Roustabout: A Novel

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1996 Trade Paperback Grade: B Catalog: Fiction General Synopsis: 223 pages. Some children dream of joining the circus. Mat dreams of escaping it. Abandoned by her mother when ... she was five, she was adopted into a tr... Read more Show Less

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Overview

Some children dream of joining the circus. Mat dreams of escaping. Abandoned by her mother, molested by her stepfather, she sees through the glitter and fantasy of the bigtop to the grimy reality of the backlot. There Mat and the roustabout crew while away the deadening hours between rigging the tent and driving trucks with drugs, booze, and sex.
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Overview

Some children dream of joining the circus. Mat dreams of escaping. Abandoned by her mother, molested by her stepfather, she sees through the glitter and fantasy of the bigtop to the grimy reality of the backlot. There Mat and the roustabout crew while away the deadening hours between rigging the tent and driving trucks with drugs, booze, and sex.

Editorial Reviews

Maud Casey

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. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly
The sordid world of a traveling circus is the promisingly exotic setting of this first novel by ex-carny hand Chalfoun, but uneven prose and broad characterization keep the story from fulfilling its potential. The heroine of this big-top bildungsroman is Mat, a tent-rigger who was brought to live at the Circus Fantastico as a child when her stripper mother moved in with a member of the crew. When she was nine, her mother ran off, and Mat was forced to endure the attentions of her lecherous stepfather for six years until she was brusquely claimed as a girlfriend by Jayson, the ring crew chief. Nearly 20 years her senior and blessed with the emotional sensitivity of one of the roadshow's elephants, Jayson cheats on her, lies to her and drives off her friends. Mat, of course, moons over him. Finally, as she matures into her early 20s, she comes to see that she must somehow summon the grit-and the wit-to close the door not just on the affair but also on the grueling, casually cruel life of a roustabout. It's hard to know how to respond to such an incorruptibly innocent, exasperatingly childlike narrator; although it's impossible not to sympathize with her, it's also wearying to witness her doggy devotion and wait for her to grow out of it and into herself. Still, Chalfoun delivers a raw and vivid portrait of circus life and of the oddities of circus people. (Apr.)
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
First-novelist Chalfoun has relied on her own experiences as a circus worker to create this decidedly unglamorous view of a circus orphan's life—a bleak tale with occasional sparks of originality and insight glimmering from beneath the ashes.

Mat hardly remembers her earliest years, before her mother took her along to live in an Airstream trailer with Enis, a circus crewman. Then, when Mat was nine, her mother fled, leaving Mat with her lover, who promptly began sexually abusing the little girl. Regularly raped by the man she calls "Pa," Mat grows up unkempt and uneducated among the travelling performers, finding happiness only in her work as a roustabout, swinging a sledgehammer to secure the stays of the circus tent, apparently unaware of how different her life is from those of the townies she holds in such contempt. At the age of 15, though, Mat is "rescued" by Jayson, the 35- year-old ringcrew chief, who moves her into a sleeper with Al, a transvestite cook happy to act as surrogate mother, and puts her to work in the costume truck with Tante, a burn-scarred crone whose own terrible past throws an even deeper shadow over Mat's grim life. Somehow the teenaged Mat dares to hope for romance and domesticity, even as Jayson, now her lover, casually betrays and abuses her. Barely able to spell out a simple love letter, Mat cannot imagine a life outside this strange, peripatetic world, yet she must learn how to escape its no-win rules if she is to survive at all.

Grim stuff, clearly, but Chalfoun's characters are not easy to forget. One wonders where the author's unflinching eye will light next.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780060927998
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 4/28/1997
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 240
  • Product dimensions: 5.25 (w) x 7.96 (h) x 0.72 (d)

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 27, 2002

    Amazing find!!

    I first read this book in 1997 - freshly pulled from a small town library's shelves. It did not take me long to get absolutely hooked. Now my brain is like a sieve, and I can rarely remember characters or plots in books. These characters stayed with me for years - so much so that I HAD to read it again. But years went by and I forgot title, author and publisher. I searched for circus fiction, with no result. Last summer, I saw a corner of the book at a library book sale and recognized it instantly! Even after numerous re-reads, I can not recommend this book highly enough. Well written and superbly crafted.

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