Excerpt from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Jeptha Arrison said, "There's the smartest man I ever met." But Jeptha was so amiably stupid everybody was the smartest man he ever met. It was a worldwide tie.

"Nobody can think that much," said Joe Wear.

"He writes poetry," said LuEtta Mood. At first she'd resented Dr. Sprague: she felt she'd dug out a little space next to Bertha Truitt and here was this man stepping into it. She had thought terrible things about him, even wondered whether their marriage was legal (in Massachusetts, it was) or actual (a different question entirely).

But Lu was as muscular in mind as in body: she made a decision. She would protect him. She said to Joe Wear, "He's published two books. He writes the poems in his head as he walks."

Joe Wear frowned with such vehemence it made the women laugh. "No doubt he does. Myself, I have a job. I have no use for poetry. I don't see what's so funny, ladies."

He was a feral child, Joe Wear, brought up in bowling alleys by bowling alley operators. He had gone to work for Bertha Truitt because he understood she would not try to mother him: he had no use for mothers, having never had one, only a photograph and a maiden aunt and a general ungainliness caused by the doctor's forceps (according to the matron at the Dolbeer Home for Destitute Children) or the umbilical cord around his neck (according to the maiden aunt). Not a limp but a liquid lumbering walk. He seemed to need tightening at his joints, or else he'd been overtightened. It did not stop him. It would not.

No mother, no imagination. He could not see how things could be improved or changed, and so he'd follow his employer's directions to the letter. She had found him at the lowest point of his life, ruined by love. Or not yet ruined, but the ruin hung over him like a guillotine blade. The blade hung there still. She had stayed the execution but did not have the power to pardon him.

Do a good job, Truitt had said to him the day of his hiring, and one day the business will come to you.

His employer, singular: Bertha Truitt. Old Levi wasn't anything to him, married or not. Still, his presence worried Joe Wear. Truitt was a fraud—she went around claiming she'd invented The Game, when everyone knew that wasn't so—and now she'd married a colored man, which showed she was a woman of bad judgment, too. Joe Wear worried somebody might burn Truitt's Alleys to the ground. Nobody did. Rich people were allowed to do things, he guessed. One day he'd be rich himself and live how he wanted.

No curtain at Truitt's, too many women, but he had lodging above the alleys and Truitt trusted him. He had never been trusted in his life. It was a perturbing sensation.

They were alike, Joe Wear and Bertha Truitt, foundlings for whom the rolling ball was the feel of a hand on a forehead, a light touch of love on the back. Bowling gave you something to think about besides your regrets.

Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.