I was still on the first page of Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection of stories, where a couple drive out of Dublin – “It was 10pm and raining. If Ireland was emerald she couldn’t say” – when I sighed with pleasure at being back in her sharp-witted world. She writes both novels and stories and her last collection, Thunderstruck (2014), was infused with grief. The Souvenir Museum is brighter and cheerier – up to a point – as the sunny yellow cover with a balloon animal on it suggests.
The subject is families, those people there’s no escaping from because we’re made of the same stuff. McCracken’s families aren’t warring: they’re good natured at heart and she has a gift for spotting the comic potential in situations many of us have endured, such as attending our first family event with a new partner (The Irish Wedding, where Sadie “would have to perform as herself in front of Jack’s family”). Her prose is stippled with just-so observations, as in the title story where a souvenir is “a memory you could plan to keep instead of the rubble of what happened” and Joanna notices her son having “thoughts all the time that she hadn’t put in his head, which she knew was the point of having children but destroyed her”.
Families come in all flavours, but their experiences run across the lines; in Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark, gay couple Ernest and Bruno argue over having an open-plan living area. “Do you know who else likes to see everything from the kitchen? The Devil. Hell is entirely without doors.” Like many of the families here, they go on holiday, though the desired outcomes – rest, relaxation – rarely happen. (The epigraph to the book, from poet Brenda Shaughnessy, reads: “The idea of travel. The very idea.”)
Where there is sunshine, there are also shadows and the darkness in The Souvenir Museum descends when families don’t get started in the first place, as with middle-aged actor Mistress Mickle, whose envy of “young, talentless, gleaming people” threatens to push her over the edge, or when a family comes to an unexpected end. 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, “constructed to memorialise a tragedy”, by gorging on loaves of bread as substitutes for her children: “She’d had to turn herself into a monster in order to be seen.”
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. Their stories are scattered through the book, which is my only complaint: placing them all together, as a separate suite of stories, could add weight, on the model of the Derdon stories in Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection or Mavis Gallant’s Carette family in Across the Bridge. But either way, it’s a pleasure to follow Sadie and Jack, through their first meeting to that family wedding and their future together, laughing – and crying – all the way.
• The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
