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A Book Review
“Cruddy” by Lynda Barry
Like most of the DRS crew, I read voraciously. My husband and I have a credit card that we use exclusively for the purchase of books, because they’re cheaper online and we were curious about just how much of our former cigarette money goes towards reading material. I can’t swear that it’s always been this bad, but lately the husband has gone a little haywire, racking up an average of about 200 bucks a month on this card. The rub with him is that he goes through obsessive phases when he will buy the entire works of a single author (the Dan Simmons craze was the longest and most expensive - anybody familiar with Dan Simmons knows that a Dan Simmons kick can last over a year and encompasses just about every genre of writing known to man) or on a single subject. Lately that subject has been Jimi Hendrix. Now, I admire Hendrix as much as the next person, and a couple of these books have been really informative, but I apparently don’t share the level of mania that has gripped my husband lately. It seems that when he isn’t reading his newest Jimi Hendrix book, he’s checking out yet another one online.
This leaves me stranded vis a vis new reading material. The last new purchase that I was interested in getting into when Eric was through with it was Christopher Moore’s latest, “A Dirty Job”. Once again Moore didn’t quite capture my imagination in the iron grip he achieved with “Lamb”, and while I don’t hold that against him (there are almost NO books by ANYONE that approach the prowess of “Lamb”) this review is NOT of that book.
I plan to make this review the first in a series about books that really help you stretch a dollar by bearing up to multiple readings. Some that make my short list – “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole, or Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin” – are no secret among bibliophiles, but I’m starting with a lesser-known, yet unique and masterful, book that I’ve read no less than a dozen times – “Cruddy” by Lynda Barry.
Quite a while ago I turned another DRS bibliophile, Tip Toe Rosie, onto this book hoping that she’d review it here so I could get a sense of how it affects others. I don’t expect everyone to develop the probably unhealthy attachment I have to this book, but it’d be interesting to know if others at least find its narrative as superbly crafted as I do.
“Cruddy” is written as an autobiographical account of two time periods in the sordid but eventful life of its narrator, a sixteen-year-old girl named Roberta Rohbeson. Roberta herself is the crowning achievement of this book, a pitch-perfect study in character immersion by an author. Barry views all of the book’s events through Roberta’s juvenile, uneducated-but-intelligent, rock steady gaze, which adds an unsettling element of truth and spontaneity to a very dark and gory tale.
When we first meet Roberta, it’s 1971 and she’s locked in her room, grounded for a year by her mother. She is sitting down to write about the events that have led up to her informal house arrest, and another set of events that took place five years earlier which culminated in something that Roberta calls “The Lucky Chief Motel Massacre”. After a couple of false starts, which Barry uses to establish the uncanny timbre of Roberta’s immature voice as she argues with her sister and, almost as an afterthought, gets viciously struck by her mother, Roberta sits down to commit her story to paper.
Five years prior to the start of the tale, Roberta’s father, Ray, has been left holding the bag by his father, who sold off the family slaughterhouse business to pay off debts he incurred. Ray, left with a worthless mortgaged business, two kids to feed, and a cheating wife, snaps and decides to collect these debts – suitcases full of money left to three very different people, all of whom are destined to be left slaughtered in his wake. Unbeknownst to Ray, as he is readying the family car for his killing spree, his wife stashes Roberta in the back seat. Once Ray realizes that he’s saddled with a child, he alternates dangerously between making his daughter into an accomplice in his crimes and threatening to kill her. Further fucking things up, Ray actually views Roberta (who describes herself as “what a person might call a dog… very much a dog”) as a son, calling her Clyde and teaching her how to pose as a “mongolian idiot” to garner free meals and sympathy from strangers.
After Ray and Roberta have managed to grab two of the three suitcases of money – along with “Old Dad’s” knife collection, with which they dispatch anyone who might pose a problem in the collection of said suitcases – Ray decides he’s going to “have to” dispose of Roberta and is about to kill her when two things happen to prevent this from happening – Roberta attacks him with her favorite knife, “Little Debbie”, and a local sheriff interrupts them. The sheriff, who turns out to be a particularly odious pervert, invites the gruesome twosome to come hang out at his cousin Pammy’s combination bar and slaughterhouse, the Knocking Hammer, and their already sick journey takes an even sicker detour.
As the story of Ray and Roberta’s killing spree unfolds, we simultaneously revisit the story’s present, where Roberta meets up with a gang of druggy misfits to whom she relays the story. This portion of the story, with its references to a psychotropic drug called “Creeper”, the casual brutality of Roberta’s mother, her brutal fights with her little sister, and the general fucked-uppedness of the stoner friends, is what passes for the “comic relief” part, but only in a book this twisted could this be defined as such. Roberta’s friend Vicki is a pathetic slut who trowels on makeup and has a nervous tic that has caused her to rub one of her eyebrows off her face. Vicki’s brother “The Stick” is a suicidal, housebound hemophiliac whom Roberta has decided is her soul mate. The Turtle, a wealthy boy who has escaped from a private mental hospital with a stash of the aforementioned “Creeper”, provides a number of the laughs to be found in the book, although his ultimate fate is as bleak as the rest of the story.
Over the course of a drug-addled day and a half that involves Creeper, Windowpane LSD and pot, Roberta’s “reunion” with Little Debbie, another stabbing, a car theft, and a road trip, Roberta tells her friends her and Ray’s story, with both culminating within the last chapter of the book just before the singularly depressing, but somehow utterly satisfying, conclusion.
Looking back over this review I realize I’ve probably confused anyone who wants much in the way of hard facts about this book. This is because this book defies conventional description. It has to be read to be fully understood, and it reads much more plausibly than a synopsis and review can convey. If you’ve ever wondered what a teen slasher movie would be like if the teens actually took over the slashing, this should give you a pretty good idea. Just read the fucking thing. If nothing else I can promise it is unlike anything else you’ve ever read – even other Lynda Barry books.
