Memories of Success Haunt Vaudevillians Long After Breakup

Mose Sharp, the tone-perfect narrator of Elizabeth McCracken’s beautifully written second novel, is a Jewish boy from West Des Moines, Iowa, who is expected to inherit the family clothing store. Instead, breaking his father’s heart, he runs away at 18 and becomes a vaudeville performer during the Depression, when vaudeville is dying.

Is Mose, renamed Mike, selfishly opting for the personal life at the expense of his family when he follows his dream of stardom through seedy theaters all over the Midwest, in the company of “eccentric dancers,” singers, jugglers, contortionists and animal acts?

Or, by abandoning his family, is he doing the opposite: sacrificing the personal life for the dubious goal of public adulation? Stay tuned.

Mike is both talented and lucky. After several failed partnerships, he teams up with a fat, physical comedian named Rocky Carter, and by World War II stardom has indeed arrived. Mike is the straight man of Carter and Sharp: Abbott to Rocky’s Costello, Laurel to his Hardy, the White Face--to use the terminology of Eric Idle’s recent novel about comedians in space, “The Road to Mars”--to Rocky’s Red Nose.

They make 28 movies together. In the public’s eye, they are inseparable--in fact, identical: “a comic animal with four legs and four arms and two heads,” endlessly stepping on bananas and getting hit by cream pies. But by the early 1950s, their private lives have diverged. Mike has segued smoothly from ladies’ man to devoted husband. He has children, makes peace with the folks back in West Des Moines, invests his money wisely. Rocky, however, is falling apart.

The blow-up comes when Mike judges it’s time to retire the act. Rocky, drinking heavily, chain-marrying younger women, going broke, is desperate to continue, even though the times have passed Carter and Sharp by. He threatens to have Mike’s wife, Jessica, a choreographer, blacklisted as an ex-Communist.

Mike is furious. With a couple of exceptions--such as being tricked onto a “This Is Your Life” episode--he doesn’t speak to Rocky for the next 40 years.

Two-thirds through the novel, the debate in Mike’s mind between the personal and the public seems resolved. The personal can’t exist without meaningful relationships, and those can best be found at home. The values of West Des Moines trump those of Hollywood.

McCracken, we perceive, hasn’t written a story about vaudeville, the movies, the Depression or the blacklist at all; they are merely props in a story about lives affected much more powerfully by private betrayals and losses.

Yet what about Carter and Sharp? They are business associates, yes, public figures, yes, but bound in an intimacy even husbands and wives might not match.

As the decades drag by, they continue to haunt each other, and not just because of their grievances (Mike slept with Rocky’s first wife; Rocky cheated Mike out of promised earnings). “Soldiers with legs amputated suffer from phantom pain,” Mike says. “Me, I’ve suffered 40 years from phantom punch lines. For all the noise I made about being glad to get rid of him, the things I did afterward, the movies I appeared in--being with Rocky was the best time of my life. I love my children, but they don’t understand.”

This is a realistic novel, as well as one in which every bit of stage patter, every foreshadowing and echo, every time-shift is faultlessly handled. The reality is that most of the fun happens in the first half of life. Then parents die, children drown in swimming pools, spouses die of cancer, careers peter out, old age sets in.

This happens to Carter and Sharp, too, and it’s proof of McCracken’s magic that the impression we take away from “Niagara Falls All Over Again” isn’t of sadness--though there’s plenty of that--so much as exuberance and wit.