"The souvenir museum" by Elizabeth McCracken (Jonathan Cape, 2021)

Stories from "Zoetrope all-story", BASS 2020 etc. They're all about 20 pages long.

• The Irish Wedding - Jack and Sadie (from Boston, US) arrive after dark at the big Irish house of Jack's sister, Fiona for her wedding - "in the dark, Ireland was making itself up as it went along". The house is a work-in-progress. Fiona's mother isn't there because Fiona's marrying an atheist, Piet (Dutch). Sadie hasn't met the family and doesn't understand the in-jokes. She notices UK/US differences. Fiona says that she should get Jack to tell her all about his old friend Lottie. Sadie finds that she's given the couple the same wedding present as a sister has given. They spend the night in the bedroom where the previous owner died. Next day she laughs over Jack's father's use of "cut the cheese" then everyone laughs with her.
• Proof - Louis and his 7 older brothers ran a store in Massachusetts until at 47 he married Arlene MacLean and left the firm. When their son David was 1, the firm folded. His brothers never married. Arlene was grumpy, he easily pleased - a bird lover with a love of Scotland. Now, with Arlene dead 2 months, and his father 77, David (unattached?) is taking him on a tour of Scottish islands to see puffins etc. David's scared of heights. The international tourists on the boat help Louis climb the rocky paths, though he doesn't need much help. David looks for signs of forgetfulness in Louis. At the end they beachcomb together for pottery fragments, the way Louis used to.
• It's not you - First person. She has a famous voice now but back in 1993 when she was 27, she worked in HR. She was in "The Narcissus Hotel" for a night, getting over a bad break-up, having Bourbon for breakfast, when she meets a radio advice-giver. He'd been planning to spend the night with a caller he'd never met, but she hadn't turned up. He'd wondered if the narrator was the missing woman. The narrator goes to his suite and has a luxurious bath. He leaves her to it, telling her she should change her life. She falls asleep, nearly drowns. He dies of a heart attack soon after, in another hotel. The events of that night still bother her. (puns in the title)
• A splinter - It's about 1985. Lenny (16) works on the QE2 to get to London. His 3 older sisters live in England. On the voyage he becomes interested in a ventriloquist, Lottie Stanley. In London she knocks on her door and asks to be taught by her. She lets him stay, charging rent. They sometimes sleep together, he helping her with her shows, some on TV. She got him to pretend he was one of her dummies. His sisters get him away in time for school back in the States. Years later, a public speaker (lecturer?), he felt the influence of Lottie, the part "that allowed him to believe that people might want to hear what he had to say. The part that let him ask strangers for their love, and not care if they said yes"
• Mistress Mickle all at sea - Jenny Early is 49, gone from the UK to Rotterdam to see her messed-up brother Jonas. They're American. Jonas' girlfriend is pregnant. It's New Years Eve. Fireworks are being let off in the street. She returns the next day. She's been acting there for 20 years. Mistress Mickle is the villian she plays on a kid's TV show. All her life she'd felt foreign. She'd lived with men off and on. On the ferry her mind drifted. She thought again of suicide -"The water behind a boat is the deepest wishing well in the world". Her money would go to Jonas. She watches the child entertainer perform - Magnificent Jimmy, 67 he says. He's good. She's seasick. She returns to her cabin, meeting Jimmy on the way. She's sick again. She thinks about how the TV series would deal with her death. The final paragraph is "And then - how do we know this? reader, we have it on the highest authority - the ocean came calm and smooth, and Mistress Mickle's heart did likewise, and she felt entirely better, and safe"
• Birdsong from the radio - Leonora and Alan were the parents of Rosa, Marco and Dolly. Leonora grew increasingly dotty. When Rosa was 15 she told her father that the siblings were leaving and he should too. That's what they did. Driving the kids to school the nanny Madeline had an accident and they all died. Leonora brought bread each day, pretending it was her children when she ate it in the shop. She became the local loony. One day Madeline's father approaches her. She'd sat drunk and alone at her children's funeral years before. He invites her to Madeline's memorial service - a chance of redemption for Leonora. She offers him bread.
• The get-go - Sadie's father died when she was 9. later she brought Jack home to see her mother Linda. He wasn't allowed to see her childhood bedroom. Jack tried to get Linda to like him. 12 years later he gets a call because she's fallen. She lives in a room in an ex-school. She's taken her late husband's stuff out of storage. In hospital she asks him if he knew that Sadie had seen her father die. He says "yes" but actually she hadn't told him. When he died she thought he was playing a trick. His dying was hers and hers alone.
