This is a book that’s quirky, it’s a book that’s heartfelt.… She’s able to come up with these outlandishly wonderful situations and make it seem not only real, but that you’re going through these experiences with them.Īt the turn of the 20th century a woman is discovered unconscious and nearly frozen in a New England cemetery with only a bowling ball, a candlepin, and 15 pounds of gold on her. Loss and love revolve around a bowling alley established at the turn of the 20th century in a Massachusetts village by a woman who seems to have fallen from the sky in this quirky epic about family and fate.Įlizabeth McCracken is just a delicious writer. Reading Elizabeth McCracken-the gorgeously-put-together sentences parading the pages like models on a Paris runway the crazy, original insights the definitive, wholly fictional pronouncements-is like going on an automotive safari.… I could not stop reading.
She never misses the infamous 7-10 split, managing to hit Annie Proulx and Anne Tyler with the same ball.… Endlessly surprising. That this ambitious novel nearly works is a testament to her considerable gifts as a novelist, her instinctive access to the most intricate threads of human thought and feeling.ĭeath and life, frosted with macabre comedy.… lures us in with her witty voice and oddball characters but then kicks the wind out of us. McCracken does the same, shifting her focus to two subsequent generations of Bertha’s family, whose stories fill up the rest of the book.Sometimes seems to want to drift off, like a hot-air balloon, into an ionospheric layer of pure twinkle and whimsy.… McCracken in Bowlaway comes close to writing caricatures instead of characters.
Her friends and family mourn and then move on with their own lives. It’s where three generations of Salford residents grow up, fall in love, fall out of love and eventually die-like Bertha does, in a freak accident. Bertha, though, is magnetic, starting a family with the doctor who revived her in the cemetery and enacting plans to open a candlepin bowling alley (a variation of bowling played predominantly in New England that she claims to have invented).Īs the alley-eventually renamed Bowlaway-comes together, it threatens to usurp Bertha as the book’s main character. Had any other outsider landed in the sleepy town of Salford, its residents might not have been so welcoming. Such is the fittingly weird-in-a-good-way start to Bowlaway, a new novel by Elizabeth McCracken (her first in nearly 20 years, after 2001's Niagara Falls All Over Again). At the turn of the 20th century, a small Massachusetts town is rocked by the arrival-seemingly out of thin air-of a woman, Bertha Truitt, found unconscious in a frost-covered cemetery with only a corset, a bowling ball, a candlepin and 15 pounds of gold.
0 kommentar(er)
