199
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #162,376 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★☆☆☆
Basically a Question of Taste
On the simplest level, all I can say is that it didn't amuse me and I couldn't force myself to finish it. But I'm a "hard sell" for fiction, and I can see by the other reviews that many people loved it. Lucky them!
On a slightly more analytic level, I'd say that what prevented me from enjoying the book was the "voice" of the narrator, who is supposed to be a man in his nineties remembering his youth in the circus. I'm a man approaching seventy, with some circus experiences as a teenager in Iowa and as the father of a circus acrobat in the Cirque de Soleil era. I found the "voice" of the narrator unconvincing, extremely unconvincing, as a male of the species and as a male American of the 1930s and 1940s. I couldn't get past that central implausibility. I found myself scoffing at the sensibilities of the pseudo-male narrator at every emotional turn of this quite melodramatic novel.
