(McCracken reportedly found most of her characters' names in a genealogy book that belonged to her grandfather.) Her first hires are Joe Wear, the teenager who found her, as manager, and another local misfit, Jeptha Arrison, as pinsetter. She forsook nothing' - except corsets.Ī proselytizer for candlepin bowling, (a more challenging version of the game than tenpin), Bertha 'bowled because the earth was an ocean and you had to learn to roll upon it.' She decides to stay on in Salford, a swampy city 'hard north' of Boston, and open Truitt's Alleys. If they were allowed a small measure of it, they had to forsake love. Her heroine is 'jowly, bosomy, bottomy,' yet a gamine at heart - and always on the march: 'She was the oddest combination of the future and the past anyone had ever met.' Like her Stanley Steamer car, Bertha is 'steam powered,' but a proto-feminist set to boil, not simmer: 'What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed. There is so much life in McCracken's prose. (The same might be asked of him.) 'Darling sir,' she replies, 'I was dreaming of love.' Questioned about where she's come from, all she'll say is, 'I'm here now.'Īuthor Interviews A Mother's Memoir Of A Child She Never Knew To read McCracken's inimitably clever sentences and follow her quirky narrative twists is to be constantly delighted.īowlaway grabs you from the very first line: 'They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.' It's the turn of the 20th century, and Bertha Truitt - a middle-aged woman in a divided skirt suitable for cycling - is discovered, unconscious, by a teenage watchman who is 'uneasy among the living and not much better among the dead.' He's soon joined by Leviticus Sprague, a black doctor and poet from New Brunswick, Canada, who asks the newly awakened Bertha what she's doing there.

Like all her fiction, including her 2014 story collection, Thunderstruck, and her much-loved novels, The Giant's House (1996) and Niagara Falls All Over Again (2001), Bowlaway celebrates the oddest of oddballs and the freakiest of freak accidents with wit and heart. That's one of the takeaways from Elizabeth McCracken's wildly entertaining third novel, a wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley.

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