American Wiseacre

 I do love when I discover a new author - new to me, that is, because my “new” authors are often quite old if not dead. This one is very much alive, and not all that old, either. 

*****

After finishing a book of essays, I had planned to return to my now-beloved Margery Sharp but then I noticed Elizabeth McCracken’s Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry in my library, and decided to read it instead. I felt like reading another novel and didn’t realize until I started it that Here’s Your Hat is not a novel but a short story collection. Short stories are just as good, though. Apparently, I’m in my fiction era. 

Elizabeth McCracken was quite young when she wrote these stories, which are populated with quirky American archetypes - circus performers, aspiring Quiz Kids, old vaudevillians, clannish large families, con artists, even convicts. McCracken’s older characters - usually the parents and grandparents of the narrators (the stories are almost all told in the first-person) - remember the 1929 stock market crash and the Depression and World War II.

This collection was published in the early 90s, a time of modern attitudes and rapidly emerging technology and major social change and political upheaval. But McCracken’s frame of reference remains firmly rooted in the American 20th century, which most of us didn’t imagine would ever end. The 21st century isn’t even foreshadowed. Neither McCracken nor her characters seemed to have any idea of what was about to happen. I certainly didn’t. 1993 was a long time ago. 

*****

I don’t know if Elizabeth McCracken ever read Flannery O’Connor, but it seems very likely that she did. O’Connor’s influence is evident in these stories, most notably in the elegant and stylish and accomplished mothers who are ambitious for their daughters and the daughters who disappoint their mothers by being rough around the edges or unconventional or uninterested in marriage and children and social status. That’s another American archetype - the mismatched mother-daughter pairing of a no-nonsense, relentlessly upbeat, stylish and beautiful mother, and the daughter who rebels against all that perfection. Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher are the best real-life examples that pop into my mind, but there are many more. 

*****

During the first year of the pandemic, I watched “Better Call Saul,” an episode or two a day, with my then 16-year-old son. Almost every night, at the end of the virtual school and work day, with dinner cleaned up and the house in order, we’d sit down together for our daily BCS episode. My husband and older son soon began to watch with us, and we all looked forward to that daily distraction from the disaster that was the year 2020. 

As I have written before, Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman is a character who could not be imagined anywhere but in America in the 20th century. My sons are both as American as can be, but they are also young. “Who is Karnak?” they would ask. “What’s ‘Let’s Make a Deal’?” And I would explain. But it was more than TV and movie and other cultural references. Jimmy McGill was the embodiment of the brash, confident, almost reckless optimism of 20th century America, and there is no way to explain him to a person born in the 21st century. Sometimes, you literally have to be there. And I would explain that to them, too. I’d explain how when I was young, some things were very much as they are now, but other things were just so different that it was as if we’re living in another country altogether. I guess Elizabeth McCracken knows this now, too, 30 some years after she published these stories. 

*****

I started with McCracken’s earliest published work and just finished with her most recent novel, The Hero of this Book, described by one reviewer as a love letter to McCracken’s late mother. It’s a beautiful book, and defies categorization, though I suppose if I had to place it in a genre, it would fall under A for autofiction. The first-person narrator of this novel is a writer like McCracken remembering her brilliant, charismatic, beloved mother. The narrator's mother is disabled though she hates the word and refuses to yield to pressure to accept help, use a wheelchair, and stop moving. She understands that motion is life, and so she won’t stop moving. She walks slowly and she falls down regularly but she gets up and walks again, one slow and hesitant step after another

McCracken’s alter ego, a successful author, recalls her early work - stories about elderly confidence artists, circus performers, wannabe child prodigies, convicts - the stories of Here’s Your Hat. She continually breaks the fourth wall, addressing readers directly, challenging us to figure out what’s truth and what’s fiction. It’s the Epimenides paradox in fictional form - “All writers are liars. But I’m a writer. And I’m telling the truth.” McCracken even mentions the paradox, making the comparison explicit. She is the Cretan (not cretin lol) in this scenario. 

And McCracken’s brilliant, funny, beautiful, self-assured, and infuriating mother is the titular hero of this book. “An American wiseacre,” McCracken calls her. I can think of no higher praise and no better epitaph.