The Invisible Circus
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The highly acclaimed debut novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Good Squad follows two sisters in the 1970s—one lost, one seeking—on "a trip that takes the reader through stunning emotional terrain" (The New Yorker).
The political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen, in 1978. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith’s lost generation.
This spellbinding novel introduced Egan’s remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters and the nuances of emotion.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Everything we love about Jennifer Egan’s later novels—the uneasy surrealism of Look at Me, the pop-culture cleverness of A Visit from the Goon Squad, the precise historical detail of Manhattan Beach—is already present in her debut. Set in 1978 San Francisco, The Invisible Circus centers on 18-year-old Phoebe, who still feels overshadowed by her beautiful hippie sister, Faith, who jumped to her death in Italy eight years earlier. Embarking on a backpacking trek across Europe, Phoebe slowly comes to terms with the reality of what happened to her sister—and of the ’60s counterculture that she’s idolized her entire life. Shifting back and forth in both time and perspective, Egan makes the story feel like a half-remembered dream (or an acid flashback). All the while, her magnetic prose keeps us focused on the beauty and sadness of the sisters’ intertwined lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
