The Hero of this Book: a novel

 

The Hero of this Book: a novel

Elizabeth McCracken (2022, Harper Collins)

“If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else.” Well, all right, this book is a novel, shaped very much like a memoir, in the same way that an epistolary novel resembles a collection of letters. The plot, such as it is, is a simple solitary perambulation around London, on a warm August day in 2019. Our narrator, who declines to name or describe herself, is accompanied by her memories of her mother, dead since November, and several London trips they had taken together.

They liked London for museums and theater, but particularly for ease of access. The mother had difficulty walking all her life. She used two canes to get around, most of her life, graduating in later years to a motorized scooter; but in London, all of the black cabs have ramps, so she could go anywhere without a lot of planning and difficulty. In a sense, it’s a book about the mother’s particular body, small and fragile, and subject to falling; but since she’s never let it stop her, it seems to affect other people more.

Of course, there’s so much more to her life. There’s her marriage to the narrator’s father, who is tall and heavy in a way that makes them quite an odd couple. (“My parents were a sight gag.”) There’s her interest in theater, and her professional life doing editorial work for Boston University. And there’s her approach to motherhood: “...on some fundamental level I’m not sure my mother, anyhow, cared about my inner life. This was a parenting gambit: Therefore I was allowed to do, think, whatever I wanted.” Perhaps that’s how writers are made.

Our narrator is a writer, a published novelist and sometime teacher of writing, which makes the veil between author and narrator very thin indeed. She’s wonderfully wry about it, though. Of her time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she says, “Authorial intrusion was seen as a great aesthetic crime in the 1980s. We accused one another of it all the time, those moments our shadows fell across our fiction. I can’t remember why we thought it was so awful. Maybe it was supposed to be a sign of ego.”

That makes sense, as one of the tensions McCracken is exploring. How do you celebrate your parents while preserving their privacy? You make them characters. It’s none of our business as readers whether the events of the story are eighty per cent factual, or twenty per cent. As we say of the Gospel where I go to church, “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

She’s just one person, but having aging parents (with their health problems and their overstuffed, deteriorating house) is a widely recognizeable story, verging on universal.

As for ego, I leave you with this gem: “As a writer, I claim to be modest, but I have delusions of grandeur. I call them delusions in order to sound modest.” Again, I can’t really tell, and don’t really care, if that’s the author or just her persona. It’s as good an explanation of the authorial impulse as I’ve ever heard.

Any Good Books, January 1 2023