Bowlaway

Starred review from October 29, 2018
McCracken’s stellar novel (after Thunderstruck) opens at the turn of the 20th century with Bertha Truitt being discovered unconscious in a cemetery in little Salford, Mass., seemingly having fallen from the sky. Bertha is middle-aged, plump, and enjoys the absence of a corset, but in spite of her unprepossessing appearance, she initiates a love affair with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revives her at the cemetery. The two marry and have a daughter, Minna. Townspeople, meanwhile, find Bertha charismatic; they begin to dream about her and to credit her with magical powers. With fierce determination, she establishes a bowling alley that uses newfangled candlepins, a game that she (falsely) claims to have invented. Bertha’s loving family completes her happiness before a freak accident (McCracken is a pro at inventing such surprises) derails her plans. Almost everyone—Joe Wear and Virgil, LuEtta and Jeptha, Nahum and Margaret—with whom Bertha has come in contact mystically finds himself or herself in love; often the catalyst is the bowling alley, where they meet. Loss is as prevalent as love, however, and the whims of fate cast a melancholy tinge on characters’ lives. The bowling alley itself is almost a character, reflecting the vicissitudes of history that determine prosperity or its opposite. McCracken writes with a natural lyricism that sports vivid imagery and delightful turns of phrase. Her distinct humor enlivens the many plot twists that propel the narrative, making for a novel readers will sink into and savor.

November 1, 2018
Bleak House meets Our Town in a century-spanning novel set in a New England bowling alley.More than many writers, McCracken (Thunderstruck and Other Stories, 2014, etc.) understands the vast variety of ways to be human and the vast variety of ways human beings have come up with to love each other, not all of them benevolent. She also understands how all those different ways spring from the same yearning impulse. She names her new novel--which she calls "a genealogy"--after its setting, a candlepin bowling alley founded by the novel's matriarch, who is said to have invented the game. "Maybe somebody else had invented the game first. That doesn't matter. We have all of us invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life." McCracken's parade of Dickensian grotesques fall in love, feud, reproduce, vanish, and reappear, all with a ridiculous dignity that many readers, if they're honest, will cringe to recognize from their own lives. The plot is stylized: One character dies in the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, another by spontaneous human combustion. There are orphans, secret wills, and hidden treasure. But unlike Dickens', McCracken's plot works more by iteration than clockwork, like linked stories, or a series of views of the same landscape from different vantage points in different seasons, or the frames in a bowling game. Her psychological acuity transforms what might otherwise have been a twee clutter of oddball details into moving metaphors for the human condition. "Our subject is love," she writes. "Unrequited love, you might think, the heedless headstrong ball that hurtles nearsighted down the alley. It has to get close before it can pick out which pin it loves the most, which pin it longs to set spinning. Then I love you! Then blammo. The pins are reduced to a pile, each one entirely all right in itself. Intact and bashed about. Again and again, the pins stand for it until they're knocked down."Parents and children, lovers, brothers and sisters, estranged spouses, work friends and teammates all slam themselves together and fling themselves apart across the decades in the glorious clatter of McCracken's unconventional storytelling.

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As evidenced by works such as Niagara Falls All Over Again, McCracken has one of the more distinctive literary sensibilities readers will likely encounter; playful, inventive, and fearless, she's drawn to oddball characters and the eccentric fringes of American family life. This new novel is a kind of feminist/existentialist riff on Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." It begins with the discovery of a female body at a local cemetery in an early 1900s New England town. Happily, the young woman turns out to be alive. Surprisingly, however, she does not remember where she came from or how she got there. Thus begins our acquaintance with Bertha Truitt, a titanic force of nature. Bertha is the materfamilias at the center of a sprawling multigenerational tale about a dysfunctional family and the candlepin bowling alley that Bertha builds. The appealingly whimsical quality is carefully balanced with an understanding that life can be unpredictable and brutal. As the story unfolds, family members abandon one another, freak accidents occur, and ghosts haunt the living. Again and again, we find that in life--as in candlepin bowling--"nothing is for sure." VERDICT A playful, powerful meditation on the proposition that life itself is strange; enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 7/30/18.]--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Starred review from December 1, 2018
McCracken (Thunderstruck & Other Stories, 2014) is a beloved bard of the eccentric, the misbegotten, and the unfathomable. In this epic American tall tale, a woman has seemingly fallen from the sky, landing in a cemetery in little, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Salford, Massachusetts. Two misfits happen upon her: the limping, lonely orphan Joe Wear and Leviticus Sprague, a poetry-loving doctor. Bertha Truitt, strong, solid, and assertive, turns out to be an evangelist for the tricky sport of candlepin bowling. She opens a bowling alley, the book's anchoring center; hires Joe; encourages women bowlers; and scandalously marries Dr. Sprague, a black man. They have a prodigy daughter, Minna, fervently loved by the household help, Margaret, long after Minna vanishes. Mysteries human and supernatural percolate, punctuated by unlikely passions, crimes, and bizarre deaths as scoundrels, godsends, lost souls, and screw-ups converge at the bowling alley. As the Truitt line barely survives generation-by-generation, the decades are marked by changes in bowling-alley equipment and decor. McCracken writes with exuberant precision, ingenious lyricism, satirical humor, and warmhearted mischief and delight. Though some otherworldly elements feel forced, McCracken is unerring in her spirited emotional and social discernment. This compassionate and rambunctious saga about love, grief, prejudice, and the courage to be one's self chimes with novels by John Irving, Audrey Niffenegger, and Alice Hoffman.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)