In some of the strongest writing in the book, the father, a failed painter, encourages Faith's reckless behavior time and time again as a way of making up for a life spent working at IBM. In Berlin, she meets up with Wolf, her sister's old boyfriend and traveling companion, and together they set out for Italy to find the truth behind her sister's death.Īlong the way, we learn about Phoebe's family in the days before her father's death from cancer and Faith's presumed suicide. In Paris, she even takes a trip in the classic sixties sense, taking a hit of LSD in a scene that climaxes in her hurling herself at a plate glass window, behind which she thinks she sees her sister, literally throwing herself at the past. On her trek across Europe, Phoebe finds the burned-out remnants of the once vibrant counterculture world. The only way forward was through that door.' With the help of Faith's postcards, Phoebe runs away to Europe, determined to recreate her sister's fatal journey. At times she hated remembering, wanting nothing in the world but to rush forward into something of her own, lose herself in it. The mystery of what happened to Faith plagues Phoebe, who is now eighteen and feels sealed off from the truth by a 'white door,' her present life 'unreal and without significance': 'What mattered was hidden from sight. Seven years before, Phoebe O'Connor's charismatic sister, Faith, a genuine San Francisco flower child, fell or jumped or was pushed off a cliff in Italy. The Invisible Circus, Jennifer Egan takes up the burden of history and shows clearly how those turbulent decades shaped the lives of her characters.

Recent history, the sixties and seventies, when it appears at all, tends to be the province of the Vietnam vet, as if only by making the mistake of going to war, of leaving the shores of America, do you run the risk of becoming part of a larger whole. If it deals with history, it is the history of an individual or, at most, a nuclear family. Contemporary American fiction tends to reflect this belief. History is not something that affects you personally. History is something you learn in school, something safely corralled in textbooks. Either way, most Americans would probably agree.

More or less bunk,' instead of the shorter, blunter version usually attributed to him.

Harper's Book of Quotations insists that Henry Ford really said, 'History is

The invisible circus by jennifer egan