No one knows much about Bertha when she appears “above ground and alive” in Salford Cemetery at the turn of the 20th century. Both Bertha and Peggy are “ruined by love or the lack of it.” And, as that 1996 book dealt with severe love, Bowlaway focuses on challenged relationships. Like Peggy Cort, the 25-year-old librarian in McCracken’s stunning debut, The Giant’s House, Bertha is a woman with her own mind and sense of direction. She is the ostensible heroine, the protagonist who claims (however falsely) to have created - as it will eventually say on her tombstone - the “SPORT OF LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.” The primary mover of Bowlaway is Bertha Truitt. The ball never does, it’s flung back by the bowler, here it comes flying, blammo.” The ball return splits up the beloveds, flings the ball away from the pins. Again and again, the pins stand for it until they’re knocked down. The pins are reduced to a pile, each one entirely all right in itself. It has to get close before it can pick out which pin it loves the most, which pin it longs to set spinning. The “heedless headstrong ball hurtles nearsighted down the alley. It also serves as an object of affection: In New England, it is a “game of purity…a game of devotion.” A candlepin ball is “small, two and a half pounds, four and a half inches in diameter, a grapefruit.” It has enough heft to function as a weapon. In many respects, bowling serves as a rich metaphor for life and love.

Who would think that a candlepin bowling alley in a small town in Massachusetts could provide such an interesting setting and prove such a viable subject for an invigorating novel? If early John Irving and late Elizabeth Strout had a fictional child, with a nudge from Charles Dickens and Sherwood Anderson, it would be Bowlaway. There is love in its various guises - of cats and birds, abandoned and hidden, forbidden and generational. There are orphans and lost wills, hidden safes and secret fortunes, a packet of abandoned letters. If it were a 19th-century novel, it would come with a frontispiece of a family tree, which would be appropriate for the jigsaw genealogy of Bowlaway. It is the very best kind of old-fashioned story molded into a modern chronicle. It takes classic narrative techniques and turns them into Greek drama. Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway is a perfect novel.

Bowlaway by elizabeth mccracken