A lot of kids used to dream of running away to join the circus, but after reading “Water for Elephants,” you feel like author Sara Gruen actually did. She brings the experience of belonging to a second-rate circus, traveling by train during the Depression, to life.
Jacob Jankowski is little more than the width of final exams away from stepping into adult life when fate intervenes. In the spring of 1931, he is a 23-year-old student at Cornell’s veterinary school and has every reason to believe he will graduate to join his father’s practice. But both of his parents are killed in a car accident, and Jacob learns they died deeply in debt.
With no family and no home, there is no place for him to go except back to Ithaca. At least there the bills are paid to the end of the semester. He’s unable, though, to sit for his exams. Following nothing but impulse, he walks out of the classroom and out of the town and swings aboard a passing train.
Such was his funk that Jacob paid no attention to the train’s appearance. He has accidentally joined the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. One of several second-tier circuses traveling from town to town during the Depression, it is clearly not the Ringling Brothers. But it makes enough to keep going, and the workers are fed and sometimes paid, which is more than a lot of people had during those times.
The narrative alternates between Jacob’s current situation and the events of that seminal summer. He is 93, and he doesn’t sound like the happiest, or easiest to like, assisted-living resident. His memories are triggered by the sight of a circus setting up less than a block from the facility where he lives.
The Benzini Brothers’ show is hardly as spectacular as the name suggests, comprising a dozen horses, a few tired big cats and the usual collection of clowns and side-show freaks. But the show’s owner is more than happy to have a near-veterinarian join the group, though he has a strange way of expressing it – threatening to “redlight” Jacob (throw him from the moving train) – if Jacob loses any of the precious stock. Jacob is assigned to work for August Rosenbluth, the head animal handler.
Gruen has done her homework, and “Water for Elephants” is lively with historical detail and unexpected turns. She writes in an author’s note at the end of the novel that she “plucked many of this story’s most outrageous details from fact or anecdote (in circus history, the line between the two is famously blurred).”
Jacob starts as an outsider in the rough circus world, and he brings the reader along on his bemused, captivated and sometimes horrified journey. He seems more comfortable with the animals than with some of the circus people and the strict hierarchy that separates performers from their support. And he finds himself in dangerous territory when he begins to fall for Marlena, August’s wife.
The triangle joining August, Jacob and Marlena is a force central to the story. August is mercurial, sometimes a man of great charm and sometimes a force of barely contained cruelty. He is fiercely possessive of Marlena but initially gives no thought that affection between his wife and the vet could blossom. But Jacob finds himself feeling at least as protective of Marlena as the animals entrusted to his care, and the attraction grows.
“Water for Elephants” submerges the reader in a delightfully foreign world while inviting a journey with Jacob to manhood. It is peopled with lively, though hardly benign, characters.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book is the dark underbelly of the circus world, at least in this particular time. It is a place where a horse that must be put down is turned into food for the carnivores and where men who can’t be paid are “redlighted.” But it is also a place of extraordinary loyalties and caring.
The novel’s prologue, which sets a burgeoning performance disaster as the opening volley, plays in the novel’s end in a surprising and effective finale. “Water for Elephants” is a rich surprise, a delightful gem springing from a fascinating footnote to history that absolutely deserved to be mined.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Water for Elephants
By Sara Gruen
Algonquin, 335 pages, $23.95
