Elizabeth McCracken holds a funhouse mirror up to theGreat American Novel.
Whimsy and weirdness spark atBowlaways edges.
Bodies and personalities appear misshapen, off, funny, or damaged.
Credit: Ecco
(He was minuscule but had an enormous and lopsided head.)
Left to rot in the wreckage of the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.
Beaten to death in a candlepin bowling alley.
Edward Carey
She introduces herself as Bertha Truitt.
Shell name it Truitts.
She claims shes inventing candlepin bowling.
(Also, utterly New England: Candlepin is a game of purity for former puritans.)
The majority ofBowlawaytakes place at Truitts.
(Hed taken too much aspirin.)
(She was, really, a Victorian.)
To the townspeople she is a mesmerizing enigma.
They all knew the story of her arrival in the cemetery, the narrator says.
Its as if Bertha existed only from the day she woke up in Salford.
She fell in love and got married to the aforementioned black doctor, Leviticus Sprague.
She built a house an octogonal monstrosity.
She ran a business.
She gave birth to a daughter.
Less than halfway throughBowlaway, Bertha dies in a freak accident so wonderfully wild it does her spirit proud.
(God, can McCracken write a death scene.)
The novel gets bigger, better, stranger.
AsBowlawaymoves through tremendous social change, McCracken develops her characters with remarkable depth.
Her sense of detail is precise but comprehensive.
She manages to profoundly describe Joe Wear as an elbow Useful, unseen, in service to others.
McCracken toys with foreshadowing, too, teasing characters fates hundreds of pages before they play out.
Her prose exudes a mystical, nostalgic menace.
Bowlawayderives tension from pain.
We wonder: What are these people carrying?
What dont they want us to see?
Hes a caricature a villain, even.
Years later he would die with these truths upon his lips, McCracken writes.
He loved everyone he had ever loved.
The author has reframed the family saga for the misfit: that truest American character.
After twisting her plot with one last what else?
bombshell family secret, McCracken dedicates the sweeping final chapter to Joe.
She chronicles his own rebirth, tracing the improbable, extraordinary later decades of his life.
We all fall out of the sky,Bowlaways narrator concludes.
Thats where we come from.A
Related content:
