Bowlaway

As evidenced by works such as Niagara Falls All Over Again, McCracken has one of the more distinctive literary sensibilities readers will likely encounter; playful, inventive, and fearless, she's drawn to oddball characters and the eccentric fringes of American family life. This new novel is a kind of feminist/existentialist riff on Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." It begins with the discovery of a female body at a local cemetery in an early 1900s New England town. Happily, the young woman turns out to be alive. Surprisingly, however, she does not remember where she came from or how she got there. Thus begins our acquaintance with Bertha Truitt, a titanic force of nature. Bertha is the materfamilias at the center of a sprawling multigenerational tale about a dysfunctional family and the candlepin bowling alley that Bertha builds. The appealingly whimsical quality is carefully balanced with an understanding that life can be unpredictable and brutal. As the story unfolds, family members abandon one another, freak accidents occur, and ghosts haunt the living. Again and again, we find that in life—as in candlepin bowling—"nothing is for sure."