The Circus in Winter
by Cathy Day
★★★★
I love reading books set in my home state, Indiana, but
they are few and far between. So I was excited to discover this book, the story
of a circus whose home base was in Indiana. The whole book is about the circus,
but each chapter features a different star, a different player in the overall
company of characters. It begins with the tale of the circus’ owner in 1884 and
then winds through the decades.
I’ve seen it compared to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,
Ohio, and that description is spot on. Both books breakdown small-town life and
the dark secrets that lie in everyone's past. There are sweet moments, but
overall it's about the heartbreak inherent in the human condition.
Day draws each character beautifully and you're invested
in their story from the first pages. Each person is fragile despite their
sometimes tough exteriors. Wallace Porter is a resident of Lima, Ind. and buys
the circus from a man named Hollenbach. Porter’s own story is so tragic that it
sets the tone for the rest of the book.
There’s Jennie Dixianna, who was raised in the Alabama
bayou and now performs the “spin of death,” wearing her perpetually bloody
wrist as a proud talisman of her both talent and stubbornness. Then we meet the
Boela tribe, which includes generations of members. It starts with Bascomb and
Pearly, but continues with their son Gordon, his daughter Verna, and her son
Chicky who is a dwarf. Even characters that aren’t human, like Caesar the
elephant, find a way to pull you in.
There are stories set within the circus and others that
feature the lives affected by it. There’s the lonely wife of its manager who
fills her home with murals of the circus. One family moves to Peru years after
the circus has closed, but vestiges of its glamour still seep into their lives.
The circus also barely survived a huge flood in 1913, which wiped out many of
its performers and animals.
I loved how all the stories are tied together. The son of
the elephant keeper lived in the Colonel’s house, later his daughter Laura is
featured in her own story. Because the time period in which many of the stories
take place, there is an inevitable tone of racism. The way African-Americans
are treated throughout the book breaks your heart. They could be a featured act
in the circus just by being black. That made them a wild curiosity that might
have come from the “jungle.”
The author grew up in Peru, Ind. which was the home of
the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. It wintered there and many of her family members
were involved in it. I was curious how much of the book was inspired or based
on true story she might have heard growing up.
BOTTOM LINE: Hauntingly beautiful stories about
loneliness in so many different forms. The circus may be the stage for these
particular stories, but their resonance and relatability reaches across the
years.
"The world is made up of hometowns. It's just as hard to leave a block in Brooklyn or a suburb of Chicago as it is to leave a small town in Indiana."
“This is why they call it the heartland. In the summer,
the fields on either side of Mrs. Colonel’s house glowed a brilliant green,
rippling in the wind. The air stretched above like miles of blue canvas, and
Mrs. Colonel pictured a center pole rising up from Indianapolis’s Monument
Circle to hold up the endless sky.”
