IN THAT NEWSWEEK COVER PIECE a few years back about “Seattle Chic” (the one with Slate swami Michael Kinsley on the front), my ol’ UW Daily colleague Lynda Barry contributed a comic strip about how she’d never really fit in in this town. She was a giddy, borderline-superficial funtime gal in a place more welcoming to somber reflection.
But from the looks of her latest illustrated novel Cruddy, Barry’s quite adept indeed at the somber-reflection bit, even to the point of abject grimness and a teenage nihlism that’s not at all affected.
The basic plot: In 1971, 17-year-old Roberta Rohbeson has been grounded to her horrible family (bratty sis, hysterical mom) in a decaying rental house, after getting busted for dropping acid. She uses the time of confinement to write about her sordid past, which is even more nihilistic than her present.
Seems that six years before, Roberta had disappeared with her maniacal, violent (and possibly incestuous) father. She was found weeks later in a Nevada foster home, with no apparent memory of what had happened to her or where her father had disappeared to. But in the diary that becomes the flashback story of Cruddy, Roberta tells all about the road trip through various hells of the American west, complete with arson, smuggling, triple-crossings, many brutal murders by the father, and two equally gruesome slayings by Roberta herself (including patricide).
Two of the towns of her hellish odyssey are Seattle-inspired.
“Cruddy City,” where the 17-year-old Roberta’s “present day” (1971) story takes place, is an almost geographically exact rendition of the Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill.
More specifically, the dreary blocks around Roberta’s dreary home are modeled on the still-rundown area just west of the Rainier Avenue-Martin Luther King Way intersection; a land of sidewalk-less streets, weed-strewn yards, the Copeland Lumber yard with its spooky black-cat logo, garbage-strewn winding roads up Beacon Hill (one of which, clasic-TV fans, is named Della Street), and taunting hillside views down onto the affluent blocks closer to Lake Washington.
I became very familiar with the neighborhood in the ’80s, when I had a miserable job in typesetting and layout for the South District Journal/Capitol Hill Times chain of neighborhood weeklies. I worked on ancient Compugraphic phototypesetting machines, in a wooden shed that had weeds growing inside from cracks in the concrete floor. Barry perfectly captures the little-corner-of-despair sense of the place.
(Remember, 1971 was the depth of the Boeing recession, the economically bleakest period in Seattle since the Depression.)
In contrast to the nothingness of Cruddy City, lots of stuff’s happening in Dentsville, one of the stops on Roberta and her dad’s road trip of terror.
The geography of Dentsville is based on downtown Seattle; specifically the waterfront (including Ye Olde Curiosity Shop), the pre-Convention Center Pike Street corridor (including the recently demolished Gay Nineties restaurant-lounge), and the pre-Interstate 5 west Capitol Hill (where, in the 1965 flashback story, the no-good dad confronts a no-good relative who’s squatting in a freeway-condemned house).
Of course, realistic geography isn’t what makes a novel really work. That requires great writing, compelling characters, and an intriguing story. Cruddy has all those aspects in vast supply; plus some of Barry’s best-ever visual works (in the form of maps and sullen character portraits).
In its vision of completely justified youthful despair, Cruddy is the Great Grunge Novel (even if the flashback story takes place before most ’90s rock musicians were born).
Just, please, don’t let anybody make it into a movie. They’d never get it right. They’d undoubtedly use the horror and violence in the story to depict exciting action, not Barry’s world of desperate rootlessness.
TOMORROW: Even Hollywood insiders are foreseeing the death of mass culture.
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