Intermittent humor mitigated the sting of death and disappointment in both, but in “Bowlaway,’’ wit is primary, exuberant, always abundantly blooming. McCracken is one of our finest chroniclers of grief: her 2014 short story collection, “Thunderstruck,’’ and her 2008 memoir about having a stillborn baby, “An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination,’’ were incandescent explorations of sorrow and the sorrowful. These disparate lives intersect with Bertha and the bowling alley, but it’s never clear whether this is a blessing or a curse.Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel in 18 years, “Bowlaway,’’ is that most improbable of literary phenomena: a buoyant, joyful, rollicking yarn of Like Arch and Roy Truitt, the children of Bertha’s first husband, and Margaret, the hired girl who helps deliver Bertha’s own daughter. Spanning a century, the novel follows characters like LuEtta Mood, a champion candlepin bowler who is banned from the alley by Truitt’s “son,” and Jeptha Arrison, a pinboy who is believed to be simple but in fact possesses near supernatural understanding.

Instead, it’s a genealogy of the people who make Truitt Alleys home, a place to which they’re all drawn and from which they’re all repelled by love and loss. McCracken has described Bowlaway as a genealogy, but given the number of orphans and unknowns in the book, it’s not a genealogy in the strictest sense. Meanwhile, the many outcasts who have found community at the alley struggle to survive in a world without Bertha, who had become a center of gravity in the town. This secrecy causes issues when Bertha dies in 1919 and the alley’s ownership is contested by a man claiming to be Bertha’s son. Bertha fends off questions about her past and her identity, however, refusing to tell anyone how she ended up in the cemetery. The alley opens soon after her mysterious arrival in town, and not long after that she begins building the octagonal home in which she, her husband and their unexpected daughter live.

Leviticus Sprague, who become the manager-of-sorts of her bowling alley and her husband, respectively. She is found unconscious in the cemetery by Joe Wear and Dr. The answer, in various ways and to various ends, is a bowling alley.īertha Truitt arrives in the small town of Salford with a large sum of gold and everything she needs for a game of candlepin bowling. Her electrifying voice brings to life a cast of bizarre characters who lean on, help and flee one another as they question their place in the world. In Bowlaway, her first novel in 18 years, Elizabeth McCracken marries the everyday with the otherworldly.

Bowlaway review