The essence of her fiction: seemingly nonsensical and yet making perfect sense. The world, strange in the first place, is often made stranger by our minds. McCracken captures the twilight zone between consciousness and subconsciousness, where intuitions are not yet filed away, impulses not yet stifled ... This is a novel about loss and grief; a novel about resilience and renewal; a novel about a mother-daughter relationship; a novel about writing. These descriptions depict the book the way I was taught to draw a bird in kindergarten: a circle for the head, an oval for the body, two triangles for the wings. But McCracken is one of those fleet-footed writers who will never be trapped, or even reliably tracked, by aboutness ... Reading McCracken’s fiction, I often fall into a kind of conversation that does not happen in life, as though the characters and I have met mid-thought: no need for small talk; no need to anchor ourselves in time or space ... A reader, catching a glimpse of their own hidden self in McCracken’s characters, experiences a moment of liberated feeling, as though they have gained a new status, become smarter, more honest, more courageous ... The secret of McCracken’s writing, one may venture to say, is her relationship with her characters. She knows and loves them: body and soul.
... soulful, melancholy ... McCracken deftly evokes how so many of us feel about our mothers: that they are just there, and always there, and that any intimation that they were not always there or weren’t ever just as they are is an affront to the primacy of their connection to their child. Many children will never forget the moment they realized that their mother was a separate human being, who made mistakes and had faults and foibles all their own, separate from their own selves. This existential shock reverberates throughout McCracken’s book, coupled with the shock of that mother no longer being there ... In this vivid composition, McCracken paints the final layer of the portrait of the mother she has so painstakingly drawn in the preceding pages ... 'Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice,' McCracken warns in the first chapter. But the irony is, her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down. Is this book a novel or is it a memoir? It matters not at all. With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love.
Leave it to Elizabeth McCracken to refresh the genre of the parental tribute ... a hall of mirrors, a lightly fictionalized memoir that interrogates genre and the act of writing even as it strives to conjure up McCracken's beloved mother in all her splendid idiosyncrasy in order to prevent her from 'evanescing.' It features the snappy prose we've come to love in inventive novels like The Giant's House and Bowlaway, and in McCracken's most recent collection of profoundly hilarious stories, The Souvenir Museum ... packed with consequence, with love, with funny observations, with reflections on writing and the risks of hurting yourself and others ... Natalie Jacobson McCracken, 1935-2018, comes alive as a wonderful hero of this book — and so does her daughter for writing it.
Sometimes the daughter lays on the forgiveness so thick that we have the urge to scrape it off to see if we can get at the more problematic feelings that are surely underneath. But the author is ahead of us. She’s found an elegant way to show us those more fraught emotions ... Real or imagined, McCracken’s mother is a great character.
Many of McCracken’s characters, like her novels, have a way of doing this: they reel you in with a joke, a wink, or a dry remark. They tremble with emotional vulnerability (or make you tremble in recognition). All the while, they retain a core of mystery, which is part of their charm ... Playful, mythic, and mysterious ... Evidence of what an alternative strategy to remembrance can offer, and the narrator’s mother, in all her imagined glory, emerges in tender specificities.
I loved Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel, The Hero of This Book, and hate to deprive people of the chance to dive unknowingly into something wonderful. So feel free to stop here and pretend I am pressing the slim hardcover into your hands ... I will warn you that the book is hard to categorize. It doesn’t have a splashy hook, and it purposefully defies genre. Page by page, it’s the quiet story of an adult child mourning a parent. As a whole, it’s a map of how to love someone ... Seamless yet dizzying jumps through time mirror the tailspin of bereavement, how our brains scramble to recall images of a loved one; how something as insignificant as a sandwich can trigger an avalanche of memory ... With admirable candor, pragmatism and humor, McCracken gives us a confessional gift as she walks through the experience of processing loss ... McCracken’s book is a grounded work of adulthood, of loss in its reasonable time and the reality of what we’re left with if granted the privilege to march through a life that unfolds in good cadence.
It is strangely unsettling to be so explicitly assigned to a state of not-knowing, to a story that is neither quite true nor quite made up, where McCracken both is and is not her protagonist. McCracken – or rather the narrator – is unrepentant ... The result is a shape-shifting hybrid of a book that hedges its bets on every page, playing with its ambivalence in order to explore the equal and opposite compulsions to respect a mother’s privacy and to hold on to her through words. It also meditates on how stories are made, and the impossibility of ever truly differentiating fiction from autobiography ... A slim novel that confirms McCracken as among the finest contemporary chroniclers of everyday life.
... funny, perceptive ... McCracken's mother, Natalie, is such an original person and worthy subject that it's evident why her loss drove McCracken to convey her spirit in a book ... This compact, wise, heartfelt book is another sign that McCracken continues to do it right.
Simple and lovely. McCracken’s easy prose is a joy to read, right off the bat ... Beyond honoring a mother, McCracken does something else remarkable in these 177 pages. She writes about writing ... McCracken does that with this book, processing her own grief and honoring her mother’s life, even if the subject — her hero — would assuredly have scoffed at the idea.
