The Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan

I needed a few Europe-themed books for my vacation to France this year so when Mom suggested that I'd like this one I went to Barnes and Noble with it on the top of my list. Jennifer Egan's Look At Me was great, so I had high expectations for this. Unfortunately, B&N only had a paperback version of this that actors from the movie adaptation on the front, but I bought it anyway.

Phoebe, the protagonist, is the youngest of three children, the eldest of which was her now-deceased sister, Faith. Faith went to Europe as a hippie teenager, and died under mysterious circumstances there. We meet Phoebe as she is a frustrated high school student. "At her vast public high school Phoebe had felt reduced to a pidgin version of herself, as during "conversations" in French class--Where is the cat? Have you seen the cat? Look! Pierre gives the cat a bath--such was her level of fluency while discussing bongs or bands or how fucked up something was at a party." Her life stagnating (and her relationship with her mother strained), she takes off to Europe seeking more information about Faith's death.

As the book progresses, and Phoebe makes her way through Western Europe, we learn more about her family history. The relationship between Faith and her father emerges as incredibly unhealthy, her father relying on her sister for strength: "Maybe nothing of hers could compete with their father's need of her, her [sister's] unique and seemingly bottomless power to save him." Faith becomes less elegant and more flawed as Phoebe follows her sister's route through Europe.

This book is very well written, which makes up for the occasional inevitability of the plot. Egan's ability to capture certain moments between characters was shockingly good, particularly for a first novel. Had I not already read other books by her, I'd worry that she exhausted all her beautiful prose in one place. The following scene occurs between Faith's former boyfriend and his new girlfriend: "Carla exclaimed at something she'd found, set down her cigarette and circled the time with a stubby pencil, her other hand groping for Wolf as if for a pair of glasses or a cigarette pack finding his wrist without lifting her eyes from the paper. The gesture transfixed Phoebe--the inadvertence of it, the thoughtlessness."

What I also liked about the book was that it was both a coming of age story as well as a journey story. At the beginning of the book, Phoebe is young; in many ways, she is frozen in time from when her sister died. As she moves through her trip she grows up and is clearly a young woman by the time she returns home. She falls in love for the first time and expresses several universal feelings about it: "Seeing Wolf clothed, out in the world, Phoebe, often was shocked at how unmarked he was physically by all that had happened between them. Their flesh seemed ready at times to fall apart limb from lib, yet here they both were, intact. Somewhat creaky, lips faintly bruised, but unmarked in any permanent sense. If they went their separate way, there would be no proof. This troubled Phoebe."

This was a great work of female fiction. Thanks, Mom.