Ancestors Maybe

Author: Elizabeth MacKiernan 

Publisher: Burning Deck (1993)

Elizabeth MacKiernan’s novel, Ancestors Maybe, is a comic fantasy about the Pagano-Christian tradition as it is experienced in central Connecticut. Three sisters, all named Marie, and their companion Hugo, probably a dwarf, entertain dead family members in a burlesque of family saga, Irish-American tall tale, and the post-Joycean novel. The form is largely catechism. The questions pondered by the characters range from: “Is the spiritual life at all possible in CT?” to “What’s for dinner?” An octogenarian buys a motorcycle, computer crime is committed, St. Brendan discovers America, and the future disappearance of almost everybody is finally explained.

"Elizabeth MacKiernan, author of this marvelous little Christmas tale, is a kind of Connecticut-Yankee version of a magic realist, stylishly anarchical in the James Thurber manner, with wonderful pace and a gift for wry oblique humor. A great read."

–Robert Coover