Synopsis
Coming of age in the harsh and colorful life of the circus, Mat finds contradictory love and support from her circus family members, including a maternal costume mistress and a homosexual cook
Reviews
The sordid world of a traveling circus is the promisingly exotic setting of this first novel by ex-carny hand Chalfoun, but uneven prose and broad characterization keep the story from fulfilling its potential. The heroine of this big-top bildungsroman is Mat, a tent-rigger who was brought to live at the Circus Fantastico as a child when her stripper mother moved in with a member of the crew. When she was nine, her mother ran off, and Mat was forced to endure the attentions of her lecherous stepfather for six years until she was brusquely claimed as a girlfriend by Jayson, the ring crew chief. Nearly 20 years her senior and blessed with the emotional sensitivity of one of the roadshow's elephants, Jayson cheats on her, lies to her and drives off her friends. Mat, of course, moons over him. Finally, as she matures into her early 20s, she comes to see that she must somehow summon the grit-and the wit-to close the door not just on the affair but also on the grueling, casually cruel life of a roustabout. It's hard to know how to respond to such an incorruptibly innocent, exasperatingly childlike narrator; although it's impossible not to sympathize with her, it's also wearying to witness her doggy devotion and wait for her to grow out of it and into herself. Still, Chalfoun delivers a raw and vivid portrait of circus life and of the oddities of circus people.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
First-novelist Chalfoun has relied on her own experiences as a circus worker to create this decidedly unglamorous view of a circus orphan's life--a bleak tale with occasional sparks of originality and insight glimmering from beneath the ashes. Mat hardly remembers her earliest years, before her mother took her along to live in an Airstream trailer with Enis, a circus crewman. Then, when Mat was nine, her mother fled, leaving Mat with her lover, who promptly began sexually abusing the little girl. Regularly raped by the man she calls ``Pa,'' Mat grows up unkempt and uneducated among the travelling performers, finding happiness only in her work as a roustabout, swinging a sledgehammer to secure the stays of the circus tent, apparently unaware of how different her life is from those of the townies she holds in such contempt. At the age of 15, though, Mat is ``rescued'' by Jayson, the 35- year-old ringcrew chief, who moves her into a sleeper with Al, a transvestite cook happy to act as surrogate mother, and puts her to work in the costume truck with Tante, a burn-scarred crone whose own terrible past throws an even deeper shadow over Mat's grim life. Somehow the teenaged Mat dares to hope for romance and domesticity, even as Jayson, now her lover, casually betrays and abuses her. Barely able to spell out a simple love letter, Mat cannot imagine a life outside this strange, peripatetic world, yet she must learn how to escape its no-win rules if she is to survive at all. Grim stuff, clearly, but Chalfoun's characters are not easy to forget. One wonders where the author's unflinching eye will light next. (Film rights to Twentieth Century Fox; $40,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The circus of Chalfoun's first novel is a mean, dirty, petty world of booze and drugs, of clothespins clamped on nostrils and nipples to keep drivers awake during long, grueling drives from town to town. A runaway mother brings her small daughter to this grungy subculture and abandons her, so that when she reaches 19, it is the only environment Mat has known. Abused by the stepfather she was left with, she winds up as the ringmaster's girlfriend and a roustabout--in fact, the only woman in the tent crew. Putting the tent up securely and maintaining its safety are the only bright spots in her life and this book in which wives and children are routinely abandoned on roadsides, circus workers don't use the shower truck for days on end, and bathroom needs are met out in the open when port-a-potties overflow. A glossary of circus slang might have made this coming-of-age story easier to understand at times; nothing could lighten its tenor of sleaze under the glitter. Whitney Scott
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