McCracken is one of the too-rare writers whose smartest, most poignant lines are also her funniest, like Bruno’s wish to be honest with Cody about what a bad swimmer the child is, even though the “rule of the household was to encourage”: “One of the things he hadn’t realized before having a child: how many ways there were to die of self-confidence.” Or how Bruno coolly recounts another parent’s unwelcome comments about Cody’s lagging toilet-training, concluding pithily that “modern parenthood” is how “other parents examined your children for deficiencies so they could augur their own child’s future from your child’s psychic entrails.” In an interview at Lit Hub, Elizabeth McCracken said the best writing advice she ever received was from Allan Gurganus, who she said “once told us not to be afraid to get our characters out of the house and send them somewhere more interesting.” In “Robinson Crusoe at the Water Park,” that “somewhere more interesting” is the artificial river at Texas’ Schlitterbahn, an escape for Bruno and Ernest and their young son Cody from their open-plan house in Houston, a house Bruno hates for, among other things, its lack of doors and walls and secrets it’s no surprise then that this story is in part about the secrets Bruno keeps, as well as his fears of drowning (and of drowning children in particular) and his certainty that anytime Cody disappears “for more than a minute, even in games of hide-and-go-seek, when the boy wouldn’t answer his name” that his son is dead, which quickly becomes “an absolute conviction that he was now looking for a corpse.” Over and over, I ask myself, How does she do it?
You Must Be Middle-Aged and Jaded to Ride the Torrent RiverĮvery time I read Elizabeth McCracken’s fiction, I awe at her many gifts: the surprises she wrings out of the situations she devises, the endless wit of her magnificent sentences, the way she treats everyone who appears in her stories with dignity and grace.
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