The Invisible Circus was Jennifer Egan's first novel, published in 1995. Approaching it after reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, for which Egan won the Pulitzer in 2011 and the National Book Critics Circle Award, you can sense the beginnings of a great writer in Circus, but yet something is missing. Admittedly, I felt that way after Goon Squad as well--there were parts that I adored and many that I felt were unnecessary or, worse yet, uninteresting.
Hence why I say Egan's writing is somewhat a "circus" in itself because there are parts where, like at the circus, you marvel at her astonishing mastery of prose and others where you are left rather puzzled, uncomfortable, maybe even frightened (not that that's a bad thing). The Invisible Circus, to sum it up as succinctly and haphazardly as IMDB does (it was adapted into a film in 1999), is about "A teenage girl who travels to Paris in the 1970s trying to find out about her sister's suicide, and falls in love with her dead sister's boyfriend." And eww, they casted Cameron Diaz. I think at times it felt as if Egan was struggling with maintaining the reader's attention by dragging us along this plot where the teenage girl/protagonist, Phoebe, wanders dangerously all over Europe to find clues to her sister's death, which we've known all along was a suicide. Further, I did not feel connected to the main character enough to empathize with her struggle, and became rather annoyed with her foolish behavior instead. Such as, taking acid in Paris, or following a man into his home in Amsterdam and nearly getting raped, or oh yeah, the falling in love with her dead sister's boyfriend who is thirty and engaged and uhm, was her dead sister's boyfriend. It was especially annoying because she started out as a sensible character who was just so obsessed with her sister that she started to mimic her behavior (and her sister was borderline crazy, which was obvious to everyone else, and the reader).
Still, I can't say enough for Egan's writing. She literally could have suspended most present action and necessary things like plot, conflict, whatever, and I probably would have still read it through. It's like finding a spider web on every page--in a good way. Her language is impeccable and always unique, such as when she describes prostitute's legs like "bruised fruit." Egan frequently employs ever-so-brief insights that leave lasting impacts, such as a character's claim, "I think irony may be one of those things you either can't see at all or can't see anything but."
The moments that really shone were when she would explore the family dynamics of the main characters. Phoebe was a young girl when her sister, Faith, died, and it was only a few years before that that their father passed away from leukemia. Phoebe, Faith, and their brother Barry had uniquely interesting relationships with their father; Faith was clearly his favorite and the apple of his eye, and Phoebe and Barry simply tried to keep up, get his attention anyway they can. Thus it was especially tragic for Faith when he passed away; the light went out for her. I've excerpted one of my favorite scenes to share with you guys:
Two or three months after their father died, Barry had decided one Saturday to clear out a basement storeroom for an inventing workshop. Their father's paintings crowded the little room: hundreds of canvases, many painted in the last months before he died. Nearly all the paintings were of Faith. Barry decided to throw them away.
He stacked a first load into an enormous cardboard box and dragged it out to the street. Faith was outside, trimming beds of ivy with a large pair of clipping shears. Phoebe slumped beside her on the warm brick path, twirling ivy stems like propellers and letting go, watching them fly for a second.
"What's in the box?" Faith asked when Barry came toiling along the driveway.
"Some old stuff of Dad's."
Faith went to the box, still holding her shears, and looked inside. She pulled out one of the paintings, a portrait of herself in the backyard. In the picture she was smiling. "Bear, what are you doing with these?"
"Throwing them out."
Faith seemed confused. She'd hardly been able to eat, and the shears looked heavy and dark in her hand. "Put them back," she told him.
"There isn't room."
"Put them where they were, Bear. Back in the basement."
"I'm throwing them out!"
"They were Dad's!" Faith cried.
Barry pushed past her, dragging the box behind him over the pavement. It made a loud scraping sound.
"Stop it!" Faith cried. "Just--give them to me."
But something had happened to Barry. "I want them out," he hollered. "I'm sick of these things!" There were tears on his face. He seized a painting from the box and threw it into the street. There was Faith, face-up on the concrete. She shrieked as if she'd felt the impact. Barry took a second painting and tried to break it with his hands. Phoebe ran at her brother and held his arms, but he shook her off easily, pulled three paintings from the box and hurled them as far as he could. Two rolled in cheerful somersaults before toppling over. Barry was a fierce, wiry boy, and he moved quickly. Portraits of Faith soon littered the street: pastels, watercolors, wet-looking oils.
Faith was sobbing. She waved the shears in Barry's face. "Stop it," she screamed, "or I'll kill you!"
Barry paused. He looked at the shears, then smiled. He broke the painting over his knee. Faith plunged the shears into her own thigh.
Then everything stopped. Barry's face went so white Phoebe thought at first that her sister had killed them both. There was a long, almost leisurely pause when none of them moved, when the day tingled around them.
Then everything happened at once: Faith sank to the ground. Barry tore off his t-shirt and tied her leg in a tourniquet. Phoebe pounded wildly on the door of their neighbor, Mrs. Rose, who ferried them to Children's Hospital in her clattering station wagon. There were shots, stitches and lots of questions. It was a game, they'd all insisted--instinctively, without plan or discussing among them--a game that had gone too far.
It had always seemed to Phoebe, looking back, that on that day something shifted irreversibly among the three of them. As Faith lay in the emergency room, bleached from loss of blood, Phoebe saw in her sister's face a kind of wonderment at the power of what she had done. It was spring 1966. That fall Faith would start high school, and within a year would be immersed in what had become, in retrospect, the sixties. But when Faith and Barry fought, none of this had happened yet. Faith was thirteen, wearing green cotton pants. She knew nothing of drugs. Even the first of so many boyfriends had not yet crossed their threshold.
After the fight Barry kept out of Faith's way. He would watch her from a distance, following her movements with his dark eyes. He was afraid of her. And Faith, after that day, no longer seemed frightened of anything.
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So there you have it, a taste of The Invisible Circus. I won't make it my pick for you guys to read... if you're going to read Egan, I still suggest Goon Squad instead. But I might start reading her other acclaimed novel, Look at Me, next.
