![]() ![]() ![]() In fact, Bowlaway is mostly concerned with pain: how we inflict it on each other, and how we keep going, year after year, as our burdens pile up. The floral illustration on the cover and the jacket copy, which bills the book as “sweeping and enchanting,” add to this illusion. Bowlaway treads what at first appears to be quirky, lighthearted territory, tracking the colorful characters who pass through a candlepin bowling alley in a small Massachusetts town in the early 1900s. Her 2008 memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, was an unflinching account of losing a child The Giant’s House, her acclaimed first novel in 1996, was an oddball romance infused with melancholy. The longtime Austin author and University of Texas professor - whose roots in the Texas literary community are so deep that three people I asked to write this review turned me down on account of knowing her too well - has always walked the line between beauty and loss. That thunderbolt of a sentence opens Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel, Bowlaway, and sets the tone for what’s to follow: a story equal parts sorrow and wonder, magical realism and cold, hard reality. “They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.” ![]()
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