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Crackpots

Name: Crackpots
Author: Sara Pritchard
ISBN: 9780618302451

by Sara Pritchard, Ursula Hegi

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Overview

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.

Synopsis

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.

The New York Times

The writing is dazzling, yes, but Pritchard allows the pathos -- and there's a lot of it -- to rise out of her sentences like a scent. You discover it instead of being pounded by it. The author's work has gone into constructing sentences that would contain, not sell, the emotion behind them, and she's in love with a whole range of feelings. In the middle of tragedy she makes you laugh out loud. — Craig Seligman

About the Author, Sara Pritchard

Sara Pritchard is the author of the novel Crackpots, which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen by Ursula Hegi to receive the Bakeless Prize for fiction. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from West Virginia University and has published stories and essays in a number of literary journals. She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"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

The New York Times

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. (Aug. 17) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A loose-jointed first novel of a woman, from an eccentric family, whose life ends up unfocused. Though Pritchard's chronology is nimbly kaleidoscopic throughout, the opening sections are where we get most of the pleasures here, and learn most of what we'll know about Ruby Jean Reese and family ("a buncha crackpots," says a childhood friend). Both of Ruby's parents (her father is an explosives expert) are musically educated, though her mother remains far the more flamboyant: when she can't sleep, she goes outdoors in the middle of the night and plays her violin, neighbors looking out their windows ("We could see her . . . blue robe and long black braids. Around and around the cherry tree she'd walk . . ."). Somehow, though, less and less seems to happen-happen meaningfully-as the story goes forward from those days in the 1950s and early '60s. Ruby's sister Albertine is smart, studious, and amusing. A friend named Etherine is pale, sickly, and will die. Older brother Mason starts out with the promise of extraordinary talent but settles for being a pharmacist, then a drunk, finally a ruin. The feckless Ruby herself will go to college, marry three men-disaster every time-and keep on talking and talking about it to the bitter end, filling endless pages with passages about other "eccentric" or "unforgettable" places and people-friends, neighbors, husbands, herself-until, as one reads, nothing seems to pass but time. With effortful allusions to the new millennium and YK2 fears made as if to up the ante of significance by some means, the end does finally come, Ruby by then a nervous wreck, with heart palpitations, even now still finding comfort (unlike the reader) in reciting yet again herfavorite words from childhood ("ASPEN, TAFFETA, WORCESTERSHIRE, NINCOMPOOP . . ."). Ursula Hegi provides a laudatory preface, but, in spite of its separately captivating moments, Pritchard's debut (a Bakeless Prize winner) doesn't develop-or gain power-so much as just keep on going.