Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385336489
• ISBN13: 9780385336482
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

What a Talent McCracken Is!

It isn't often that one can find a book that a) successfully portrays the sweep of a man's life, from childhood to old age, and b) provides such a profoundly satisfying read. These are characters one comes to know intimately, emotionally, and care about thanks to McCracken's gift with language and storytelling. As a magazine reviewer, I've had to read far too many grotesque and sensationalistic new books by alienated young male writers lately; this tour-de-force was a relief and a delight.

Beautifully Written!

This novel is beautifully written, as was The Giant's House. My advice: ignore reviews that fault the book for not being what some of the readers below would have written, and enjoy it for its lyrical prose and moving characters.

I never expected this to be so good! Deserves promotion.

Anyone who reads this book in the mistaken belief that it will be a pleasant and nostalgic escape into vaudeville, the golden age of film, and the early days of television, may be disappointed. This is not Carter Beats the Devil, delightful as that book is--it's far more ambitious. McCracken uses a narrow focus on one Abbott/Costello type comedy team over a span of sixty years to delve into the broad spectrum of human emotions which makes life meaningful for each of us, insightfully developing themes about family, friendship, love, and the essence of communion and connection. Mose Sharp (Sharensky), a Jewish boy from Valley Junction, Iowa, is an only son among six sisters, destined to inherit his father's men's clothing store, until his sister Hattie inspires him to take his chances with vaudeville. He runs away, meets up with Rocky Carter, for whom he acts as straight man, and becomes half of a successful team, which goes from vaudeville, to popular B-movies, radio, and TV in the age of Eddie Cantor and Milton Berle. Giving proof to the idea that you can take the boy out of Iowa but you can't take Iowa out of the boy, Mose remains true to the values he learned at home, escaping their narrow limitations while preserving their essence and, in contrast to Rocky, forming lasting and loving relationships. As McCracken explores the off-again, on-again relationship of Mose and Rocky over the span of sixty years, she draws parallels and contrasts between their relationship and that of a marriage, between friendship and family, between sharing an act and sharing one's life, between the little deaths inherent in a tumultuous partnership and the very real deaths one must cope with in real life. It's a thoughtful, sensitive exploration of ideas within an intriguing framework, loaded with original imagery and observations ("he was a parsnippy-looking guy, scraped and pale..."; "eyebrows so plucked they looked like columns of marching ants"). Though I admired McCracken's earlier novel, The Giant's House, I was thrilled by this one. Mary Whipple

Didn't Want It to End

Elizabeth McCracken takes an ambitious idea of the personal and professional relationship between two vaudeville performers and makes it soar with humor, depth, and heart. Out narrator Mose Sharp is a young Jewish boy growing up in Iowa who is given the dream of vaudeville by his sister Hattie. But the story really takes off when he meets the man who is to become his partner and friend for some thirty odd years, Rocky Carter.From the midwest to the Hollywood Hills, McCracken paints a set of characters so real, so realized you feel like you're reading a wonderful celebrity bio that remembers an America captured in nostalgia. The book was faintly reminiscent to me of Michael Chabon's "Kavalier & Clay" as they're both set in the same general timeline; And if you enjoyed that book, you'd probably like this as well. It also made me, in light of recent events, feel like a part of Americana was captured. And that in itself was a small comfort and joy. A great book.

Highly recommended

This is the story of an unlikely friendship in which Mose Sharp is the straight man indeed. A good-looking stagestruck Jewish kid from the midwest, his career is going nowhere (he comes perilously close to getting hooked off stage) until he meets fat, funny Rocky Carter, whose knockabout comic career set to take off. Rocky sees something in Mose, and together they launch Carter and Sharp, the fat-guy-skinny-guy comedy team to beat ?em all. On stage and off, Mose's life is transformed by his partnership with talented, outrageous, big-hearted, demanding Rocky. In their thirty years together that friendship will be tested at many twists and turns, and when that friendship ends the reader feels its loss almost as much as Mose does. Sorry if the first paragraph makes "Niagara Falls" sound pretty morose. It's not. Elizabeth McCracken balances skilfully on the tightrope between yearning and yucks to make "Niagara Falls All Over Again" more than a show-biz novel or a nostalgia piece. She builds on the inventive voice first heard in "The Giant's House" to reach one of those rare levels where although you're tickled by these guys' foibles, in the center of your chest you feel the hurt and longing behind the jokes. "Niagara Falls" will move you and make you laugh. What more can you ask of good fiction?