The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel

Mabel Stark was the greatest female tiger trainer in history. In the 1910s and ’20s, during the golden age of the big top, she was the superstar of the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, and one of America’s most eccentric celebrities. A tiny, curvaceous Kentucky blonde in a white leather bodysuit, Mabel was brazen, sexually adventurous, and suicidally courageous. The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is Robert Hough’s brilliant, wit-studded novel of her fantastic life.

It is 1968. Mabel, nursing her most serious mauling yet, is just turning eighty and about to lose her job at Jungleland, a California game park. Devastated by the loss of her cats, she looks back on her life and her five husbands: the fifth–a cross-dresser whom she married without bothering to divorce the other four–would one day be tragically mauled by her one true love, her ferocious yet amorous 550-pound Bengal tiger, Rajah.

Starting with her escape from a mental institution to begin her circus career as a burlesque dancer, Mabel’s exquisitely voiced confession is a live wire of dark secrets, broken dreams, and comic escapades. It is a brilliant, exhilarating story of an America before television and movies, when the spectacle of the circus reigned and an unlikely woman captured the public imagination with her singular charm and audacity.

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The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel

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The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel

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The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802140432
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/19/2004
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

	The Barnes Show
	The Athenian Tailor	2
	The Young Psychiatrist	24
	JungleLand	46
	The Southern Cotton Mogul	63
	The Hungarian Military Officer	95
	The Bengal Punk	134
	JungleLand	164
	The Handsome Bigamist	175
	The Ringling Show
	The Ringling Accountant	206
	The Ex-Polar Bear Man	239
	JungleLand	265
	The New Menage Boss	298
	Art	328
	John Robinson / Barnes
	Lucky Barnes	394
	JungleLand	422
	Research Notes	425
	Acknowledgements	429

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Editorial Reviews

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is one of the most rollicking, good-time books of the year. — Virginia Holman

USA Today

The novel's captivating depiction of circus life is matched by Hough's furious plotting -- every few pages bring the hint of a secret, a riled tiger, a handsome stranger, a career twist or the surprise reappearance of a past friend or foe. — Laura Jamison

The New York Times

It's no surprise that Robert Hough's rollicking debut novel, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, has already been snapped up by Hollywood. The book, a fictional memoir of the greatest female tiger trainer of all time, is filled to the brim with cinematic moments and larger-than-life characters. Mabel Stark is the largest of them all, a nurse turned stripper turned tiger trainer who performed in a series of death-defying cat acts during her heyday in the 1920s. On stage, Mabel was known for her charm and daring, and her personal life was no less adventurous. She married six times -- once for love, five times for convenience -- but her most enduring affair was with Rajah, the 500-lb. Bengal tiger she raised from birth. — Jenny Offill

The Washington Post

The circus has long been a refuge for society’s misfits; for some, it is the inherent danger of the acts that offers a welcome escape from reality. Faith—the heroine of the first novel by the late Amanda Davis, Wonder When You'll Miss Me—runs away from her high school, her mother, and the police and remakes herself as Annabelle, the elephant-dung mucker for a traveling circus troupe. Psychologically disjointed (she is trailed at all times by her imaginary alter ego), Annabelle seeks solace in acrobatics. “I wanted to tell her about the woman on the trapeze. How I’d held my breath and how my heart had pounded,” Davis writes. “How I’d seen a whole world up there in the air, and the one down here had disappeared.”
Ascension, a novel by Steve Galloway, focuses on the travails of a wire walker named Salvo Ursari. As a child, his parents were killed by Transylvanian villagers; forty-five years later, during the family act on the high wire, his twin daughters plunge to their death. But while Ursari is on the wire, all that matters is the next step. “Immediately everything receded. All his fears, all his memories, all he loved and all he loathed,” Galloway writes.
The eponymous heroine (based on a real-life tiger trainer) of Robert Hough’s The Final Confession of Mabel Stark joins the circus after escaping from a psychiatric ward, where she was committed for refusing to fulfill her wifely duties. For Mabel, life with her big cats reminds her that happiness always has its dark side: “No matter how well things’re going, you always know it’s only a matter of time before a claw catches, or a tooth snags, or a forepaw lashes, and your contentment feels bearable again.” (Andrea Thompson)

The New Yorker

A marvelous debut, winner of a Canadian literary prize, about the life and amazing adventures of the greatest female tiger trainer in circus history are narrated with delicious humor and warmth. The story's presented as the somewhat discordant autobiography-in-progress ("there'll be times when I take liberties with this thing called order") of "Mabel Stark." Born Mary Haynie in Kentucky to a family of luckless tobacco farmers, Mabel is orphaned early in life, trained as a nurse, and married young (to a patient who's particularly needy sexually). She recounts the ordeal of the mental hospital that husband Dimitri Aganosticus has her committed to, her escape and experiences (as a "cooch dancer") with a traveling carnival, another failed marriage, and the discovery of her true calling with the Al G. Barnes Wild Animal Circus-where she learns to "work" the big cats, marries lion tamer Louis Roth, and meets the real love of her life: a stunningly beautiful Bengal tiger cub that grows into her 550-pound partner, Rajah, in a world-famous "wrestling act." Tales of success and fame with Ringling Brothers are juxtaposed with grimmer accounts of Mabel's declining years at a moribund animal park ("Jungleland"). All, though, is told in a vivid and cantankerous comic voice (reminiscent of the voice of Jack Crabb in Thomas Berger's Little Big Man) alive with self-deprecating wit and truculent cussedness. The Ringling years are brilliantly detailed, as is the story of Mabel's happy but cruelly brief fifth marriage to part-Indian ex-con "ménage boss" Art Rooney. The descriptions of animals and of in-the-ring routines are equally irresistible. And Rajah is a glorious character: a regal presence, given toadolescent moodiness, with a forceful personality and a very considerable sexual presence. Just about perfect. One of the most entertaining novels in many a year. Film rights to Tailor-Made Films, UK

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