Elizabeth McCracken's The Souvenir Museum begins with one of the funniest short stories I've read in a long time ... I had to stop reading 'The Irish Wedding' several times to explain to my husband why I was laughing so hard. I kept thinking: I wish I were reading a whole book about these people ... they're all beguiling ... This tale, like much of McCracken's work, captures the mixed bag that characterizes most people's lives ... McCracken's writing is never dull. She ends this fantastic collection with a second English wedding and its aftermath, nearly 20 years after the first, delivering happiness tempered by sobering circumstances — and a satisfying symmetry.
Short stories in general require a little more concentration compared to the slow build and wider frame of a novel. Thankfully, McCracken is adept at packing a lot of meaning into a few lines ... McCracken gives us beautiful insights ... do yourself a favor and read the book. McCracken has delivered a lovely collection of stories loosely tied together by one theme—the bonds of family that fracture and heal as lives are led.
Whether they take place in Ireland, Texas, Illinois, Amsterdam, or Scotland, the marvelous stories in The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken’s impressive third story collection evoke moving depictions of marriage and parenthood, and love, betrayal, and loneliness ... In McCracken’s dramatic and often humorous stories you’ll find a goluptious coterie of eccentric and fascinating, if not entirely likable, characters whose stories unfold in a steady stream of exquisite writing. Evocative and often droll turns of phrase concoct mental images of shoes that are 'damp as oysters,' voices brew like 'hot cider,' flesh can be 'so fair-skinned as to be combustible,' and the 'hatred of castoffery came upon her like an allergy.' Inanimate objects come to life, too.
I find myself laughing with simple delight at her just-so-right-ness. She has the eye, ear, and voice for capturing the essence of the world as it unfurls around all of us—trapping us, dragging us along, leaving many of us trailing in its wake. She’s right in the scrum with us, sharing it all: the absurd, the miraculous, the horrific, the utterly banal. In McCracken’s hands, it’s gold ... the...stories in The Souvenir Museum are the kind that hold up well beyond a single re-reading. How far beyond? I’ll let you know when I get there.
... skillfully crafted miniatures that feature unfailingly ordinary characters whose lives she uses to illuminate truths about love, longing and the elusive search for connection ... The personal discoveries unearthed by characters like these may seem inconsequential, but they are anything but that. They're the stories of choices, turning points and epiphanies that are the stuff of life itself, and of indelible moments Elizabeth McCracken preserves in these unpretentious tales.
I sighed with pleasure at being back in her sharp-witted world ... The subject is families, those people there’s no escaping from because we’re made of the same stuff. McCracken’s families aren’t warring: they’re good natured at heart and she has a gift for spotting the comic potential in situations many of us have endured, such as attending our first family event with a new partner ... what gives The Souvenir Museum an added layer of coherence is that five of the 12 stories are about the same couple, Sadie and Jack ... it’s a pleasure to follow Sadie and Jack, through their first meeting to that family wedding and their future together, laughing – and crying – all the way.
... there is, in these stories, a kind of compulsive noticing, and the resultant prose is so plush that it may be read happily for the language alone, though there is much more at work here ... the primary question of this collection: the question of scale, of what is large enough to matter ... McCracken’s sharp eye—for the protective gesture, the accidental admission—refutes the idea of smallness ... [an]outstanding collection ... There are many...moments in these stories, each of them an exploration of some form of intimacy, each of them featuring some kind of cliff to avoid falling over.
In a lesser writer’s hands, this story might be merely meditative, even dull, but a McCracken story is never boring, and this one offers plenty of surprises ... A new collection from McCracken is always welcome. Grief, loss and the passage of time run through these stories, but so does humor, both the wry and laugh-out-loud varieties. Comedy lurks in even the smallest, sharpest observations.
Reading these stories creates...excitement: what wonder will be in the next drawer, the next story? Part of this pleasure comes not only from the careful curation of the objects themselves, but also how they are arranged. The author stitches us back and forth in time, across the book as well as within each story, back and forth, the way memory works. And while some characters do recur, this is not a traditional linked collection of stories. Still, the characters share a sense of strangeness, of not fitting in, not quite belonging to a place or to a family—whether family of origin or a family acquired by the choice and accident of marriage. And this adds a thematic thread that binds the work together ... Beginnings inexorably proceed to endings, and endings render the fleeting moments, fragile souvenir memories, precious .... An almost perfect conclusion to an almost perfect collection of stories.
...love of all kinds is given to us in beautifully plated small bites ... McCracken has a breezy, conversational tone here, and even when she is relating difficult emotional truths between characters, we feel as if we are privy to casual conversations that speak loudly and plainly on the relationships at hand. It is as if we are sitting at a kitchen table, tea cup in hand, listening to a friend tell a story from the past. Her style invites readers in ... McCracken takes the sharp knife and palette with which she builds her beautiful novels and cuts the canvas of her stories into small exacting pieces that readers can enjoy one at a time.
A dark whimsy animates the short fiction in Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection...Its dozen stories tend to be light in tone, but many are haunted by the deaths of loved ones, impending mortality, or fatal accidents narrowly averted ... There is an economy in her telling, mostly done in a third-person narration that sticks to a single character or shifts between a pair of them ... Sometimes the intimacy is assumed too quickly ... A few of these stories end before convincing you they’ve really begun ... As with many of these stories, the accumulation of eccentric detail is out of balance with the weight of death.
McCracken's...understanding of how we stumble up against these painful realities unfurls on every page. Tuned into absurdities and disasters, she knows our losses are calamitous, our connections precarious ... Attachments are mercurial, these stories insist ... McCracken's prose is wry and exquisite, a good companion to her generous, comic observations.
McCracken’s sly, emotionally complex collection (after Bowlaway) focuses on characters uprooted from their usual surroundings ... McCracken has a gift for surprising similes...that ignite the reader’s imagination, making great fun out of ordinary settings and scenery. Each story opens to reveal a whole life spent within the web of a family, chosen or not. Full of gems, this collection is a winner.
McCracken switches gears and proves her mastery of short fiction with these 12 tightly structured, searingly realistic stories ... McCracken’s stories are often heartbreaking, but those about Jack and Sadie are particularly incisive, showing all the hidden crevices of a long-term relationship ... An astonishingly powerful collection worth multiple readings.
In McCracken’s hands even the nothingness of a sugar-adjacent void can be a subject ... Circus archetypes, combined with travel, make up the fun furniture of McCracken’s excellent new collection of short stories ... Death, equally, can change your life at any moment, and this theme is the book’s dark underside, which lends the protagonists’ lives a tension (or attention). Like a tail, it hangs around, sometimes reaffirming life.
