Beware of "Water for Elephants"

What to do when you begin the latest book group selection--a best-seller-- and find that you hate it? I had good vibes for Sara Gruen's Water For Elephants, anticipating a good read about a young man's adventures with an itinerant third-rate circus traveling the byways of America back in the 1930's Depression. I like trains and I liked circuses, but this book with its cliche characters, tiresome plot, predictable events, and banal dialogue that just goes on and on is a major disappointment. How could The New York Times praise it and 612 Amazon readers give it five stars when it's obviously such a chore to read? Not all Amazon readers were fooled, however. In 1 or 2 star reviews they were critical of the poor writing, while others reeled away from the animal cruelty depicted or a really creepy description of a strip-tease artiste plying her trade.. . I've given up on the book after about sixty pages. Here are a couple of Amazon two-star reviews, the first from neighboring Fairlawn--five minutes' drive away. I feel vindicated. For the one-star reviews, go to Amazon. They offer valuable advice.

By	M. G. Jamison (Fairlawn, OH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Water for Elephants: A Novel (Hardcover)

Last week, halfway through my own reading of WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, I decided to check the customer reviews to see if any other readers were rolling their eyes as much as I was, and, to my surprise, not many were. 900 hundred reviews and most of them were five stars! What seemed paper-thin and kind of ridiculous to me was "beautiful and moving" to nearly everyone else. Everything about this book seemed like a cheat--like the warning you get on a bag of chips--"contents may settle"--to explain how there are only three chips in a family-sized bag. Even the inclusion of the period photographs seemed to excuse the writer for not making clear enough pictures of her own. It's not just the implausibility of the story either (elephant speaks only Polish). If the details are right, I can be drawn into even the most ridiculous of stories (THE RUINS and THE TERROR come to mind)), but the paragraphs here are so flimsy (usually no more than three sentences long) that I never pictured (or believed) a word of it. I'd close the book and pick it up a few hours later and have absolutely no idea what had happened. It was an "easy read," but I don't know many writers who would consider that a compliment.

Sara Gruen owes William Styron some royalties, July 26, 2007 By Craig Keller (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews I rarely pick up best-sellers, but I felt compelled to torture myself through this one after Gruen was awarded -- in a baffling but sickeningly telling example of how lowest-common-denominator and bottom-line the book publishing business has become -- $5 million for her next two, as yet un-penned books. I've got $10 that says they involve touchy-feely maudlin interaction between people and animals and cliched romanctic treacle. I wouldn't be shocked to see a unicorn rear its head. This novel is cliche and a pastiche of formula coopted from other, better books from cover to cover. The dialogue is PAINFUL. Every line feels prepackaged for the movie studio executive Gruen undoubtedly set out to placate before writing one word. Worse, while characters speak in cliched colloquial style, it remains ONE style. There is little to distinguish one voice from another. The plot, too, proceeds along a rote path -- I was predicting nearly every turn of it paragraphs, and then pages, ahead of time. Gruen is justly commended for her research into circus history, which is the only original element she brings to the table. She clearly delights in it, though even that reads like dutiful observations culled from a torrent of microfiche and historical society archives. It's clear Gruen has spent a lot of time with her nose in books, and derives her style, such as it is, from other sources -- most notably, and unforgivably, William Styron's "Sophie's Choice," from which she shamelessly pilfers the very specific dynamics of that novel's central ill-fated love triangle, around which all else revolves. Gruen's Nathan is an equestrian director named August (interesting to note there are six letters in each name), and he's a Jewish paranoid schizophrenic. When Gruen's protoganist -- surprise! a young, precocious, naive but quickly maturing lover-boy bred from earnest all-American stock -- finds himself caught between the couple (Sophie is renamed Marlena here), all hell breaks loose ("all hell breaks loose" incidentally is a cliched phrase that appears several times throughout the book -- consider my usage a wry homage). Do yourself a favor and buy the original, not the infantile copy.

The New York Times was generally favorable. 916 readers so far have reviewed it online at Amazo. 612 of those gave the book five stars (tops). But over 50 disagreed, awarding only 1 or 1 stars.