Thursday, June 26, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Going home to the circus

By John Ziebell

The idea of running away to join the circus seems to reflect the same reality that Norman Rockwell paintings do. Life in America might have been like that once, even before "Leave It to Beaver," but it's a tough sell these days. Near the close of Amanda Davis' Wonder When You'll Miss Me there's an image of Annabelle, the heroine who has so engagingly reinvented herself over the course of the novel, staring up at the aerialist's trapeze in a circus tent.

"I'm going to do that someday. I'm going to climb up there and fly," she says. And what's so amazing is that we believe her.

Annabelle is tough, sexy, cool--everything you'd expect from the kind of girl who could run away from home at 16 to join the circus in the new millennium. But it's a long road to the Big Top. Annabelle begins the novel as Faith Duckle, a psychologically shattered teenager returning to high school after a seven-month sojourn at Berrybrook, one of those universal destinations for kids who swallow all mom's prescription drugs at one sitting. Faith has regained some control, enough to exist just this side of hysteria, but she is not an untroubled child.

"I swear that's the fat girl from Homecoming," one of her ever-charming classmates says.

Faith's situation is heartless enough to be utterly credible. The school's entire student body knows her as "the fat girl" who was brutally assaulted by nine male classmates under the bleachers at Homecoming; the adults in the novel, including Faith's therapist, remain oblivious to that trauma, some seemingly by choice.

Faith's mother is a self-centered suburban zombie whose wrongheaded parenting can't even be categorized as a good but mistaken intention. Faith has no friends, nobody to talk to except the voices in her head. The excess weight Faith shed, and the past she can't, manifest themselves in "the fat girl" who follows her everywhere--alter ego, conscience, call it what you will, the fat girl is also a cruel, cynical caricature of her former self that Faith seems unable to escape. The fat girl is a shrewd and darkly humorous observer, but revenge is the idea that resonates most frequently in her asides.

"Boys moved through the halls like packs of wild dogs. The fat girl watched me watch them. They were all different sizes, all different heights, but their limbs were somehow uniform, equalized by the similarity in their strides. They were loose and dangerous. `They need to pay,' she whispered."

And they do--or the worst of them, anyway; and once she's in the vortex of action Faith finds herself on the road trying to track down the closest thing to a friend she has, a junkie busboy whose boyfriend is "The Digestivore," a circus sideshow sword swallower.

In the circus, Faith finds the dysfunctional family she was meant for, and the book finds its pace as well. While the preliminary chapters are finely crafted and necessary, they're not really new; once the circus shows up, the narrative gains so much focused momentum that it can't go wrong. While there's an inherent fascination in the extraordinary--and the circus is definitely not ordinary--the book doesn't glide by on that exoticism. Characters and language carry the weight, used skillfully by Davis to illustrate the everyday realities of circus life. Riding elephants into the ring is the fantasy; shoveling up wheelbarrows of their excrement is a job. (And for anyone pondering a lifestyle change, the book includes a full-page bibliography of recommended circus books.)

Wonder When You'll Miss Me is a refreshing, entertaining and, in the end, hopeful novel, painfully truthful, exactly the kind that you want to tell people about. And I was telling a friend of mine about it when she shook her head.

"Yeah, Amanda Davis," she said. "What a tragedy."

She was talking not about the novel but the real story, about how Davis--who, at 32, boasting a well-reviewed story collection and a brand new tenure-track job at Mills College--died in a plane crash, with her parents, while traveling to promote her first novel. Reality may not be as exact as fiction, or as persuasive, but it is infinitely sadder.