This blog hasn’t been good at observing its self-imposed deadlines. Several times I haven’t managed to finish my chosen book by the end of the month, and my latest choice has suffered the worst, perhaps. By 31 March I had only got to page 180 (of 308 pages) of Niagara Falls All Over Again, the Elizabeth McCracken novel I first read in 2003. I have finished it now, though, and I’m writing this blog a week later. What did I make of my re-reading – of a book that, unlike many previous selections, is by a writer who’s still alive?
As far as I remember, I chose to read McCracken’s novel, first published in 2001, because I’d really liked her previous one, The Giant’s House (1996), about a Cape Cod librarian and her quirky relationship with a boy who eventually grows to become eight feet tall. Longer than The Giant’s House but also narrated in the first person, Niagara Falls All Over Again (hereafter NFAOA) is the story of Mose Sharp, born in “a little whistle-stop town just west of Des Moines”, who leaves home in the 1920s to perform in vaudeville and then becomes one-half of the (fictional) comedy double act Carter and Sharp. Although the novel – which seems to span at least 70 years – concentrates on the ups and downs of the duo’s relationship, there is plenty about Mose’s Jewish family background: as a narrator, he keeps harking back to his sister Hattie, who was instrumental in kindling his love of vaudeville but dies early in the story.
Yes, NFAOA follows the familiar show-business arc of youthful hope followed by success (in “dumb and cheerful” wartime movies and radio) and then decline, hastened by a new medium (television), but there are unfamiliar elements, too, and a striking set-piece towards the end where Carter and Sharp get the This Is Your Life treatment. Having recently seen the movie of Stan and Ollie (which I can recommend), I suppose I can admit to a fondness for this kind of thing.
But – and maybe this is more a reflection of my reading habits and preferences these days than it is a criticism – I found NFAOA just a bit too long. One of the reviews quoted on the paperback’s cover enthuses about the novel’s “enchantingly detailed” quality – but I’m afraid sometimes the detail seemed to be unnecessary, and to hold up the story. There’s too much about the vaudeville acts that Mose shared the bill with, for instance – though I suppose we have to accept that we have a somewhat unreliable narrator who wants to record as much as he can of his past … And occasionally what could pass as acceptable in a third-person account felt not quite right when narrated in the first person: “‘Do I look like a proud person?’ I spread my arms to display my sorry self” (p.233); or “I knew [grief] from growing up in Valley Junction, where the Raccoon River jumped its banks once a decade and slunk into town like a convict come back to a favourite crime scene” (p.120).
On the other hand, here’s a typical passage that shows the novel’s strengths:
I am an old man myself now, and I understand. Your own children and their questions! They interrupt you. Their eyes bulge when a relative in a story behaves in a way they can’t imagine (and they can’t imagine much). They interrupt again, though every question they ask, every single one, is the same: How exactly has this story shaped my life? Why haven’t you told me this before … (p.115)
I hope I’ve said enough to indicate that re-reading NFAOA was by no means a waste of time. McCracken has a new novel just out, Bowlaway, which seems to be another exploration of the quirky side of American life (it features candlepin bowling, whatever that is), and she is worth following on Twitter for her acute but generally light-hearted observations. I should also reveal a tenuous connection: her mother Natalie Jacobson McCracken and I were colleagues at Boston University in the 1990s. And Valley Junction (I’ve just discovered) was where Natalie, who died last year, grew up – just like her daughter’s fictional hero.
In March I also read two other novels by women: Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo and Lissa Evans’s Crooked Heart – both readable but also (dare I say it?) a little too long.
Old geezer re-reading 