• Robinson Crusoe at the waterpark - Bruno and Ernest are the fathers of Cody (4) who's forbidden videos games so he's obsessed with a pocket calculator. They're visiting a waterpark in Galveston. Bruno was married for 15 years to a woman. He works with manuscripts and thinks he has much better taste than young Ernest, who deals with cloud services. Bruno was abandoned as a baby in Nottingham library (UK), adopted by a German woman who divorced and took him to the States. "Ernest believed in vows, Bruno in facts and deeds. The important fact was four years old. The fact was named Cody. The fact had never-cut red hair that hung to his shoulders and was so fair-skinned as to be combustible". He'd loved Eleanor, who'd been 40 when they married. She died 10 years before, drunk in a swimming pool - "She was the author of most of Bruno's opinions. Holding them was his way of keeping her alive". Bruno took Cody down the water-run while Ernest has a drink. Cody briefly disappears underwater. When they get back to Ernest, Bruno asks to marry him. Several quotable sentences - e.g. "For Bruno, there was nothing between uncertainty and catastrophe. That was his secret"; "'Yes,', said Cody seriously, as though he'd been arguing this for hours"; "Every bathing suit was an act of bravery" (The best so far)
• A walk-through human heart - Every so often there's a paragraph about grackles (a type of bird) - the first ending with "They weren't omens of anything except more grackles". Thea, a 52 y.o. grandmother-to-be, is in a vintage store looking for a present. There are items from her childhood. Her daughter Georgia is in a same-sex relationship. She recalls her ex-friend Florence, 20 years older than her, whose son Orly played with Georgia. He went off the rails, was in rehab at 13 and OD'd, dying at 16. She's looking for a "Baby Alive" doll that Georgia had wanted when 8. She recalls going with Geogia to a museum with a beating heart you could walk through, switch off at night. The shopkeeper stared at her - "It was like being on the phone with someone and not knowing whether you'd been disconnected". Georgia had been through rehab as well. Florence had once shown Thea the places to look for Georgia next time she disappeared. Thea wonders whether Georgia would have turned out different had Thea given her the doll that fed and pooed. The final paragraph (about grackles) ends with "Maybe they don't want anything. maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?" (I like this story too)
• Two sad clowns - Sadie meets Jack for the first time as he's manipulating a giant puppet. He invites her to a bar. There's wisecracking. They help a drunk home. (No)
• The souvenir museum - Joanna (3rd-person PoV) married Aksel, then became a mother, then her mother died, then after 10 years she separated (11 years ago), then her father died. He'd left a watch for Aksel. Now she's visiting Denmark to see Askel with her little son Leo (who doesn't know the purpose of the trip). Neither liked busy Legoland. They visit a souvenir museum (Eiffel Towers, etc) with a room of Forbidden Souvenirs. She lets him chose what to do, going round museums that bore her. Then they visit a living Viking Museum. Aksel's in a hut with a medicine woman, Flora. He wonders if Leo is his son. No, says Joanna. She feels something for him. She asks him why he left. The watch is old, with old porn inside. The ending is Leo's PoV. He plays with Flora's son. There's a glimmer of love. He wouldn't mind staying in this timeless place.
• Nothing, daring, only darling, darling - Sadie, 39, wants her and Jack, 46, to marry before too many other relatives die (most recently Thomas, Jack's 27 y.o. nephew who killed himself. She'd known him since he was a kid). He copes with grief by immersing himself in the grief of others. He's an academic with an interest in [historical] puppets. They leave the States for a month or so to marry in the UK village of Jack's parents (who'd spent years in the States). Then they spend part of their honeymoon on an Amsterdam houseboat next to Anne Frank's house (tickets online only, booked weeks ahead). She thinks over their time together - childless, happy. Europe was his gift to her - she was passportless when they met. He keeps trying for tickets. They go to the Anne Frank house and see a father and young daughter asking to be let in. When they’re about to be admitted, Jack interrupts to say that he and Sadie should be let in too. In the end, nobody’s let in. On the way back to the boat he tells Sadie he wants a child. She says it’s not that easy. For some reason – anger? – he locks her in the boat. The final paragraph is “She loved puppets, too, of course she did. Before, and during, and even after, she loved them, those dear beings – twee, of course they were, which was what made them dear – who died of abandonment over and over. And then were resurrected.”.

There are negotiations between children and parents. Collections of old household items appear in more than one story. The stories tend to have a slightly obscure final paragraph or so.

Other reviews

• Jon Self (The subject is families ... Three stories deal with grief on the death of a child and this suffering finds its fullest form in Birdsong From the Radio, where bereaved mother Leonora makes a “monument” of herself ... And what gives The Souvenir Museum an added layer of coherence is that five of the 12 stories are about the same couple, Sadie and Jack.s)
• Amy R Martin (Jack and Sadie, like many of McCracken’s characters, are delightfully quirky ... McCracken’s characters are “different.” They are oddballs, travelers, expats, or otherwise uprooted and away from home, out of their element — or without any element at all)
• Helen McAlpin (I had to stop reading "The Irish Wedding" several times to explain to my husband why I was laughing so hard.)
• Jackie Thomas-Kennedy (there is, in these stories, a kind of compulsive noticing, and the resultant prose is so plush that it may be read happily for the language alone, though there is much more at work here. ... the primary question of this collection: the question of scale, of what is large enough to matter. ... The travels undertaken by McCracken’s characters often reveal what they should have been able to see at home)