R. Cathey Daniels on Lynda Barry’s Cruddy: Set Pieces

(Guest post by R. Cathey Daniels)

Chasing that revision villain, What’s-Going-Wrong, often comes at the expense of letting her more elusive sister, What-Must-Go-Right, escape. At least for me it does. Thankfully, in the fraught days just prior to my final revision deadline for my novel Live Caught, my mind—like a drowning river rat grasping at a bob of drift wood—somehow spotted a claw hold on a new way of examining What-Must-Go-Right, and scrambled aboard.

When I’m not writing, I’m probably playing sports, so in my final moments of revision crises, “set pieces” from the world of sports elbowed themselves forcefully to mind. A set piece in sports is a meticulously planned play generally implemented in a critical moment in the game. Every player has a place to be and a time to be there. It’s logistical grunt work, but when pulled off takes on a magic that can turn the heads of even the most doubtful of fans. A lot can go wrong in a game, but get your set pieces right and you can push the probability skyward that the crowd will come back for more.

In a novel, there may be many memorable moments, but, it seems to me, the well-positioned set piece—that meticulously planned scene created at a critical juncture in the story and written for maximum effect—is where the grunt work of a book meets the story’s magic.

“…  this do I drink to thee.”

That’s one of many obvious set pieces Shakespeare certainly had to nail. Juliet toasts Romeo as she drinks the Friar’s potion, hoping to fake her own death in a plot to reunite with Romeo. Juliet’s death scene must go right. Not only does it set up the ensuing series of catastrophic plot twists, it underpins the emotional tenor and driving action for the remainder of the play. Timing is critical; Juliet must drink the potion before her marriage to Paris; the Friar’s note to Romeo, advising him of the subterfuge, must fail to arrive; Romeo must show up in the tomb before Juliet wakes, and so forth. I can almost envision Shakespeare drawing this set piece up on the chalkboard and moving his characters around the practice stage until he had it right.

Once I noticed the relationship to sports, I realized I’m a sap for set pieces in fiction. Esch’s perilous rooftop escape in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (the puppies, oh gosh, the puppies—if Ward hadn’t deftly placed those puppies, would I even remember the scene?), Cal’s naïve yet life-changing venture into the Peep Show in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, the phosphorescent fins of the sharks circling the old man’s boat in Ernst Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the Captain’s heart-wrenching airport evacuation in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer.

To my mind, these are more than just memorable scenes. They transport us through a pivotal juncture in the story while setting or confirming the emotional heart of the novel.  

Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, a novel described by the NYT as “a work of terrible beauty,” was my guiding light through early drafts of Live Caught. How does Barry inject horror with humor? How does she keep such tender hold on our hearts while squeezing both chambers?

Here is a set piece from Cruddy, one that I’ve read and reread in search of Barry’s magic. For reasons that will become clear, if this set piece is not finessed, we might throw the book against the opposite wall and shatter a mirror, to paraphrase author Josh Mohr, who worked with me in the early days of Live Caught and encouraged me to read Cruddy. The narrator in this scene is a young girl on a harrowing road trip with a butcher who might be her father and who reveres his knives to the point of naming them (the knife in this scene is Little Debbie). The butcher (called the father) thinks of the young girl as a boy and calls her Clyde. Earlier, in a deer gutting incident, Clyde’s finger was sliced by another of the father’s knives, Big Girl. Now, the red streaks of infection race up her arm. Corpse Reviver is the father’s alcohol of choice.

Time had fallen apart for me. I lost the order of days and nights and conversations. I know the sun was either coming up or going down because I saw the golden rays falling upon the metal-seamed walls. The father said, “It’s got be done, Clyde. I can’t take you to no hospital. You understand that. At least you know I’m the best possible man for the job. Sit up here, drink, again, and one more.”

His worn whetstone was oiled and he was making the motions. The knife he was honing was her, Little Debbie, he said she had just the right sort of point for small-joint separation. I listened to the soft circular whisper of the sharpening and the familiar promise that I would not feel a thing.

The father was strapping my arm down and tying my wrist tightly and jabbering on, he was laying out his Corpse Reviver-fueled plans about how to make the gold mine that was the Knocking Hammer his. He held the jug up to me. “Take a drink. Take another. I’ll tell you what, you feel anything? You can take off one of mine. That’s a promise. The only reason I’m putting this rag in your mouth is for just in case. Now, turn your head, Clyde. Look out the window for the sandman.”

The sandman. The sandman. The sandman.

And then the father owed me a finger but he did not want to pay.

Barry lays down tender honesty in exquisite, concrete detail. Yet what happens on the page is absurd. In her deft hands, deep truths mix with understated absurdity and often jar a startled laugh from the reader. Once the horror and the humor are in front of us, it’s difficult to look away. Barry prepares us for the amputation set piece over several chapters, letting us simmer in hope and dread as Clyde’s condition worsens. Then, at the most opportune moment, she moves her characters into position and quickly administers the pain, but with a gentleness that allows Clyde the dignity of introspection and the possibility for growth. To my reading, this set piece is critical to Barry’s novel, as it’s played at the hinge between Clyde’s vulnerability to the knives, both literally and metaphorically, and her later resilience as she wields Little Debbie on her own behalf.

In those final few days of polishing Live Caught, I decided to pin down for examination my own set pieces: (1) three crimes, (2) two sermons, and (3) every single interaction between my protagonist, Lenny, and Romey, the young girl he kidnaps in his desperate effort to “save her” from domestic danger.

Which, of course, he can’t.

Romey wades right into the river. No hesitation. No looking back to see if Lenny would stop her. Directly up to her thighs, the eddies swirling and cutting dark over the fringe of her shorts. The boy wades in behind her, her darker skin like his shadow leading him across the river, his hands in his pockets, sure of himself, steady in the current. They move together, now sidestepping against the gentle updraft. Like they know each other, which they don’t. Like they know the capricious nature of the water tugging at their knees, which she doesn't. Like they think the land stretching out on the other side of the river is theirs, and the mountains, Rosey Face and Chub Ridge, even in their glare, belong to them.

From where Lenny stands atop the hill leading down to the river, Romey and the boy should be dots on the landscape. But they are all he can see.

While most set pieces would not be sustainable as a stand-alone story (nor in sport could one stand as a game), they do tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s part of their appeal. Placed at critical junctures in the story in places where we still wonder about the outcome and puzzle over a character’s intent, there’s this literary nugget, this scene that’s hard at work, urging us forward yet imbued with beauty and substance in its own right. Not only do set pieces say, read on, read on, they also beg, don’t forget me, don’t forget me.

R. Cathey Daniels is the author of Live Caught, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, April 2022. Daniels grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina and graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with a master’s degree in education. She taught high school mathematics in East Tennessee prior to becoming an award-winning newspaper reporter for The Oak Ridger, covering science coming out of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Visit Daniels at rcatheydanielsauthor.com.