‘The Invisible Circus’ by Jennifer Egan
When buying books I have a tendency to deliberate over a few before actually choosing one (perhaps two if I’m feeling naughty), however with The Invisible Circus it was a very different story. I clocked the eye-catching cover from afar, gave the blurb the once-over, noticed it was written by Jennifer Egan - the author of Look at Me, which I read back in January and loved - and bolted towards the till. The glowing reviews, the heartbreaking subject matter, the fact that it was Egan’s debut novel - all of it made The Invisible Circus seem utterly irresistible to me. So I bought it with the intention of reading it immediately. And I am very glad I did.
The Invisible Circus was first published in 1995 by Nan Talese, a division of Random House, and it was well received by writers and critics alike. Set in 1978, the novel follows eighteen-year-old Phoebe O'Connor as she makes a pilgrimage from her home city of San Francisco, across Europe, to the tiny Italian coastal town where her older sister died. Faith O'Connor was a beautiful and highly principled hippie chick who ‘fell’ from a cliff in Corniglia, Italy, in 1970. Phoebe, who was just ten years old when Faith died, decides to leave San Francisco behind for three months to retrace her late sister’s steps across Europe, using the postcards she sent home as a guide. She navigates cities such as Amsterdam and Paris on her own, but on arriving in Munich she is reunited, by chance, with Wolf, her sister’s former boyfriend. Through reconnecting with Wolf, who she learns was present at the scene of her sister’s death, Phoebe discovers the complex and devastating truth behind it all, and that it was by no means an accident.
It is hard to believe that The Invisible Circus is someone’s debut novel, for it has all the elegance and assuredness of an opus, something that has been worked towards for years. Yet, because it is a coming-of-age story of sorts, it retains the heady promise and visceral feeling characteristic of a freshman effort. Phoebe herself is something of a blank canvas, there is not a lot to her, but I sense that this is deliberate as it allows the reader to focus on the dearly departed Faith in the same way her little sister does. Phoebe puts Faith on a pedestal. She sleeps in her old, unchanged room and even tries on her clothes. From Wolf, Phoebe discovers that Faith was part of a radical anarchist faction in Germany and that she committed suicide out of guilt over the accidental killing of a custodian in what was only intended as an act of civil disobedience. With these and other revelations Phoebe’s deity-like image of her late sister is duly shattered.
It is difficult to fault The Invisible Circus in any way, my only halfway negative comment is that the ending is perhaps a touch too neat. Phoebe returns home, a changed woman, finally moving out of her dead sister’s bedroom and back into her own. She and her mother decide to sell the sprawling old family home, putting the past behind them for good. I suppose a part of me was hoping for something a little more ambiguous, however this is a very minor criticism of a book that I thoroughly enjoyed. At just over three hundred and fifty pages long it is neither too teasingly brief nor too long, and Jennifer Egan’s voice is as compelling as ever. This first novel is not as witty or in-your-face clever as Egan’s later works, 2001's Look at Me and 2010’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, but in my opinion it packs a mightier emotional punch. At times it is almost unbearably poignant.
Overall, this novel is very nearly perfect. It is neatly structured, elegantly written and often truly heartbreaking. If you’re a fan of Jennifer Egan’s writing you will adore The Invisible Circus, and if you haven’t read any of her work before I would recommend it as the best place to start. Egan’s books are a pleasure to read and this is a dazzling debut: sad, compelling and, above all, beautiful.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in May 2012.