What a time to be alive and reading, when some of our keenest and most eloquent observers of the human heart are reaching the age when their parents die and therefore can—must?—be written about ... The results can be breathtaking ... The chapters attempt to alternate between the now of London and the many thens and theres of the narrator’s family history and her history as a writer, but her attention proves as fluid as the Thames, with even the present-day sections continually turning back to the past. It may not sound like much to hang a book on—in lesser hands you might call it a walkin’-and-thinkin’ story, and not in a nice way—but in fact there is action aplenty ... The story concludes with a last internal debate about its own possible crimes—but not before a final litany of the mother’s habits, abilities, and traits, a glorious biographical inventory at the end of which, deeply moved, one might have to turn aside and weep. Whoever is doing the writing—fictional narrator or real-life daughter—it’s such a close and loving description that you know she’d rather have the mother than the book.
This is McCracken at her finest — incisive, playful, and wise, as she portrays the extraordinary life that her mother led, their relationship, and the loss that has followed ... Ultimately, the book’s genre is a guessing game, a ploy, of sorts, that raises intriguing moral and philosophical questions. But McCracken has addressed all that for herself, and moved on. In the process, she has given us a terrific story, a tribute to her mother that’s gorgeously written, smart, witty, loving, and tart.
The Hero of This Book is a loving, moving portrait of Natalie McCracken that doubles as a wry, helpful guide for any writer to not freak out so much about how to categorize what she is writing ... Her mordant wit ... In its 177 pages The Hero of This Book does sharply capture a remarkable person ... It’s a pointillist portrait, made up of closely-observed detail ... But even these are not enough, and toward the end of the book, McCracken gives us an entire chapter of details, sentence after sentence, a tactic that should be dulling—a daughter throwing everything she remembers onto the page—but instead feels wonderfully overwhelming, our final glimpse of this person we’ve come to love as well ... And at every turn, McCracken puckishly undercuts our expectations about the way a book like this should work.
Dazzling ... The authenticity of the narrator’s emotions, the consistency and fullness of her voice, and her prismatic recollections of her mother shine ... She possesses a poet’s sensibilities, an astounding eye for details, crackling humor, complex characters, and the capacity to spin richly woven, character-driven narratives. Does this book even qualify as autofiction? Frankly, the writing is so captivating it doesn’t matter. Fact or fiction, a great story is a great story.
Meandering ... At a sleek 177 pages, McCracken breaks open the stereotypical definition of what is considered fiction or memoir. She muddles and layers times and events ... While the story itself is slow to start and other moments throughout seem too mundane to find interesting, McCracken — similar to the works of Anne Patchett or Elizabeth Strout — is able to find tidbits in the mundane and make them relevant, witty, and relatable ... The clean, brisk language, stunning sentences that tie up the chapters, and overall thoughtfulness in terms of life and acceptance make it well worth the read.
Who needs plot when we’ve got her writing?... early on in reading The Hero of This Book, I had to stop flagging passages that grabbed me so I wouldn’t end up highlighting the entire text ... slender enough to be read over the course of one long, dreamy Sunday, and yet there is so much packed inside. It is, after all, a mother-daughter story, one that may be factually false but is clearly emotionally true.
Jettisons conventions of genre and humorously combines the cadences of memoir with claims of fictionality ... Readers who delight in forthright and fearless stories of complicated women, told through the eyes of other complicated women, are sure to find joy in McCracken’s new book. Those who have walked with the memory of a loved one will find solace in the narrator’s final revelation—that the hero of the book and the storyteller remain forever connected, as neither will let the other go.
Like everything else this author has written, it’s simply beautifully done, with sharp, arresting language and imagery on every page. It’s the story of McCracken’s mother, realized in a supple combination of obviously treasured family memories and the author’s warm but pitiless reflections on those memories. Those memories make unfailingly good stories ... These are touching memories, but the publisher has stamped 'A Novel' on the dust jacket of this book, and McCracken herself periodically steps out of the narrative just long enough to tell her readers that they’re reading a work of fiction, not a memoir.
The narrator of Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of This Book welcomes the reader to join her in processing her mother’s death. McCracken slips between action, memory and internal monologue, seamlessly exploring her narrator’s world with no border between the internal and external. The writer intersperses observations about the writing craft with these recollections ... Readers who enjoy tales of quiet, internal reflection will find themselves right at home here. Regardless of label, The Hero of This Book is a thoughtful exploration of the lived experience of grief.
McCracken’s book is pure pleasure from first page to last ... The book gives us the life of a distinctive character: the charming, funny, stubborn mother who is truly the hero of the book ... There is so much good writing here, this review could simply be a series of quotations from the book. The narrator’s descriptions of the people she encounters are master classes in how to evoke personality with few words ... We learn all kinds of details about the narrator, revealing character in the most delightful ways ... Keen observations, often laugh-out-loud funny, are threaded among the rich memories of the narrator’s mother, a woman appreciative of life, observant and sharp in her opinions, as is her daughter.
Novel or memoir? At the end of the day, this distinction is the least important part of this beautiful, timeless book about the heroes we lose and what still remains.
McCracken navigates a literary tightrope stretched between fiction and memoir and makes darn sure we know it in a hilarious, bravura, and complexly resonant performance ... Transcending categories, McCracken’s novel-as-eulogy and meditation on writing and truth is mischievous, funny, canny, and deeply affecting.
Braided into McCracken’s gorgeously spiraling narrative is an expansive meditation on the act of writing and, intriguingly, the art of writing memoir ... The novel assumes a hybrid quality that could be called autofiction but really is an homage to the art of great storytelling ... Novel? Memoir? Who cares. It’s a great story, beautifully told.
