Bowlaway

Elizabeth McCracken

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, May 18th 2019

Bowlaway, American author Elizabeth McCracken’s sixth novel,defies easy summation. It opens at the turn of the 20^th Century with the discovery of a woman’s body in the graveyard in Salford, Massachusetts. With nothing on her person other than a spare corset, a candlepin, a bowling ball and fifteen pounds of gold, nobody knows who she is or where she has come from. Indeed, all evidence seems to point to her having materialised from nowhere or fallen from the sky like an angel.

Despite initial appearances, however, and much to the relief of the men who found her, she is far from deceased. Offering no further information about herself than her name – Bertha Truitt – she proceeds to install herself firmly in the community and draws everybody who crosses her path into her orbit. A larger-than-life character in every way, Bertha’s eccentricities and irregularities know no bounds, be it marrying and bearing a child to the black doctor who restored her to consciousness or building an octagonal house that bears more than a passing resemblance to a massive folly.

But her most singular and lasting achievement is the establishment of a bowling alley to which she invites the women of the town alongside their male relations, a scandalous development at the time. Nor is this just any alley, but one dedicated to candlepin bowling, a game whose symmetrical, slender targets require far more skill to dislodge than their ungainly tenpin cousins, and are impossible to clear in a single strike. Even after Bertha drowns in a wave of molasses in 1919 (presumably modelled on a real event that killed 21 people in Boston), Truitt Alleys remains the town’s most distinctive – and divisive – landmark.

Although the nature of the Alleys changes as society changes, candlepin bowling remains a central presence in everybody’s lives and, love it or loathe it, the only person who is able to escape the pull of the game and its creator is her daughter Minna. As a result, the question of who should take control of Bertha’s empire is a matter of some contention, and although it passes from hand to hand across the generations, her contrarian spirit remains well and truly in attendance right to the very end.

Whilst this synopsis is relatively straightforward, the novel itself is anything but. A sprawling, dislocated narrative redolent with foreshadowing and metaphysical meditation, it tracks social and generational changes through the lens of the Alleys, with frequently changing perspectives as narrators appear and disappear. Characters are cartoonishly vivid and two-dimensional, physically or morally grotesque (often in inverse proportions), and their relationships to each other and to Bertha are as tangential as individual pins after a split strike. Bowlaway’s depiction of bowling-as-life has considerable idiosyncratic charm. Whether you consider it a whimsical masterpiece or a self-indulgent flight of fancy will depend on your patience for the game.