Bowlaway

Bowlaway is an oddball family epic that starts with Bertha Truitt's mysterious appearance in the Salford, Massachusetts graveyard at the beginning of the 20th century. She wouldn't talk about her past or where she came from, but she made a place for herself in the town by building and running a candlepin bowling alley that became an important part of town life. She also surprised everyone by marrying a black man, a doctor, Leviticus Sprague.

The focus of the story moves from one character to the next without much warning. I started this book thinking it was going to be about Bertha Truitt and Leviticus Sprague, but I was wrong. It was about them for a while, but then it moved on. Also, I tagged this as a family epic, and in a way it is, but it's also not, for reasons that will be clear to you if you read the book.

I didn't find any of the characters especially likeable (with the exception of Minna Sprague, the daughter of Bertha and Leviticus, who escapes the bowling alley and who I wish was a bigger part of the story). All of them, except possibly Bertha herself, seem stunted in some way–determined to trap themselves in unhappy marriages or jobs, or poison themselves with drink. There is a sad, dead-end feel to the story at the same time as it moves along at a steady clip. The pace is what kept me reading–if I didn't like what was happening at any one moment, I wouldn't have to wait long before things changed. There were enough intriguing, oddball details (the Salford Devil, the ghost hunter, Roy Truitt getting caught sneaking into his colleague's offices) that I always had hope the story would turn in a direction that was more interesting to me. Overall, I didn't love the book but I'm glad I read it. I liked the end more than I liked the rest of it.

As if dropped from the sky, Bertha Truitt is found unconscious in Salford Cemetery with a bag beside her containing “one abandoned corset, one small bowling ball, one slender candlepin, and, under a false bottom, fifteen pounds of gold.” She awakes and quickly gets to work building a candlepin alley in town.

OK I guess. I mean I'm intrigued but it just can't sustain me for an entire book. At the sentence level McCracken absolutely slays, her writing feels turn of the century meets Tim Burton which works in small doses. In aggregate though it can totter to what repeatedly comes up as “twee” and I simply couldn't take a full-length novel of it. I think I would have enjoyed these more as a series of jewel-like short stories instead of the accumulated mass of it all that overwhelms like a flood of molasses. (A plot point here that actually did happen in real life.)

Frustratingly I tried to invest myself in Bertha but she passes the story on to others and we jump from character to character. It's as if McCracken is determined to avoid creating any resolution for any of her characters. Knock the pins down and they get set up again for another frame.