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Loading... Niagara Falls All Over Againby Elizabeth Mccracken
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A really beautiful and intricate (but not over-done) portrait of a man who was haunted by sadness, but performed comedy. This is one of my favorite juxtapositions. (  ) miriamparker | Mar 19, 2009 |  I loved this book. It's about Mose Sharp and Rocky Carter, members of the vaudeville team Carter & Sharp. Mose narrates the book, and he's the most likeable character I've come across in fiction in ages. Also, the most believable. The book is loaded with comedy and tragedy in the perfect balance. It was easy to read, and I really got caught up in Mose's life story. I'll be looking for this author's other books. (  ) jennyo | Apr 9, 2006 | This just happened to push all my story buttons - love and dysfunctional families, the thin to disappearing line between love and the closest partnerships/frienships, to name a few - and it was funny and amusing and yet broke my heart in several ways. ( ) alarra_c | Jan 8, 2006 | 
 In the end, the men’s success on the big screen is no match for the offbeat appeal of vaudeville as told in the first half of the book.  How frustrating, then, that everything about ''Niagara Falls,'' from its title on down, feels forced and self-conscious, like a pair of baggy pants that are worn but never inhabited. Get, with regret, the hook.  Given Elizabeth McCracken's abilities, you can't help wishing that in a future book she would fully deploy not only her powers of invention but also her talent for observation -- to grace her larger-than-life characters with inner and outer lives that are complexly detailed and difficult. Even so, this novel provides plenty for which to be thankful -- a sense of play, a nervy willingness to imagine a wide range of characters and situations, estimable powers of empathy and the enjoyment of watching a talented writer beginning to come into her own.  In the vernacular of vaudeville, a successful act was called a Riot, a Panic, a Knockout and -- the final accolade -- a Wow, in an ascending order that suggests a brawl ending with a victor, his foot planted on the other fellow's chest. Elizabeth McCracken's new novel, Niagara Falls All Over Again, is a Wow. Only the novel's conclusion feels slightly unsatisfying, in that some questions never even get asked (let alone answered). Overall, though, tagging along with straight man Mose Sharp, from the time of vaudeville through the age of television, is flat-out fun -- a heartbreaking and exhilarating ride.
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You try to recall your wedding day, and you remember a fat man. Or the birth of your first kid, and you remember a fat man. You loved your wife, who died decades ago; you love your kids, who you see once a week. But facts are facts: every time you try to remember anything, the fat man comes strolling into your brain, his hands in his pockets, whiskey on his breath.A vaudeville team that makes the leap to B-movie fame, Carter and Sharp have perfected a classic shtick: the stern professor and the hapless, bumbling Rocky. Offscreen, however, their roles are reversed. Mose Sharp is mild-mannered and accommodating, while Rocky Carter is a jovial bully--the kind of guy, Sharp thinks, who "compared the slices of cake on an arriving dessert tray and got disappointed, really disappointed, when the largest was delivered to somebody who wasn't him."
Show business is a subject tailor-made for McCracken's eccentric gifts: her timing is impeccable, and she's no slouch with the jokes either. But she's not playing this one just for laughs. As anyone who read The Giant's House knows, McCracken writes prose of uncommon beauty, studded with images both arresting and sad. Sharp's first few encounters with his wife, for example, are like "a pan of warm water inside my chest almost shoulder high, filled but perilous. It was the balancing that amazed me. Every time I thought of when I'd see her, the pan wobbled, but didn't spill, and the feat of carrying it astounded me again." This second novel is a balancing act on an even greater scale: tender but never sentimental, verbally dexterous but never merely clever. Like its predecessor, Niagara Falls will have you reading aloud to whomever will listen. --Mary Park
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400)
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