Book Review: Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants

Note: This is #35 of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.

Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants is one of those books I’m kind of split on. Set in America during the Great Depression, the book tells the story of Jacob Jankowski, a young man who drops out of veterinary school just shy of graduation in the face of personal tragedy. Adrift and dazed, he joins a second-rate circus, almost by accident. After slumming around with the “working men,” Jankowski is hired on as the show’s vet when his training comes to light. From this new position he quickly falls into a love triangle between one of the show’s performers and her alternately charming and vicious husband.

The bulk of the novel deals with this romance and the tension that arises as Jankowski both falls in love with the performer and befriends her husband. What I really enjoyed wasn’t necessarily this story, though. Gruen seems to have done a lot of homework about traveling circuses during the Depression-with-a-capital-D, and what I liked most was this look at how things probably really were. Jankowski’s is not a romanticized tale of running off to join the circus; it’s a dirty, crass, slovenly, desperate, cruel, gritty, and sometimes dangerous world that Gruen does a pretty good job of pulling us into with her own blend of storytelling, narration, and explanation of certain ugly customs and harsh business practices. It’s a whole new world of its own, and it was fun to get drawn into it.

It also helps that Jankowski and, to a lesser degree, his romantic rival are are interesting and strong enough characters to hold your attention. The former obviously has a stubborn streak as wide as an elephant, yet he also has noble intentions and is genuinely tortured by his infatuation with a married woman. He’s flawed but noble, plus he has an elephant.

That all being said, there was one aspect of the book that really didn’t work for me. Gruen punctuates the above tale of Jankowski’s circus adventure with scenes of him in the present day at age 90 or so. Jankowski is locked up in a nursing home where he has to endure things like surly nurses, young (as in 85 or so) upstarts, and his general lack of freedom.

Basically, it’s every bad cliche you can think of about nursing homes and the elderly, and it’s almost embarrassingly trite. Gruen surrounds the book’s real and vastly more enjoyable story in this nursing home tale like an ugly wrapper, and I got to the point where I groaned every time such an interlude intruded upon my entertainment. After the first few, I just started skimming the bits with the elderly Jankowski to get back to the good parts. I get what Gruen was trying to do here, but her execution seemed so trite and so cliched that I think the book would have been better without the nursing home chapters at all, else she should have reduced them to abbreviated bookends for the central tale.

Still, it’s good enough if you can just ignore what doesn’t work and focus on what does.

Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week:

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