Jennifer Egan is one of my favorite authors. Like many readers, I was wowed by "A Visit from the Goon Squad" (2010), but I was dazzled just as much by the novel that preceded it, "Look at Me" (2001), whose intricate plot is part thriller, part social satire, and part multi-layered identity drama. In addition to being stylistically unique, the narratives in both these previous books shift around in time, even looking ahead into the near future. "Look at Me" was even uncannily prescient about Face

Jennifer Egan is one of my favorite authors. Like many readers, I was wowed by "A Visit from the Goon Squad" (2010), but I was dazzled just as much by the novel that preceded it, "Look at Me" (2001), whose intricate plot is part thriller, part social satire, and part multi-layered identity drama. In addition to being stylistically unique, the narratives in both these previous books shift around in time, even looking ahead into the near future. "Look at Me" was even uncannily prescient about Facebook, which had not yet become a “thing” when the book was written, and the terrorist mentality that led to 9/11. Given all this, I really looked forward to reading the first of Egan’s four novels, The Invisible Circus (1995), especially since it deals with many issues that interest me: coping with grief, the time period of the Sixties and Seventies, the reverberation of youthful experiences on adulthood, and a female protagonist coming of age.





Parts One and Two are interesting enough, and very vivid. However, as parts Three and Four wear on, something goes terribly awry with this novel, so much so that, as the plot twisted—confoundingly, implausibly—through one gratuitous passage after another, I wondered whether any editor had laid eyes on it prior to publication. “Okay, we get it!” I thought. “She was overshadowed by her sister! She’s young and insecure! She wishes she’d been part of the Sixties!” etc. Because it was Egan, I was unprepared for the tedious belaboring of themes. Nor did I expect to have my credulity challenged. At first I bought the amazing coincidences that landed Phoebe in the Munich apartment of Faith’s old boyfriend, Wolf. It is not until we learn that he has withheld the circumstances of Faith’s death—and the fact that he was present at it—that Egan loses me entirely, so obvious it is that this withholding of information is purely for the convenience of the plot. Worst of all, she introduces an awkward structure to tell Wolf’s and Faith’s backstory, moving between (and sometimes blurring) accounts by Wolf in first person and flashbacks told in close third, both styles containing many fine details that would not be included in such an account.



Did I say the awkward structure was worst of all? Sorry, I meant the 20-page “lost week(end)” sequence in which Phoebe and Wolf become sex addicts on their way to the scene of Faith’s suicide, barely leaving their hotel room for days on end. Is this supposed to be a nod to the excesses of the Sixties? An indication of how freaked out they are by the prospect of confronting their traumatic memories? I can’t figure out what purpose these pages serve with respect to either the plot or the characters. And twenty pages of belabored prose that serve no purpose? Practically unforgivable.



I still admire Egan greatly, but in the end, perhaps the greatest value I derived from reading "The Invisible Circus" was insight into her development as a writer and how she cleaned up her excesses in subsequent works.