THE SOUVENIR MUSEUM

After the multigenerational, somewhat whimsical sweep of Bowlaway (2019), McCracken switches gears and proves her mastery of short fiction with these 12 tightly structured, searingly realistic stories.

Four linked stories about a couple named Jack and Sadie are interspersed throughout and form the book’s unifying spine. The opener, “The Irish Wedding,” refers to Jack’s sister’s nuptials, where Jewish American Sadie meets Jack’s British family for the first time. Intimations of the fault lines in their relationship are revealed along with hints that it may last despite them. Enduring love—along with the urge to resist it—is this volume’s common theme, whether in relationships between parents and children, lovers, ex-lovers, friends, and even in-laws. In “Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark,” a few seconds of panic cause a middle-aged gay man to drop his wry surface detachment and acknowledge his commitment toward his more emotive partner and their child. While in Denmark ostensibly to visit Legoland with her 10-year-old son, the divorced bookkeeper of the title story juggles her complicated feelings for the boy with her dead father’s final request to find her long-lost former boyfriend and give him a bequest. "A Walk-Through the Human Heart" illuminates the vein of cruelty that sometimes runs through parental love, making it all the more powerful, as a mother desperately searches vintage shops for the Baby Alive doll she refused to buy her grown, now-pregnant daughter as an 8-year-old. “Birdsong From the Radio,” about a stay-at-home suburban mother whose love grows destructive, shows the risk of caring too much. 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. Over the course of the book, both characters are pulled between the urges to disguise and reveal themselves, to cling and to run. By the last story, when they marry 20 years after they met, they still harbor resentments and deep disagreements. But what longtime couple doesn’t?

An astonishingly powerful collection worth multiple readings.