The unnamed narrator of Elizabeth McCracken’s short, witty, philosophical fourth novel is, like McCracken, a writer in her fifties who grew up in Massachusetts, the daughter of a professor at Boston University, and recently bereaved following the death of her mother: “Bereaved suggests the shadow of the missing one, while grief insists you’re all alone,” she says at the beginning. “In London, I was bereaved and haunted.”
The Hero of This Book is set one Sunday in August 2019, during “the summer before the world stopped”. The narrator wanders London alone, thinking about her relationship with her late mother and interrogating the rights and wrongs of writing about it. If that sounds unpromising, the narrator would agree: “I hate novels with unnamed narrators. I didn’t mean to write one. Write enough books and these things will happen. I never meant to write a novel about a writer, either.”
Just because a writer anticipates a criticism doesn’t make it invalid and The Hero of This Book will not be for those with an aversion to what Joyce Carol Oates dismissed as “wan little husks of ‘auto fiction’”. There is more than literary navel gazing going on here, however. McCracken is writing about loss, family, memory, and her narrator is entertaining company, unpredictable and blunt in her judgements of others: “It’s noble to go to museums and cafes alone, because other people, the ones in couples or groups, behave so terribly in them.”
As she visits art galleries, watches a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and drinks prosecco, the narrator’s memories accumulate with a force and spontaneity that feels authentic. She chronicles her mother’s decline but finds the comedy in old age and disability, recalling her mother “dozing off in the Museum of Modern Art with her hand on the throttle of her scooter. She nearly rolled through an installation that involved a pile of sand on the floor.”
McCracken’s narrator is like a more acidic version of Elizabeth Strout’s much-loved protagonist Lucy Barton, who is also a writer and obsessed with her relationship with her late mother. The Hero of This Book is steeped in autobiographical writing about families and the discourses around the genre: the narrator recalls, in passing, watching the musical adaptation of Fun Home – Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her relationship with her late father – with her mother.
The narrator insists that the book we are reading is a novel and is dismissive of memoir, although she admits that she, like McCracken with An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (2008), is the author of a memoir. Late on, McCracken breaks her novel’s fourth wall, addressing the reader directly about the differences and similarities between herself and the narrator, leaving us to ponder the porous border between fiction and reality.
Once, when the narrator loaned her mother a thousand dollars, her mother thanked her by saying: “You’re a good kid. You must have had a wonderful mother.” The narrator’s mother is the hero of the novel’s title and indeed a wonderful character, a “confounding optimist” who “always said her greatest regrets in life were things she didn’t buy”.
Standing in a gallery gift shop, recalling how much her mother loved giving and receiving presents, the narrator looks at the ephemera on sale and observes: “The afterworld was made of the things I could not buy my mother, a charged net of things she could never possess.” It’s one of many affecting moments in this life-affirming novel about death which finds humour in the difficulties that await us all, joy and poignancy in the everyday.
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99)
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