WATER FOR ELEPHANTS: What a bunch of clowns.

Here's what I knew about WATER FOR ELEPHANTS before I started this book:

1. A blockbuster movie is being made of it

2. It takes place in a circus

3. Book clubs love it

#1 and #2 are inarguable but I'm no closer to understanding #3 than when I started, regrettably. But I am interested now as to how a Bildungsroman starring a basically unlikeable straw protagonist obsessed with his own manliness is going to be spun into the gold of a romantic drama starring Robert "The Vampire From 'Twilight'" Pattinson.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS is told in flashback by 90something Jacob Jankowski about a tumultuous time in his life in which he dropped out of college and became a circus vet. His plan was to join his father in veterinary practice, but after his parents are killed in a car accident, young Jacob more or less wanders away from his senior-year final exams at Cornell and hops aboard a train, which is a popular thing to do during the Great Depression. He ends up on the train of The Benzini Brothers and in the employ of penny-pinching Uncle Al who allows Jacob to stay even after he can't save one of the show horses who has gone lame in a plot twist that makes no sense, but ensures that Jacob meets married circus performers August and Marlena. August is an angry crazy psychopath; Marlena is a hottie who is also good with animals. Later an elephant is acquired from another failing circus (remember, it's the Great Depression!), over whose training Jacob and Marlena fall in love despite existence of angry crazy psychopath husband. (At one point someone says he's a paranoid schizophrenic, which seems a little out-of-era... but I digress.)

Most of the characters in this book are very flat, except Jacob, who is all over the place. I think he's meant to evolve from a know-it-all college boy to a man aware of The Ways Of The World and that there are horrors he never had to face in his formerly cushy life. (The major character who imparts this lesson to him, a man named Camel [I KNOW], is an alcoholic who is slowly becoming paralyzed, whom Jacob helps hide from the circus heavyweights so he can stay on the train. Oh, there's also a dwarf involved in that, 'cause what circus isn't complete without a bitter dwarf?) But his wild swings between knowing and know-nothing make it difficult to accept that he's really learning anything. He's part naif, part partier, and in no part do you see why Marlena would risk life and livelihood for him. I guess it would help if she had more of a background than "My family disowned me when I married into this circus."

By the way, Christoph Waltz is totally getting typecast in this movie as August, and prediction: I will love it.

The "The Notebook"-esque frame story didn't do much for me either. Old Jacob is angry when his kids and grandkids come to visit, and sad when they don't; hates being cooped up in assisted living, so acts like a total jerk. (If this ended up any more like "The Notebook" I was going to make a special trip to the Hudson River so I could chuck this book in. As it is I'm not a dirty polluter but the temptation remains.)

Anyway, I didn't like this book, but I didn't like the first hundred pages the most (which set up the book, but also revel in Jacob's desire to divest himself of his virginity to a bad-Updikean level of detail including dirty comic books and his first circus job of guarding a stripper/prostitute). Even then I'm not sure finishing it was worth the effort. My curiosity about the movie stands, mostly because a friend and I are going to write about it and possibly pick it apart for laughs.

A fun fact I later remembered about this book (#4, I guess) was that Gruen's book started as a National Novel Writing Month project, and for that it is pretty impressive. Maybe it just needed a heavier editing hand, or some nuance.