Book of the week
Bowlaway by Elizabeth Mccracken (Penguin $37)
The Big Lebowski (1998), Kingpin (1996), Dreamer (1979): there have been a number of classic movies set in a bowling alley, but no classic novels. Enter: American author Elizabeth Mccracken’s stunning sixth book, Bowlaway. This isn’t the only first for this offering – this is the first novel by Mccracken in 18 years.
Set in small-town Salford, Massachusetts, and spanning the 20th century, the book is a supernatural family saga focusing
upon mystical Bertha Truitt, her life in the town’s bowling alley, transformative relationships with the locals and unusual legacy left to her offspring.
At heart, it’s a character story. It’s to Mccracken’s credit that her cast is superbly crafted. The supernatural nature of the narrative means that these aren’t your everyday personalities. Rather they are often eccentric and enigmatic, which makes their credible realisation all the more difficult. Bertha is emblematic of the difficulties Mccracken overcomes. From her first appearance, a body found ‘‘in the Salford Cemetery, aboveground
and alive’’ to her unusual management of the bowling alley and her homespun ideologies on bowling’s life-affirming benefits, Bertha is an otherworldly force of nature. And yet, Mccracken’s vision of her balances Bertha’s peculiarities out with aspects of personality contemporary readers will warm to – strength, sarcasm and sixth sense.
The remaining characters are no less curious yet well-crafted, including sage African American doctor Leviticus Sprague and young alley manager Joe Wear.
There’s also Bertha’s offspring, who inherit and grapple with her remarkable gifts.
In them, under Bertha’s undeniable influence, a narrative of family and neighbours at love and war materialises – the kind which is revealed with the same storytelling prowess as an epic by Charles Dickens. Themes of interracial marriage, feminism, spirituality, community and independence emerge.
The other standout is the novel’s tone. At once comic and magical, it’s the kind of style, captured in the writing, which is as difficult to pull off as Mccracken’s unusual characterisation. Not for this book the tackling of big contemporary issues through a series of actionpacked plot points. Instead Mccracken achieves the novel’s distinctive ambience through wordsmithing which infers as much as it reveals. Evidence this opening line from an early chapter: ‘‘The first indication of Bertha Truitt’s condition was the spirometer’s reading.’’
Beautifully written and superbly plotted, Mccracken’s eerie, entertaining novel Bowlaway has been two decades in the making.
For the sheer force of its heroine alone, it’s been well worth the wait. But there’s so much else to be feasted on: the quirkily relatable cast, as well as the ambitious plotline anchored to a small-town locale. – Siobhan Harvey
At heart, it’s a character story. It’s to Mccracken’s credit that her cast is superbly crafted.