The Invisible Circus
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Average rating3.7
In Jennifer Egan’s highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen. 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.
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Initially, I was a little disappointed by this. Good Squad is one of my all-time favorites and Egan's preceding short story collection was pretty solid. The beginning of Circus in particular reads like a first novel, but by the end I came around. The story is cohesive and contained and Egan is still a great writer, I just hold her to a higher personal standard, so my scale for her is a little more critical.
