Plaid shirts. Gruff men. Youth hockey. The girl next door. Black ice.
Tracey Lange’s third novel, “What Happened to the McCrays?,” has all the elements of small-town life in a cold place, right down to the puffy outerwear.
The setting is Potsdam, N.Y. The gruff men are Danny and Kyle McCray, an estranged father and son who’ve been reunited by a medical emergency. Danny, a retired firefighter, is recovering from a stroke; Kyle, an auto mechanic, has returned home after two and a half years in Spokane, Wash., to care for his dad and stare down his demons.
One of them is Casey, who lives across the street and happens to be Kyle’s ex-wife. She teaches sixth grade, manages the junior hockey program and keeps an eye on her brother, Wyatt, who lost the use of his legs in a car accident on a slippery road when he was 5 years old. As for the plaid shirts, it’s safe to assume that most characters are wearing one, except Casey’s chardonnay-sipping best friend, who’s known for her sartorial flair.
We don’t know what prompted Kyle to flee Potsdam when he was 39, but it’s clear that something terrible happened. Everyone seems to be in the loop, from Kyle’s old hockey coach to his former partner at Railroad Avenue Car Care to neighbors permanently stationed in rocking chairs on their front porches.
“Small towns don’t forgive easily,” Lange writes. “Even when they do, they never forget.”
In alternating sections, we watch Kyle and Casey fall in love as teenagers (the rugged athlete, the serious student who suddenly turned pretty) and now orbit each other as wary strangers. The reason emerges slowly, like a plastic capsule that takes its sweet time turning into a dinosaur when dropped in water. Only in this case, the end result isn’t a fun, spongy toy; it’s a devastating loss, worse than I imagined, but rolled out with such compassion for both Kyle and Casey that one can almost forgive the infliction. Almost.
Lange has proved herself to be a deft spinner of shamrock-tinged family yarns. Her previous novels, “We Are the Brennans” and “The Connellys of County Down,” ushered readers into houses where one might expect to find Claddagh rings, Belleek harps and, on really special occasions, Bailey’s Irish Cream. But “What Happened to the McCrays?” is less about what those of us with the pedigree call “professional Irish” and more about hardworking Americans getting by in a place where mistakes linger. Lange doesn’t romanticize, politicize or judge. She introduces you to the people of Potsdam and lets you form your own opinions.
As for Lange’s missteps, there are a few. Children in this world are preternaturally witty and wise; it must be something in the water. Adults tend to state things for the benefit of an audience. For instance, the middle school principal says, “Casey, you teach all day, tutor afternoons, you help Coach with his admin work.” Surely she already knows all this, but now the reader knows too: Casey is a hard worker.
Which brings me to my biggest gripe. On one side of the street, we have Casey and Wyatt, who are almost too good to be true (intuitive, helpful, can-do, you name it). On the other, we have Kyle and Danny, a pair of bumbling dudes who require the Heimlich to cough up a feeling. They’re not bad per se, but the setup feels binary, as if Lange used a thick crayon when a mechanical pencil would have sufficed. Still, overdrawn though it might be, her portrait of complicated, deeply rooted relationships is a sight to behold.
Fans of the homecoming plot — “The Half Moon,” “Marrying the Ketchups,” “The Blue Sisters,” to name a few newish ones — will enjoy “The McCrays,” with good reason. One can only hope that this unassuming, moving novel will also land in the hands of readers who struggle with forgiveness. From epigraph to last line, Lange reminds us that there are two sides to every story — and that there’s no easy path between them.
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