‘A Long Game’ by Elizabeth McCracken | Book Review

It’s easy for an aspiring novelist to envy writers who describe their characters as full-fledged people demanding to be committed to the page. For Elizabeth McCracken, however, writing is not at all akin to channeling spirits. She wants fiction to explore “what happens when inner life meets outer life,” a question that experience and invention must answer together. This goal, far more abstract than a daily word count, demands a correspondingly quixotic process.

It’s one that has yielded her seven books of fiction, including “The Giant’s House” (1996), a romance with a strange twist, and “Bowlaway” (2019), a succession drama at a candlepin-bowling alley. She’s twice turned to nonfiction, first for a 2008 memoir of stillbirth and parenthood, now for “A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction.”

This latest project’s roots go back to Ms. McCracken’s 2022 novel, “The Hero of this Book,” the story of a woman vacationing in London in the aftermath of her mother’s death. An early draft of that work included footnotes throughout detailing how the writing came to be and reflecting on fiction as a genre. By publication, however, only one footnote remained. Ms. McCracken has now collected the 280 excised notes and compiled them into a sometimes useful, always charming book roughly equal in length to the original novel.

The author accurately describes herself as “an aphorist and metaphorist.” A tricky revision process might mean that “the writer has lost sight of the book, as though it’s an enormous, fully formed garment that they’ve gotten turned around in.” Fiction itself “isn’t a human being, though it is human, or should be. It can’t be all blood, or all bones, or all breath, or blood and bones and breath but no muscle to move. All bones and no spirit. All metaphor but no human will.” The idea of craft is, to her, “like regarding a vast tapestry and saying, This is how I wove the blue part.”