Bowlaway: a novel

 Bowlaway: a novel

Elizabeth McCracken (2019, Harper Collins)

“They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.” How’s that for an opener! “A body,” because Bertha Truitt was unconscious, lying in the frozen-over early spring grass, with no footsteps to show how she got there. The year is 1900, or thereabouts. Bertha’s of an indeterminate, middling age, and has nothing whatever to say about her past. The bag she has with her adds to the oddity, containing as it does a small wooden ball and a narrow wooden object, which turn out to be a candlepin: she’s going to bring the town a new sport. In short order, she builds a bowling alley, with a cellar below and an apartment above.

Truitt’s Alleys welcomes all comers, and Bertha attracts a claque of women bowlers. It would be scandalous not to at least conceal them with some kind of curtain, except that Bertha Truitt won’t think of such a thing. Let them ogle, let them gawk, if they will–her sublime unconcern sets them at naught. Joe Wear, the cemetery watchman who discovered her, becomes the manager of the lanes; Dr. Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who was there when she came to, becomes her husband. He’s a black man–Bertha’s unconcerned about that, too–with relatives on a farm Down East who are waiting for him to come to his senses and come home.

Elizabeth McCracken gives us the whole of the twentieth century in the history of this modest bowling alley. It survives Bertha’s death in one true-but-unlikely misadventure, and Dr. Sprague’s death in another; it survives the Depression, by being the cheapest entertainment in town. Nahum Truitt, her son (can it be so?) comes down out of Maine to take over; he marries, and raises two sons to carry on a while longer. A neon sign goes up; pinball machines are installed; the human pinsetters are replaced by automation; the seasons turn.

McCracken has a distinctive gift for strangeness, both in language and in narrative. The story of Truitt’s lanes, or of candlepin bowling itself, is a story of genealogy, and of love. “Maybe somebody else had invented the game first. That doesn’t matter. We have all of us invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.” That crescendo from sandwich to human life is comic, in its way; it’s also profoundly true, if you’re in the mood to let fiction can get past your defenses.

For dessert: I listened to WBUR’s Only a Game religiously for the entire 27-year run of the show, and still miss it, of a Saturday morning. In 1994, in the shadow of the Ken Burns Baseball documentary series, Only a Game had a crack at New England’s own candlepin bowling, in about as many minutes as Burns needed hours. Enjoy– 

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/07/27/candlepin-bowling-ken-burns