The Invisible Circus - Hardcover

Egan, Jennifer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385473796 ISBN 13: 9780385473798

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 1994

Synopsis

Phoebe O'Connor, eighteen in the summer of 1978, is too young to have partaken of the riotous carnival of the sixties, but old enough to feel the anxiety of its influence. Living in San Francisco with her widowed mother, Phoebe drifts along the edges of her life, obsessed by the memory of her charismatic older sister, Faith, a true flower child who died mysteriously in Italy eight years before. Believing that her sister's fatal journey holds the key to her own transformation, Phoebe bolts to Europe.
Phoebe follows the itinerary Faith had spelled out in postcards home - London, Amsterdam, Paris - but the millennial excitement of Faith's Europe has vanished, and Phoebe finds herself vulnerable and isolated. Finally she reaches Italy and traces her sister's last steps. But the truth Phoebe discovers is darker and more complicated than anything she has imagined, and finally she must face the human price her sister paid for taking her quest for personal liberation to the very edge.
Only by dispelling the ghosts of a romanticized past does Phoebe come into full possession of her world. Jennifer Egan portrays this fundamental passage with a mastery of riveting narrative extraordinary in a first novel. As it confronts the ambiguous legacy of the sixties, The Invisible Circus also beautifully and powerfully describes a journey essential to all of us.

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Reviews

Suicide's undiminished impact on a family informs Egan's poignant first novel, the tale of an 18-year-old retracing her older sister's doomed excursion through Europe. As a child, Phoebe O'Connor felt less vital than her sister Faith. Their father, a frustrated artist, lived vicariously through the aptly named elder girl; Faith learned to please him by taking extravagant physical risks, and after his death, her apparent free-spiritedness masked the same desperate need to impress her peers. (The "Invisible Circus," one character explains, was a late-'60s "be-in" that "was all about watching ourselves happen," and Faith embraced this celebration of spontaneity.) But Faith lost faith-in 1968 when, on a trip with her boyfriend, she mysteriously fell from a cliff in Italy. Ten years later, Phoebe crosses the Atlantic, her itinerary mapped by Faith's falsely optimistic postcards, to learn how and why Faith died. The younger sister at first fails to realize that her impossibly romantic image of her sibling has left her suspended in time. She's leading only an artificial life dictated by a ghost, and Egan effectively contrasts Phoebe's rigidity with Faith's daring nature. Eventually, however, she discovers that Faith "just threw herself away." Though the prose at times overexaggerates in conveying such extreme personalities, the author usually manages to keep it in check as Phoebe chooses her own future over Faith's forsaken one.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This sensitive debut novel puts theme before function in portraying the post-Boomer generation's nostalgia for the '60s they just missed out on. In 1978, 18-year-old Phoebe O'Connor is still haunted by the mysterious death, termed a suicide in 1970, of her hippie teenage sister Faith in Italy. Newly graduated Phoebe is feeling restless at home in San Francisco after discovering that her widowed mother is romantically involved with her boss. Phoebe's further horrified when her mother insists that her father, a would-be painter whose day job was being an IBM executive, had no talent. She spontaneously takes off for Europe to retrace Faith's steps in the days leading up to her death. Egan (whose stories have appeared in major magazines) takes a long time setting all this up, and in order to get the background in place, she often makes matters too convenient. It seems unlikely that an old friend of Faith's would run into Phoebe, recognize her (because of her resemblance to her sister), invite her to his apartment, talk about her sister, and then hand her a joint to deliver to his cousin in Munich. Later, when Phoebe arrives in Munich, there is a coincidence so huge and unbelievable that it almost destroys the earnest heart of this book. On the other hand, Egan does some fine writing. Descriptions of Amsterdam and London are so accurate they are almost tactile, and Phoebe's disappointment in finding that things are no longer quite so groovy as they used to be anywhere in the world is convincing. Eventually, she gets to the locus of Faith's despair and learns how the ideals of the '60s disintegrated. All of this is logical, but Egan has clearly set out to depict an entire generation rather than to tell a story. For example, Phoebe's brother is a 23-year-old millionaire with his own software company who exists only to show the alternative to the counterculture. Covers a lot of ground but sometimes stumbles. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The 1960s seem to have had a pervasive influence on the lives of those who were young then. Phoebe O'Connor saw those years in terms of her older sister Faith's life and death. In 1978, 18-year-old Phoebe decides to relive the final months of Faith's life and perhaps discover the truth about her death. She leaves San Francisco for Europe, determined to retrace Faith's journey using the precious postcards from Faith that she has saved for ten years. She visits London, Amsterdam, France, and Germany, where she meets Faith's lover, Wolf. Wolf decides to accompany her to Italy, and they have a passionate, feverish affair as they travel to the place of Faith's death. Phoebe learns the truth about Faith, the sister she has idealized, and about herself and her family. These self-realizations are often painful to read because they are so real. Egan's first novel is great reading. Recommended for most fiction collections.
Barbara Maslekoff, Ohioana Lib., Columbus
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0385473796
• ISBN 13: 9780385473798
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 338