Product Description

The comedy team of Carter and Sharp thrives for 30 years, from the vaudeville backwaters to Hollywood, until one unforgivable act leads to another and the partnership begins to unravel. An exploration of the fragile structures that underlie love affairs, friendships and families.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1252910 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Elizabeth McCracken seems to specialise in unlikely romance: the inventive Niagara Falls All Over Again is the story of a vaudevillian's love for the one person he can't be without--his partner in comedic crime and her charmingly quirky debut, The Giant's House, was the story of a librarian's passion for the world's tallest boy.

In Niagara Falls Carter and Sharp, a vaudeville team that makes the leap to B-list film fame, have perfected a classic shtick: the stern Professor and the hapless, bumbling Rocky. Off screen, however, their roles are reversed. Mose Sharp is mild-mannered and accommodating, while Rocky Carter is a jovial bully--the kind of guy, Sharp thinks, who "compared the slices of cake on an arriving dessert tray and got disappointed, really disappointed, when the largest was delivered to somebody who wasn't him".

Show business is a subject tailor-made for McCracken's eccentric gifts. Her timing is impeccable, and she's no slouch with the jokes either. But she's not playing this one just for laughs. As anyone who read The Giant's House knows, McCracken writes prose of uncommon beauty, studded with images both arresting and sad. This second novel is a balancing act on an even greater scale: tender but never sentimental, verbally dexterous but never merely clever. Like its predecessor, Niagara Falls will have you reading aloud to whoever will listen. --Mary Park, Amazon.com

Review
Mose Sharp, a young Jewish boy growing up in small-town Iowa in the 1920s, dreams of greasepaint and the roar of the crowd. Hattie, the closest of his six sisters, introduces him to vaudeville, and promises that one day they will become a world-famous double act, sparing him the dull life running a men's outfitters that his father has mapped out for him. But Hattie first betrays him by training to become a lawyer and then dies, and Mose must make his way on his own. From the beginning, the reader gets the sense that Mose - later renamed Mike - is never really cut out to be alone, as he teams up with one eccentric character after another. By the time he meets the larger-than-life comedian Rocky Carter in 1931, it is obvious that they are destined for great things as the Laurel and Hardy of their day - a funny fat man and a thin straight man, heading for first radio fame and then Hollywood and household-name status. But, as with true love, the path of friendship does not always run smooth, and the complex relationship between the two men, spanning decades and marriages, becomes the focus of the reader's interest. Rocky Carter's jolly, rotund exterior conceals a tortured personality and a vulnerability which he conceals by cruelty to those he loves. Meanwhile, Mike's marriage to a girl from his home town will provide a source of strength - until tragedy suddenly strikes.Elizabeth McCracken's warmth and humanity shine through the brittle sophistication of her portrayal of Hollywood, and she brilliantly evokes the changing mores of America from the beginning of the century until the 1970s. This, her second novel, is a history of the human heart as much as a history of a lost era, and must surely establish the author as a formidable talent in American literature. (Kirkus UK)

Daily Telegraph
‘McCracken is a generous author, bestowing gifts on her characters…Graceful and evocative’

Customer Reviews

A gem which deserves wider readership.
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

Brilliantly realised study of friendship and ambition
Elizabeth McCracken's stunning second novel focuses on the Laurel and Hardy-style partnership of Carter and Sharp, following them from vaudeville to Hollywood and finally to virtual obscurity. Rocky Carter is the bumbling slapstick man who lives for his career and whose personal life is a disaster; his straight man, Mose Sharp, has the lower profile role but a successful marriage and children he adores. Inevitably, conflicts arise in both the act and their friendship before a tragedy in Sharp's life brings both relationships to a premature end. This novel is more about friendship and family than vaudeville and Hollywood (although both, particularly vaudeville, are vividly portrayed) and is interesting, enlightening, very funny and terribly sad.

Another wonderful novel from Elizabeth McCracken
This writer deserves to be better known in the UK - hers is a distinctive, quirky and observant voice, and this second novel easily matches The Giant's House in scope and execution. Reading this lovely, tragi-comic book will make you smile wryly, break your heart, and leave you better informed about American vaudeville and family life in the small-town Midwest.
Carter and Sharp and the people who contribute to their career and relationships are beautifully drawn, utterly believable, and for the most part, loveable.
I couldn't put it down and wish McCracken turned them out more often!