“Unrequited love, you might think, the heedless headstrong ball that hurtles nearsighted down the alley. Her psychological acuity transforms what might otherwise have been a twee clutter of oddball details into moving metaphors for the human condition. But unlike Dickens’, McCracken’s plot works more by iteration than clockwork, like linked stories, or a series of views of the same landscape from different vantage points in different seasons, or the frames in a bowling game.

There are orphans, secret wills, and hidden treasure. The plot is stylized: One character dies in the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, another by spontaneous human combustion. 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.” McCracken's parade of Dickensian grotesques fall in love, feud, reproduce, vanish, and reappear, all with a ridiculous dignity that many readers, if they’re honest, will cringe to recognize from their own lives. “Maybe somebody else had invented the game first. She names her new novel-which she calls “a genealogy”-after its setting, a candlepin bowling alley founded by the novel’s matriarch, who is said to have invented the game. She also understands how all those different ways spring from the same yearning impulse.

More than many writers, McCracken ( Thunderstruck and Other Stories, 2014, etc.) understands the vast variety of ways to be human and the vast variety of ways human beings have come up with to love each other, not all of them benevolent. Bleak House meets Our Town in a century-spanning novel set in a New England bowling alley.

Bowlaway elizabeth mccracken