When a man named Lewis rents a vacation house on Long Island for a few days, he doesn't expect to end up on a crazy circus train ride to nowhere. His one night in the house, he burns it down. Then he meets charismatic Joseph Dillon, manager of the Circus of the Grand Design. Knowing he needs to leave the area in a hurry, Lewis agrees to join the circus as a publicist, despite Dillon's warning that he might not be able to return to the place he began. The circus's private train travels an infinite dream-loop to unknown lands, and Lewis becomes lost amongst crazy acrobats, sexy elephant riders, a magical mechanical horse, a giant woman and her savage, prehistoric rodent bears, an egotistical juggler and a fertility goddess who takes exceptional interest in him. The train, its residents and the places they visit form a complex puzzle that Lewis feels compelled to solve; this, then, is the Circus of the Grand Design.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A traveling circus with an otherworldly pedigree serves as a supportive surrogate family for a directionless young man in this diverting traipse through the terrain of magic realism. Lewis, an amiable slacker, is fleeing after accidentally burning down a Long Island beach rental when he bumps into Joseph Dillon, enigmatic ringmaster of the Circus of the Grand Design. Dillon hires him for public relations work, but warns that there's no coming back from a circus that "moves in the fourth dimension." The circus crew includes Garson Gold, a rakish juggler with a seemingly supernatural talent for keeping aloft any item tossed him, and Bodyssia, a capybara trainer with Amazonian appetites. While Lewis spends most of the novel ingratiating himself with these two, he's also tantalized by Cybele, an alluring sylph whose sexual attentions ease his integration into the insular circus society. Wexler (In Springdale Town) mostly avoids the familiar "circus of life" terrain already mapped out by Angela Carter, Ray Bradbury and other fantasists, concentrating instead on Lewis's efforts to understand the temporal and spatial peculiarities of the train carrying the circus between towns and to find his place in its quasi-mythic design. Though the narrative sometimes moves as aimlessly as Lewis, its unaffected style and exuberantly eccentric cast keep the story as buoyant and airy as a center-ring trapeze act.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Looking for a quick getaway from his girlfriend and his grinding job in the city, public relations specialist Lewis rents a house on Long Island from an eccentric artist--and accidentally sets fire to the living room. Fleeing to the nearest local diner, he by chance encounters the ringmaster of a circus that he suddenly finds himself running away to join. When, as the company's new marketing guru, he hops aboard the caravan of the Circus of the Grand Design, however, he unhappily finds little that resembles the Ringling Brothers milieu he expected. While interviewing an assortment of odd and dysfunctional characters, from a promiscuous juggler to a triad of abusive trapeze artists, he falls for the enchanting and beautiful Cybele, who may or may not be real, and who forces him to confront his own darker nature. Although the narrative occasionally drags, newcomer Wexler excels at lucid prose and provocative ideas, giving the Bradbury-ish carnival-comes-to-town theme a new twist and showing promise as an original fantasist. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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This review is from: Circus Of The Grand Design (Hardcover)
Robert Freeman Wexler takes his readers down paths that no one else ever thought about. Here we have a man running away to join the circus -- a simple enough story, one with which we're all familiar. Of course, the circus exists in a fantastical dimension, but that is only to be expected. What makes this book so special is not that reality is bent, but the way in which Wexler bends it. Just as in his highly praised novella "In Springdale Town," Wexler once again shows us a world from a different angle, combing factors in ways unlike anyone else.
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