Eccentricity charms in 'Bowlaway'

A body is found in a cemetery. That might not sound unusual, but this body is alive. Bertha Truitt is actually teeming with life, as the folks of Salford, Mass., discover when the middle-aged woman is found near an “obelisk that marked several generations of Pickersgills” with a Gladstone bag containing “one abandoned corset, one small bowling ball, one slender candlepin, and, under a false bottom, 15 pounds of gold.”

So begins. The boisterous story combines a love of New England history with an eye for the eccentric to create a tragicomic tale that spans 100 years of a family and its bowling alley. “Our subject is love because our subject is bowling,” writes McCracken, and she isn’t kidding.