A well-told story almost always captivates, and Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, published by Chapel Hill's Algonquin Books, is no exception.  That it is a New York Times bestseller is confirmation of this.  However, its status on the Times list is also indicative of where we are as a culture --- loving stories but numb to their moral content.

The story focuses on Jacob Jankowski who, after the tragic death of his parents, left his studies in veterinary medicine at Cornell just short of his final exams and joined a traveling circus.  However, the telling of the story alternates between Jacob as a ninety-year old man in a nursing home and Jacob as a twenty-something young man, an unusual technique that Gruen pulls off with aplomb. 

In the circus of the 1930s, Jacob finds a living hell, with little or no pay, poor living conditions, tyrannical bosses, and mistreatment capped off by the practice of "redlighting," a form of letting someone go by simply pushing them off a moving train.  Yet he also finds love with Marlena and becomes caretaker of an intelligent elephant named Rosie.  You might say it's a love triangle.  Predictably, Marlena is already married to a man who is alternately charming and cruel.  This love triangle sets up a crisis that you'll have to read the book to see resolved.

There is nothing terribly novel about the plot here:  Boy meets girl.  Girl is married.  After much dancing around each other, girl and boy fall into each other's arms.  Husband finds out and. . . well, that's the age-old crisis of course.  I did not find the telling of how this romance occurred particularly convincing.  Rather, it seemed formulaic and strained.  But what does captivate is the amount of detail that Gruen provides about the traveling circus of the 1930s.  Her attention to the often sordid facts of circus life shows her careful research, and while it's not particularly savory, it does paint a realistic picture of that life.

In the end, however, I was left unfulfilled by the book.  There's not a lot of grace here, except for the nurse caring for old Jankowski, Jacob and his bunkmate's care for the ailing Camel (a worker), and Jacob's concern for the care of Rosie and the other animals.  There's plenty of profanity and enough illicit sex to make it "real" and ensure an "R" rating when it goes to film.  Unlike after reading a great story, when I finished reading this book I did not miss the characters.  And that makes it one to forget and one I cannot recommend.