not the little white haired woman herself, but the set of rules laid down by our parents beforehand. These rules were the equivalent of the forbidden fruit, the more we heard them, the more fragile they sounded. In the car on the way to Grandma's house was when we would get the briefing from my mother. She would spin around in the passenger seat of the 77' Buick Regal, and point her boney finger at us. That's how we knew she meant business.
"Remember girls, no touching Babcia, no playing with her tanks or tubes, no mentioning Grandpa, and please, only believe half of what she says. Remember, she's... not right." My mother would then spin back around and my sister and I would giggle with anticipation. It had been discovered, last Thanksgiving, when I was up three nights in a row with nightmares, that Babcia had filled my head with stories of gypsies and witches. That's when the rules came into effect. It had also been discovered that when you squeezed and held a certain clear tube connecting Babcia to a white tank behind her chair, she would, after about ten minutes, start swatting at us, and yelling in Polish. Hence the amendment to the rules, stating no touching the equipment.
When reading Sara Pritchard's Crackpots, one is to approach Ruby, the narrator and protagonist, with the same caution I used with Babcia. You feel like you can only believe half of what she says. This conclusion is drawn after reading halfway through this puzzle of a story that jumps tense, jumps format, jumps from first to second, and finally to third person. This book may not appear to make much sense. This book may confuse you, baffle you, you may have to reread some chapters to remember where you are going, but it is one magnificent ride.
The story is told through a young Ruby's eyes, at first. Prichard manages to capture the bizarre, yet common, curiosities that consume childhood. In one very memorable scene, Ruby is in a bathroom, having locked herself in, and uses the medicine cabinet and shaving paraphernalia as her personal toy box. From her nurturing father to her beautiful, yet detached, mother, Ruby is affected deeply by her family and their idiosyncrasies.
Pritchard never drops the ball, she takes us on a journey with Ruby through adulthood, and you, the reader, willingly go along. You don't bat an eye when Ruby and her husband live for two or so years in a circus tent, because it's so consistent with the character Pritchard has developed. By the time you get to the circus tent years, you are so in love with Ruby, you can't possibly think of breaking up with her.
I will not lie, Crackpots is difficult for about twenty-five pages, but I promise you, like Babcia swatting at us with her wrinkled claws and cursing in another language, it is one amusing show.

She has an odd but engaging view of things. I liked this book a lot.

It takes a special kind of person to be a crackpot.

I remember many of Sara Pritchard's names, dates and battles (even if I did spell them differently). I was there among them myself during many of the coming of age years. The crackpots just keep on coming, no matter how old you get. Bravo! Baby Sally, you've done the girls of 401 University Avenue proud. Don't stop now. More, more, more!!!

This book was impossible to put down. I was sad when it ended - I knew I'd miss Ruby terribly. I had the good fortune to take it with me on vacation and enjoy it non-stop......however, I begrudged the time when I had to put it down and watch Old Faithful! Please Sara, write another book......I can't wait to read your next book!

Sara Pritchard writes the words that you think but don't always record or say while you're experiencing your life. She still sees a five- or six-year-old's simple (and sometimes erroneous) comprehension of things adults don't explain to children, and brings Ruby into adulthood and midlife with the same complex thoughts we all have during the harsh realities of life. I found this book to be simultaneously provoking and enlightening, and couldn't put it down until I finished reading it.

The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is an amazing phenomenom. Started over 75 years ago by Robert Frost and Will Cather, it is s starting point for fine writing. The conference and its established poets and writers support new voices, and the endowment of a West Virginia patron, Katherine Bakeless Nason, has allowed for competitive prizes awarded by a single, distinguished judge.

"Crackpots", won the Bakeless award for fiction in 2002. There is little wonder why Sara Pritchard, writing under her own name, was considered to be the finest new fiction writer of the year. Pritchard is passionate about words, a passion she imbues upon her heroine, Ruby Reese (semi-autobiographical?)In her tale, she weaves a complex portrait of Ruby and some family members and friends that surround her during her lifetime. She has an amazing way of bringing together small threads of life in the 50's and 60's, the ways in which she thought, as a child, and placing them out there, in your consciousness, so you will remember, too. I'm grateful to Pritchard for helping me to remember things such as old Judy Collins songs, the way in which children substitute everyday words for colloquial words in the hymns they learn ("Bringing in the cheese...instead of sheaves!")and the beauty of falling in love with words(Some of Ruby's choices: taffeta, gladiola, nincompoop).

That said, Pritchard tries too hard to demonstrate an original voice - slipping from first to second to third person, and layering seemingly childhood incidents with those of the present day, asking her readers to find the common thread. Although her style is arresting, and probably very much the way that crackpot Ruby thinks, it becomes tedious. Just when you read a passage that takes your breath away:

"The song is over, but my mother is still singing it. The song is spinning around Jackson Circle like it's a carousel calliope or a music box playing, floating through the cedar trees and out into the marsh. It's hanging like threads caught on the briars at the edge of the marsh, thr briars sticking to the hem of the universe."

You are suddenly thrown into the harsh world of Ruby's first marriage, where her husband's anger and jealousy led to furtive peeks into the world of domestic violence.

There are just too many contrasts and layers, too much to befuddle (Ruby would love that word) the reader. As such, the book breaks down into some incredibly memorable vignettes and characters -- some evocative dialogue, loosely held together. It tires you out. You'll put it down often and convince yourself to finish, not for the tale, but for the quality of Pritchard's writing.

Beautifully conceived, lyrical writing = 5 stars.

Confusing, tedious, trying too hard for originality = 2 stars.

Overall, a 3 star effort. I'm not sure the Bakeless Award was given fairly.

I liked and didnt like this book.

Its about Ruby, a woman who goes through a bad childhood, and an abusive marriage, and then gets married again.

It was really sad that she had all these dysfunctional adults in her life when she was little, and I think the author kept the story going with her dysfunctional adulthood.

I liked it all in all because it switches through her life sporatically so you have to keep reading to put all the parts together.