Book Review
The Souvenir Museum (2021)
by Elizabeth McCracken
Only two more books left for me on the 2021 National Book Award Fiction longlist. McCracken, a short story specialist has three longlist nominations starting with her story collection The Giants House in 1994. I wonder if her failure to progress from the longlist can be explained by her decision to write short stories. I've tried to grapple with my dislike of the format, particularly as I've tried to introduce more diversity into my reading list; McCracken is a very New England author, she lives there, and most of her stories are set there, although large chunks of the stories in The Souvenir Museum are set in the UK and one takes place mostly in the Netherlands.
McCracken is funny, and her characters ring true, but mostly they sound like well educated, middle class or upper class white New Englanders who have some sort of issues in their interpersonal relationships and/or unresolved issues in their personal history. Oh, wait did I just describe every collection of short stories published in the United States this year? Maybe not all of them, but most.
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