February 2008: Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen

"Trunk Show"
by Elizabeth Judd
The New York Times Book Review
June 4, 2006

On our first date, my husband took me to see Tod Browning's "Freaks," a 1932 horror film with a distinctly Diane Arbus feel that takes a voyeuristic delight in dwarfs, fat ladies and other sideshow improbabilities. Sara Gruen's arresting new novel, "Water for Elephants," explores similar subject matter — the pathetic grandeur of the Depression-era circus. And like Browning, Gruen infuses her audacious material with a surprisingly uplifting strain of sentimentality.

"Water for Elephants" begins violently and then veers into weirder terrain. 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 Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, and inveigles a job as an animal doctor. His responsibilities draw him into the unpredictable orbit of August Rosenbluth, the circus's mercurial 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, mastering a vernacular that reflects a rigid caste system. Ringling Brothers is nicknamed "Big Bertha," performers are "kinkers" and members of the audience are always "rubes." When an aged Jacob observes a contemporary circus, he sees children carrying blinking toys: "Bet their parents paid an arm and a leg for them, too. Some things never change. Rubes are still rubes, and you can still tell the performers from the workers."

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.

Gruen, whose first novel was "Riding Lessons," turns horses and other creatures into sympathetic characters. According to an author's note, she studied elephant body language and behavior with a former handler at the Kansas City Zoo. The research pays off. August's mistreatment of Marlena pales beside the visceral wallop of his nonchalant cruelty toward Rosie: "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."

Second-rate and seedy, Benzini Brothers suffers a collective inferiority complex (no one is permitted to utter the word "Ringling" in Uncle Al's presence). When Lovely Lucinda, the 400-pound fat lady, dies suddenly, Uncle Al orchestrates a funeral procession led by 24 black Percherons and an army of mourners competing for the three dollars and bottle of Canadian whiskey promised to whoever puts on the best show. "You've never seen such grief — even the dogs are howling."

Gruen's circus, with its frankly mercantile morality, symbolizes the warped vigor of capitalism. 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 emblematic — an indictment of a lifetime spent feigning emotions to make a buck.

At its finest, "Water for Elephants" resembles stealth hits like "The Giant's House," by Elizabeth McCracken, or "The Lovely Bones," by Alice Sebold, books that combine outrageously whimsical premises with crowd-pleasing romanticism. But Gruen's prose is merely serviceable, and she hurtles through cataclysmic events, overstuffing her whiplash narrative with drama (there's an animal stampede, two murders and countless fights). She also asserts a grand passion between Jacob and Marlena that's never convincingly demonstrated.

Black-and-white photographs of real American circus scenes from the first half of the century are interspersed throughout the novel, and they brilliantly evoke the dignified power contained in the quieter moments of this unusual brotherhood. The grainy photos capture the unexpected daintiness of an elephant disembarking from a train, the symmetry of a marching band, a gaggle of plumed showgirls stepping gingerly across a patchy lawn and the haunting solitude of an impeccably dressed cook.

Circuses showcase human beings at their silliest and most sublime, and many unlikely literary figures have been drawn to their glitzy pageantry, soaring pretensions and metaphorical potential (Marianne Moore leaps to mind). Unsurprisingly, writers seem liberated by imagining a spectacle where no comparison ever seems inflated, no development impossible. For better and for worse, Gruen has fallen under the spell. With a showman's expert timing, she saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale.

Elizabeth Judd has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Salon and other publications.

January 2008: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering American on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson

'A Walk in the Woods': On the Trail, With Wit and Insights
May 21, 1998
New York Times Book Review
by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Short of doing it yourself, the best way of escaping into nature is to read a book like Bill Bryson's latest, "A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail." The only risk is the one posed by all books on nature: a certain monotony.

Or as Bryson describes what he calls "the world on foot": "You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, 'far removed from the seats of strife,' as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge."

A willingness to trudge, in Bryson's case, the full length of the Appalachian Trail, some 2,160 miles, from Springer Mountain, in Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, in Maine. He decided to do it because a little voice in his head said one day: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"

So the challenge to Bryson -- a writer of travel books ("The Lost Continent," "Notes from a Small Island") and books about language ("The Mother Tongue," "Made in America") -- was to lend variety to his account of trudging. More variety even than the terrain of the 12 states through which the trail passes.

Bryson has met this challenge with zest and considerable humor. He begins by scaring you a little. He tells you of the trail's perils: its dangerous animals, killing diseases, "loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex." And bears that bite.

He tells you of the power of woods to unnerve. "The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core."

He tells you of his hiking partner, Stephen Katz, a childhood friend from Iowa who had been attracted to drugs and alcohol until he was found by the police "in an upended car in a field outside the little town of Mingo, hanging upside down by his seatbelt, still clutching the steering wheel and saying, 'Well, what seems to be the problem, officers?"' Katz is seriously out of shape and given to seizures ever since he took "some contaminated phenylthiamines about 10 years ago." Bryson remarks, "I imagined him bouncing around on the Appalachian Trail like some wind-up toy that had fallen on its back."

When he gets through being scared, Bryson entertains you with the history of the trail, the hell of the early going when he and his partner were not yet conditioned, the quirky characters they met, the geology, biology, ecology of the terrain, and jokes. You turn the pages not knowing what's around the next bend.

Then, after trudging for what seems like forever, he arrives in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and sees a map of the trail "about six inches wide and four feet high." He writes: "I looked at it with polite, almost proprietorial interest -- it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety -- and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches."

"My hair had grown more than that."

He concludes: "One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine."

"A Walk in the Woods" is a funny book, full of dry humor in the native-American grain. It is also a serious book. Nothing really terrible happened to the author, but by playing on our fears, he captures the ambivalence of our feelings about the wild. We revere it but we're also intimidated. We want to protect animals but we also want to kill them. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but they also "choke off views and leave you muddled and without bearings." He continues: "They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs."

One other contradiction is also captured in these pages. Americans may be destroying their environment, wiping out species, mismanaging ecology, but our forests remain vast and impressive. "One third of the landscape of the lower 48 states is covered in trees -- 728 million acres in all," Bryson writes. "Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That's 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up."

What's more, in the past century and a half, the woods have reclaimed 40 percent of New England, Bryson writes. The feeling he leaves you with is that despite all our abuse of it, nature may be too powerful to take notice.

Bryson himself was liberated by nature's vastness. The impossibility of walking the whole length of the trail freed him to sample it in stages. All the same, he ended up walking 870 miles of it -- or 39.5 percent of its total -- a distance slightly greater than that from New York to Chicago.

He was often exhausted, his "brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below." The reader, by contrast, is rarely anything but exhilarated. And you don't have to take a step.