Disappearing Ingenue: The Misadventures of Eleanor Stoddard
by Melissa Pritchard
Winner of The Pushcart Prize and one of "Borders Bestsellers"
Doubleday
a division of Random
House, Inc.
New York 2002
Hardcover
The ups and downs and turnarounds of a good girl who can’t help being bad no matter how hard she tries come hilariously to life in these disarming, utterly distinctive interrelated stories.
Eleanor Stoddard tries to lead an exemplary life, to pursue the high road, and better herself and the world, but somehow things keep going awry. In “Port de Bras,” even as Eleanor spends her summer reading about the Holocaust, her good intentions are disrupted by the discovery that her first best friend is a compulsive liar who has cried wolf too many times. “Salve Regina” wryly captures another ill-fated step on Eleanor’s journey toward goodness. When, much to her mother’s dismay, she dreams of becoming a nun and dutifully says her rosary in the bathroom at her first cotillion, Eleanor finds that she still can’t save a friend from the consequences of her first seduction. Her marriage brings no relief from the twists of fate–and her quirky attempts to deal with them: In “The Case of the Disappearing Ingenue,” Eleanor turns to Nancy Drew for help when she suspects that her husband may be cheating on her. In the Pushcart Prize—winning “Funktionslust,” the final story in this collection, Eleanor does get her childhood wish. . . but not exactly in the way she imagined. Traveling through Central America with a rescued laboratory gorilla, “Like a rogue saint, Eleanor Stoddard was sighted here and there, most often by the innocent.”
Disappearing Ingenue presents a heroine whose adventures with life and love are wildly imaginative.
(synopsis from www.randomhouse.com)
Praise -- for more reviews and praise of this book, click here.
"Dreamy and delightful."
--Alan Cheuse, "All Things Considered"
"Pritchard has a sure touch. She knows just how
much to tell, and how much readers should intuit. . . . It's risky to
compare any other author to Steinbeck, . . . but, just possibly, the potential
is there."
--Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"An imaginative free-for-all . . .[Eleanor] is a
persona moved from one circumstance to another, to dizzying and often
funny effect."
--The Arizona Republic
"Melissa Pritchard is one of our finest writers."
--Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
"Pritchard's meticulously crafted prose bursts at
its own seams with inventiveness."
--The Harvard Review
"Stories, like their heroine, so brave and full
of life."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Like Flannery O'Connor, Melissa Pritchard treats
odd, cruel dilemmas with dispassion, and as if by some fictional law of
absence of overt charity toward deprived or crippled characters produces
in the reader a sense of their memorably unmediated presence upon the
page."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Impressive . . . With each story the collection
gains momentum . . . Pritchard's prose is spare and wrenching."
--Publishers Weekly
"[Pritchard's] writing . . . is beautiful, graphic,
aggressive -- and always smart."
--The Bloomsbury Review
"Wildly imaginative . . . Endearingly quirky."
--Glamour
"Delightfully odd."
--Entertainment Weekly