Niagara Falls All Over Again
A Novel
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
By turns graceful and knowing, funny and moving, Niagara Falls All Over Again is the latest masterwork by National Book Award finalist and author of The Giant’s House, Elizabeth McCracken.
Spanning the waning years of vaudeville and the golden age of Hollywood, Niagara Falls All Over Again chronicles a flawed, passionate friendship over thirty years, weaving a powerful story of family and love, grief and loss. In it, McCracken introduces her most singular and affecting hero: Mose Sharp — son, brother, husband, father, friend ... and straight man to the fat guy in baggy pants who utterly transforms his life.
To the paying public, Mose Sharp was the arch, colorless half of the comedy team Carter and Sharp. To his partner, he was charmed and charming, a confirmed bachelor who never failed at love and romance. To his father and sisters, Mose was a prodigal son. And in his own heart and soul, he would always be a boy who once had a chance to save a girl’s life — a girl who would be his first, and greatest, loss.
Born into a Jewish family in small-town Iowa, the only boy among six sisters, Mose Sharp couldn’t leave home soon enough. By sixteen Mose had already joined the vaudeville circuit. But he knew one thing from the start: “I needed a partner,” he recalls. “I had always needed a partner.”
Then, an ebullient, self-destructive comedian named Rocky Carter came crashing into his life — and a thirty-year partnership was born. But as the comedy team of Carter and Sharp thrived from the vaudeville backwaters to Broadway to Hollywood, a funny thing happened amid the laughter: It was Mose who had all the best lines offstage.
Rocky would go through money, women, and wives in his restless search for love; Mose would settle down to a family life marked by fragile joy and wrenching tragedy. And soon, cracks were appearing in their complex relationship ... until one unforgivable act leads to another and a partnership begins to unravel.
In a novel as daring as it is compassionate, Elizabeth McCracken introduces an indelibly drawn cast of characters — from Mose’s Iowa family to the vagabond friends, lovers, and competitors who share his dizzying journey — as she deftly explores the fragile structures that underlie love affairs and friendships, partnerships and families.
An elegiac and uniquely American novel, Niagara Falls All Over Again is storytelling at its finest — and powerful proof that Elizabeth McCracken is one of the most dynamic and wholly original voices of her generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Any doubts that McCracken could not equal the inventiveness, wit and quirky imagination of her first novel, The Giant's House, will be dispelled by this relentlessly eventful, rollickingly funny and heartwarming narrative. Her story about a pair of vaudeville comedians explores a symbiotic relationship in vigorous, expressive prose. Narrator Mose Sharp relates his life from childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, to old age in Hollywood in a distinctive, mordantly humorous voice. Pierced with remorse at the accidental death of his beloved sister, Hattie, 16-year-old Mose runs away from his gentle father and five remaining sisters to join the vaudeville circuit that he and Hattie had dreamed about. Later, down on his luck, he's taken under the wing of a plump comic, Rocky Carter, and they go on to become the famous team of Carter and Sharp. Though Mose is cast as a stern professor, and Rocky as the fat and hapless fall guy, in real life Rocky takes all the credit and a larger share of their income, and Mose is endlessly forgiving of Rocky's self-destructive behavior. In depicting the mingled love and resentment felt by both men, McCracken plumbs the soul of a relationship. She also chronicles the dying years of vaudeville with a tolerant eye for its desperate exuberance, and, when Carter and Sharp move on to Hollywood, the slaphappy 1940s movie industry. As years pass, Mose finds a wife, fathers children and grows rich, but his troubled partnership with Rocky remains the core of his existence. In its delicate balance of black humor, irony and pathos, this novel is as exhilarating as the waters of Niagara, its flow mimicking the tumultuous rush of time.
