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A review by ridgewaygirl
Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
3.0
He was done with lots of things, he told her. Restaurants, candy, newspapers, parties, cars, airplanes, living in houses. He slept in hotels and traveled by train.
What he needed was to fall in love with another woman, but she saw he was too vain. Ordinary happiness would be a dent in his armor. Happiness was everywhere, like dropped coins. You might feel lucky to pick it up and put it in your pocket, but what could it really buy you?
To be haunted? That set you apart.
This is an odd book, full of whimsey and colorful characters. Beginning with the discovery of Bertha Truitt, lying in the cemetery who, upon being revived, makes a new life for herself in the small Massachusetts town she landed upon, opening a candlepin bowling alley, building an octagonal house and marrying the doctor who tended her. That bowling alley becomes a refuge for outcasts and a place where women can be together.
Nobody believed that this so-called Nahum Truitt was a child of Bertha's. The height of him, the denunciations, the way he talked. You could die of boredom. You longed to.
The great strength of this novel is McCracken's writing. By the time I'd finished it, there were dozens of post-it notes sticking out from between the pages, marking out remarkable descriptions and gorgeous sentences. But the beautiful writing did not hide that there were too many characters. Every time I began to understand a character and to fall into their story, they were gone, often forever, lost in the great flood of quirky characters and weird situations. There was never anything or anyone to hold onto. There's no question that the writing is extraordinarily good, but it turns out that even that is no substitution for plot and character development.
He had inherited his predecessor's office as it was, with the books and the ottoman, the manual typewriter that reminded him of a skeleton in a natural history museum--a small dinosaur, one so unfortunately shaped it existed mostly as food for larger dinosaurs. An aquatic animal, probably, with an alphabetic spine.
What he needed was to fall in love with another woman, but she saw he was too vain. Ordinary happiness would be a dent in his armor. Happiness was everywhere, like dropped coins. You might feel lucky to pick it up and put it in your pocket, but what could it really buy you?
To be haunted? That set you apart.
This is an odd book, full of whimsey and colorful characters. Beginning with the discovery of Bertha Truitt, lying in the cemetery who, upon being revived, makes a new life for herself in the small Massachusetts town she landed upon, opening a candlepin bowling alley, building an octagonal house and marrying the doctor who tended her. That bowling alley becomes a refuge for outcasts and a place where women can be together.
Nobody believed that this so-called Nahum Truitt was a child of Bertha's. The height of him, the denunciations, the way he talked. You could die of boredom. You longed to.
The great strength of this novel is McCracken's writing. By the time I'd finished it, there were dozens of post-it notes sticking out from between the pages, marking out remarkable descriptions and gorgeous sentences. But the beautiful writing did not hide that there were too many characters. Every time I began to understand a character and to fall into their story, they were gone, often forever, lost in the great flood of quirky characters and weird situations. There was never anything or anyone to hold onto. There's no question that the writing is extraordinarily good, but it turns out that even that is no substitution for plot and character development.
He had inherited his predecessor's office as it was, with the books and the ottoman, the manual typewriter that reminded him of a skeleton in a natural history museum--a small dinosaur, one so unfortunately shaped it existed mostly as food for larger dinosaurs. An aquatic animal, probably, with an alphabetic spine.