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In a twist on the old cliche, here's a heroine who wishes she could run away "from the circus to join the real world." In the opening pages of Michelle Chalfoun's first novel, "Roustabout," Matilda (Mat), the late-adolescent narrator, tells the reader that "in her memories, the colors of the circus are bright like Charm lollipops." It is Mat's tough, staccato narration -- in contrast with her use of bold, lollipop colors to describe the self-contained world of the circus -- that gives this book its haunting integrity. This is a world in which men bullwhip cigarettes from the trembling mouths of women, where walking a tight rope without a net is a matter of course. As the only female ringcrew member, Mat has spent most of her roustabout life with ringdirt under her nails and longing for normality -- or at least a house without wheels where she can put away the groceries.
What Mat is running away from is, for the most part, circus men -- men who kick their wives and children off the circus lot when they're tired of them, men as mythic as their environment. Mat has been passed off from her mother's boyfriend, Pa, to other men -- Jayson the ringcrew leader in particular -- since the age of nine. (Jayson wins Mat from Pa in a brawl outside a trailer whose bumper sticker reads: "Don't come a-knockin' if the trailer's a-rockin.'") Unfortunately, Chalfoun often fails to push Mat to find her own gritty insights and, as a result, these circus men are little more than cut-outs against the vibrant landscape. The almost pure evil of Jayson's hand on Mat's thigh, for example, while he asks her to trust him, babe, is disappointingly easy.
At one point, Tante, a circus costume designer who has herself been severely abused by her husband, asks, "Why do you keep going to men, Matilda?" It's a question I wish Chalfoun had allowed Mat to ask herself. Then the stark, affecting images throughout the novel would have more resonance. Images like Jaq, one of the Fabulous Farouks, lobbing knives at his wife as she leans carefully against a painted silhouette. "I wanted to ride the bucking canvas, to wrestle it against the wind, lacing it tight, secure," Mat says, describing the thrill of hard work. More of this passionate specificity might have pinpointed exactly where in Mat's young heart these circus men's heartbreak knives were landing.
-- Maud Casey
