|
Christopher Bram, the prolific author of novels and screenplays, is perhaps best known for his book FATHER OF FRANKENSTEIN, which is about director James Whale and was subsequently turned into the film Gods and Monsters.
His new novel is set among the New York theater crowd, from Broadway hits and flops, to off-off Broadway experimentation, to Gay Sex-Show Bars. It is a carousel of love (mostly failed or unrequited) and sex (mostly unfulfilling). It is brimming with colorful characters and outrageous situations.
Bram begins the novel by introducing his characters one by one, each passing on the baton of the story to another character from sketch to sketch. It's a conceit best exemplified by the movie Slackers, which stayed true to its method --- you never meet the same character again. It's tag-team storytelling. Bram only uses it as a way in --- eventually his story builds by accretion and a plotline develops, wavy and crisscrossing, his panoply of actors and reviewers and wannabes becoming a vivid mélange.
At the heart of the story is Jessie, a secretary for famous British actor Henry Lewse, who is now starring on Broadway, and her brother Caleb, a playwright with one huge hit and one dismal failure on his résumé. Jessie is in love with Frank, a director who returns her affections but, well, it's complicated, and Caleb is getting over a near-relationship with Toby, a part-time actor and stripper. Henry is more of a cruiser of gay bars and user of phone sex lines. The web of relationships is more complex than this, but this lays the groundwork. That Bram can create so many strands and make them all come together is a testament to his prodigious inventiveness.
Everyone in this book is acting --- real life only appears around the edges. And the book often seems like a stage setting; one assumes this is intentional. And for verisimilitude, as he did more heavily with FATHER OF FRANKENSTEIN, Bram mixes in some real names, like Susan Sarandon, John Malkovich and Hope Davis.
The novel's title comes from W. B. Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion." Bram's "circus animals" perform admirably, though sometimes in the service of a jerrybuilt plot. Bram's style is a breezy and cheesy mix. There are passages of overheated prose as purple as a blush, tired sentences and some bad dialogue. But for the most part he moves the story along fluidly, and though one may find passages that seem melodramatic, stale, even irrelevant, LIVES OF THE CIRCUS ANIMALS keeps ticking and its readability is unquestionable.
--- Reviewed by Corey Mesler
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
