Roll Up! Roll Up!...

This novel by Sara Gruen explores the pathetic grandeur of the Depression-era circus. It is audacious material yet is sentimental. Water for Elephants is seeped in romanticism - both for a "brotherhood" feel of human relations and connections, for a harder but better time long past, for animals and their emotions. Although the narrative seems at times overly complicated and confusing, the feelings that the story evoke were enough to make me really get into this book.

Water for Elephants begins weirdly and gets weirder. Jacob Jankowski, a veterinary student at Cornell, discovers that his parents have been killed in a car accident. Aimless and distraught, he climbs aboard a train that happens to be carrying the second rate and seedy Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, and falls into a job as an animal doctor. His responsibilities draw him into the unpredictable orbit of August Rosenbluth, the circus's unsettling menagerie director, and his beautiful wife, Marlena, whose equestrian act attracts enthusiastic crowds.

Jacob immerses himself in the bizarre subculture of acrobats, aerialists, sword swallowers and lion tamers, that reflects a rigid caste system of the time. The troupe crisscrosses the country cannibalizing acts that have gone bankrupt in the Depression-era economy. After Uncle Al, the autocratic ringmaster, purchases Rosie, an elephant with an unquenchable thirst for lemonade and the inability to follow the simplest command, Benzini Brothers looks doomed. How Jacob coaxes Rosie to perform — thereby saving the circus — lies at the heart of the novel.It is August's mistreatment of Marlena and cruelty toward Rosie that is the most shocking element of the novel:

"I look up just as he flicks the cigarette. It arcs through the air and lands in Rosie's open mouth, sizzling as it hits her tongue. She roars, panicked, throwing her head and fishing inside her mouth with her trunk. August marches off. I turn back to Rosie. She stares at me, a look of unspeakable sadness on her face. Her amber eyes are filled with tears."

Gruen's circus, with its frank study in morality, symbolizes the warped vigor of capitalism in the western world. No matter how miserable or oppressed, the performers love the manufacturing of illusion, sewing a new sequined headdress for Rosie or feeding the llamas as men die of starvation in a devastated America. August's paranoid schizophrenia feels like an indictment of a lifetime spent feigning emotions to make a buck.

Circuses showcase human beings at their silliest and most sublime, and this allows writers to explore a world in which reality and the imaginary are blurred and anything is possible. I think Gruen has succeeded in transforming a glimpse of historical Americana into an enchanting fairy tale that to me was pure escapism.