I’d never even heard of Elizabeth McCracken until my friend Eden suggested to me at Gen Con that I check out McCracken’s newest novel Bowlaway. McCracken, who edits Ann Patchett’s novels, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996 and has earned some smaller plaudits for her work since then, but this was the first time I’d encountered her. Based on n of 1, at least, she is a wonderful storyteller on par with Patchett, and while I’m not really sure if there’s a broader point to Bowlaway, I was completely enraptured by the story, which washes over the reader with waves of fun or interesting characters.
Bowlaway opens with a woman in a graveyard in a fictional town just outside of Boston just after the turn of the 20th century, and no real clue of how she got there. Bertha Truitt doesn’t remember her previous history, or just isn’t telling, but she enters the town on a mission to introduce candlepin bowling, a regional variation on bowling with a much smaller bowl and slimmer pins. She founds an alley called, of course, Bowlaway, and attracts a group of regulars, including several local women, while also employing a pair of the town’s eccentrics. Bertha marries and has a child, and when she dies, the narrative shifts to her husband, then to his housekeeper, and on around to other people who are all primarily connected through the bowling alley, including one later owner who wants to ban women from the alley.
While Bowlaway has a real conclusion to its plot, it’s not clear whether there’s a point to all of this other than to tell a good, fun story. McCracken seems to love her characters, and that alone is enough to make the book a compelling read, although I did stop a number of times because of that persistent, subcutaneous feeling that I was missing a greater theme. It’s not quite empty calories, since McCracken’s prose is good (and smart) and the characters work, but it’s unusual for me to read fiction that isn’t genre that doesn’t have something more significant going on underneath the hood.
There is, however, the mere passage of time, which itself does allow McCracken to get into some additional cultural shifts as her fictional town goes from a somewhat sleepy hamlet to an active suburb of Boston, connected to the city via mass transit. The novel spans something close to 70 years – she’s vague with some of the dates – so she tracks characters, the alley, and the town across the decades, working in real-world events like the Great Molasses Flood. She also has the habit of dispatching characters major and minor in gruesome ways; the molasses takes one, another goes the way of Old Krook; others are killed by flying objects or a runaway horse. Death is just another detail in the world of Bowlaway, especially when the characters aren’t essential.
It’s really a better book than I’ve made it sound here – I tore through it and, once I got past the fact that the best character was gone before the midpoint of the novel, found myself enraptured by McCracken’s prose and knack for spinning new stories out of the spare threads of the ones before. I don’t know that it amounts to much, but the journey there is enough.
Next up: Gary Smith’s Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics.
