Everyone loves the circus. Well, I don't. When I was I kid and my mom brought me to see the clowns in the big tent, I made her take me home screaming and crying. And when she coaxed me into giving it another shot, my fear was even more intense.
Whether for good or ill, the world of the circus is one almost solely of memory. In the light of adulthood, the animals stink and the clowns have smeared makeup, but childhood memories of the circus offer romance, fantasy, and spectacle. Gruen can't resist the liberation, as a writer, to envision a world where nothing seems impossible or far out of the ordinary, but she veers between a tendency toward melodramatic sentimentality and an unwillingness to touch any real emotion. Water for Elephants is all saccharine and no sugar.
We follow the story of Jacob Jankowski, a 93 year-old nursing home inmate recalling his youth as a young man experiencing the fragile glory of the Depression-era circus culture. While a veterinary student at Cornell, Jacob discovers that his parents have been killed in a car accident and, aimless and distraught, climbs aboard a train that happens to belong to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. His experience with veterinary medicine wins him a job with the crew as an animal doctor and he falls in with August Rosenbluth, the erratic menagerie director, and his beautiful wife, Marlena.
Gruen constructs many relationships in Water for Elephants, but none of them resolve in any particular way. The one we hope for most, the budding romance between Jacob and Marlena, culminates in a clumsy copulation that sorely disappoints. Despite some interesting plot twists and intriguing ideas, Water for Elephants never really delivers on any of its promises. Like the circus itself, it is mostly show, with very little substance.
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