Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel [Paperback]

Lynda Barry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 2000

On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping acid, a sixteen-year-old curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom and begins to write.

Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood.

The girl is Roberta Rohbeson, and her rant against a world bounded by "the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road" soon becomes a detailed account of another story, one that she has kept silent since she was eleven.

Darkly funny and resonant with humanity, Cruddy, masterfully intertwines Roberta's stories -- part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz. These stories, the backbone of Roberta's short life, include a one-way trip across America fueled by revenge and greed and a vivid cast of characters, starring Roberta's dangerous father, the owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar-cum-slaughterhouse, and runaway adolescents. With a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lynda Barry's illustrated novel Cruddy has not one but three equally alarming openings. The first is a suicide note: "Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs." The next is a description of the lurid crucifix that hangs over the narrator's bed: "Some nights looking at him scares me so bad I can hardly move and I start doing a prayer for protection. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?" The third is worthy of a nightmare fairytale, beginning "Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe..."

She's not exaggerating. It's 1971, and 16-year-old Roberta Rohbeson lives in what looks very much like hell. It's five years after the Lucky Chief Motel Massacre, after which Roberta was found wandering the desert, covered with blood and clutching her dog, Cookie, who suffers from "incurable skin problems." Even now, Roberta still won't talk about what happened. She lives with her mother and sister on the aforementioned cruddy street, hides in the weeds during her lunch period, and eventually befriends some suicidal misfits like herself. The novel intercuts their chemically enhanced adventures with scenes from a gore-filled road trip taken five years before. Hint No. 1: Roberta's father used to run a slaughterhouse. Hint No. 2: The maps inside the front covers have keys that read "Dead People We Left Behind" and "Places There Were Blood."

Barry came to fame as a cartoonist, and though the humor in her strip Ernie Pook's Comeek is dark, nothing in it could prepare her fans for the sheer horror of Cruddy. The novel is funny, sort of, as long as you think naming a knife Little Debbie is funny, or lines like "A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect." What's more, it's compulsively, almost harrowingly, readable, written with the kind of velocity that makes you keep turning pages even when you don't want to. Despite the hallucinogenic quality of the violence around her, Roberta is never anything less than real, and her story will strike chords in anyone whose childhood was marked by ugliness and fear. Cruddy may be a bad acid trip, but if you can stomach the ride, it's a very good book. --Mary Park --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Barry, whose recent graphic novel, The Freddie Stories, took as its subject the dysfunctional family from her newspaper cartoon strip, now takes us into the head of an indomitable 16-year-old. Roberta Rohbeson lives with her mother and half-sister, Julie, in a crumbling neighborhood overlooking a garbage-filled ravine. Roberta's energetic voice carries us along two story-lines. In one, Roberta and a classmate, Vicky, cut school and meet up with a series of low-life young men. Simultaneously, Roberta provides us with a running account of a cross-country crime spree with her father when she was 11. This trip involves three suitcases full of money, lots of alcohol, gore, putrefaction, and some of the most desolate, godforsaken locales in modern fiction. It also contains more violence than this reader can usually tolerate, yet Roberta's wacky, irrepressible outlook makes her story fresh, compelling, and sometimes hilarious. Does Roberta survive? All I can say is, she gets my vote as one of the all-time great unreliable narrators. Recommended for most fiction collections.AReba Leiding, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (October 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068483846X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684838465
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (104 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,001 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. She is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated scross North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook's Comeek featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy, as well as the books One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, The Good Times are Killing Me which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor's Award. Her bestselling and acclaimed creative writing-how to-graphic novel for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is, won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author. D+Q plans to publish a multivolume collection of Ernie Pook's Comeek, Barry's next prose novel, and the follow up and creative drawing companion to What It Is, November 2010's Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book.

Born in Wisconsin in 1956, Lynda studied at Evergreen State College.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing imagination!!!, April 23, 2005

By 

E. Sussman (Columbia, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel (Paperback)

I had never heard of Lynda Barry before getting a tip about this book from another Amazon reader. For some reason I was expecting something along the lines of Phoebe Gloeckner's "Diary of a Teenage Girl"...graphic novel about girl coming of age in the 70's, etc.
But this is no memoir--at least, I hope not! It isn't really even a graphic novel in the traditional sense; Barry's crude paintings (done with charcoal? paint? hard to tell) interspersed throughout the narrative evoke the dark and ugly mood of the book perfectly, but they're miles away from comic-book realism.
This is a wildly-imaginative, horrifying book about Roberta Rohbeson, the story itself made even more surreal by the copious amounts of drugs and alcohol she as the narrator consumes, both as an 11 and 16 year old.
Roberta is tormented and abused at the hands of her nomadic father, who takes her on a roadtrip littered with corpses and who calls her Clyde and introduces her as a mute mongoloid. This is a girl who considers herself so ugly as a result of his violence, she becomes uncomfortable when people even glance her way. She's pitiable in the most obvious sense, but she's also smart and tough--and carries a knife named "Little Debbie" to protect her from the evil she (rightly) expects to encounter at every turn.
There's shenanigans and drug-and-alcohol induced exploits, of course, which drew comparisons to "Fear and Loathing" on the jacket cover, if I remember correctly. But it's not a one-trick pony, as Barry's character development skills are stunning. There's Roberta herself, her dim-witted and hysterical sidekick Vicky Talluso, the Father (referred to only as such), an erstwhile druggie hookup named Turtle, the flabby abusive hillbilly bartender Pammy, and many more. I can't make this stuff up, but Lynda Barry can.
Read it!!! Read it in the dark before you fall asleep. Read it when you're feeling sad. Read it in the most incongruous of settings--in the park, at the beach, on a sunny day. Despite its ugliness, it will make you smile.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read it with all the lights on, December 22, 2000

By 

Karen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel (Paperback)

Up in heaven, Flannery O'Connor wishes she could come back as Lynda Barry.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One hell of a good read, September 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Cruddy: A Novel (Hardcover)

How does Lynda Barry do it? A Mass murderous father, knives with pet names, hallucinagens named "creeper", a fascination with the social lives of flies -- Certainly my childhood was nothing like this. So why does Roberta Rohbeson remind me so strongly of exactly what it was like to be an adolescent girl? I predict this will become a cult classic for girls who will hide it from their disapproving parents and read it under the sheets with a flashlight. For us grown up girls, it's one hell of a good read.