Maybe it’s because the characters sense that they’re lost and therefore can’t take themselves too seriously or fool anyone else into doing so.
I must be one of the few readers of literary fiction who can’t abide Anne Tyler putting up with her asylum of self-destructive masochists makes me feel as if I’m having a tooth drilled. The prose is literary, yes, but to engage the reader, not call attention to itself. I suspect that McCracken chose her time and place because that’s when candlepin was popular in New England, “a game of purity for former puritans.” But as she says in her acknowledgments, “This book is highly inaccurate, even for a novel.” And that’s what Bowlaway is, really, a kind-hearted, whimsical musing about the eccentricities that permit (but more often inhibit) love. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)īowlaway resists classification as a historical novel, except in the most inclusive sense, for few outside events intrude on the alley and its denizens, though common social attitudes do. The signs prohibit players from stepping or sliding into the lanes. 1910, of the Windsor Club candlepin lanes in Windsor, Vermont. But the young women Bertha cultivates like it fine, and the alley and its owner become town icons.Ī postcard, ca. Sprague, who’s African-American, causes tongues to wag, as does her bowling alley’s approach to the sport - all welcome, men and women together, which can hardly be ladylike. But that doesn’t prevent the townsfolk from making myths about her, and not all are complimentary. No one knows how Bertha got there, where she was before, or who she is. She hires the other, Joe Wear, for the candlepin bowling alley she opens. Leviticus Sprague, one of her discoverers, and decides to marry him.
When Bertha Truitt wakes up (for she was asleep, not dead), she sets eyes on Dr. A bag beside her contains a corset, a small bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold bars. Around the turn of the last century in Salford, Massachusetts - don’t bother to search your atlas - two men discover a woman lying aboveground in a cemetery.
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