BOOK REVIEW

“The Great Circle” by Maggie Shipstead. New York: Knopf, 2021. 589 pages. $28.95 (Hardcover).

Maggie Shipstead is a literary tinkerer of genius. Each of her three prize-winning novels is altogether different from the others, and this one, “The Great Circle,” is by far the most ambitious and technically challenging of the three: a pair of intertwined narratives involving two remarkable women and more than 100 years of history.

One of the women, Marian Graves, is a dedicated, driven pilot rarely happy except aloft. The other, Hadley Baxter, is a self-absorbed ex-child star trying to revive her career by playing Marian Graves in a modern biopic. Very different women on the surface, but each one is an orphan who lost a parent or parents by drowning. Each was raised by an inattentive uncle. Each is assailed by uncertainties and doubts. And Shipstead carefully weaves other similarities into their paired experiences, somehow managing to make each point of contact believable until she makes their lives cross for a last time in the book’s stunning conclusion. Just to goose up the degree of difficulty, Marian’s story is told in the third person and Hadley’s in the first.

So much for the plan. In practice Marian’s story dominates the book, and rightly so. While Hadley’s poor little rich girl tale and brittle, Hollywood-noir, wisecracking style are instantly familiar and largely subsumed in the larger narrative, Marian’s saga is vastly more complex and surprising. And saga is the right word. From an Edenic childhood in Montana she emerges into a fierce love of aviation, fostered by an encounter she had with a pair of barnstorming pilots when she was 12, at “an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.”

From there she goes on to a constantly engaging and suspenseful career as a rare Prohibition-age female pilot; a wife trapped in a catastrophic marriage with a bootlegger; a daring rum-runner flying liquor in from Canada; a death-defying bush pilot in Alaska; an Air Transport Auxiliary flyer ferrying Allied war planes in England during World War II; and finally an Amelia Earhart-like “aviatrix” undertaking a first-ever around-the-world flight crossing the North and South Poles – the Great Circle of the book’s title.

At each step of the way, Marian’s story is supported by Shipstead’s seamlessly integrated research – countless details about flying and planes, war-time history, the oceans, birds and a wide array of settings from Alaska to Antarctica. From time to time her path crosses that of real women flyers like Earhart or Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, pinning the tale to history. In fact the realism is so strong I occasionally forgot this was fiction and flipped to the middle of the book as you do in a biography, looking for photographs.

All this would mean little if the yarn itself weren’t so compelling. But it is. Marian, an unpredictable mix of unresolved doubts and steely determination, is the strongest character, but her life teems with memorable figures: her feckless uncle Wallace, her artist brother Jamie (also obsessed with impossible yearnings), her various lovers and a parade of notable walk-ons. Everyone we meet, from Marian’s mother, drowned at the beginning of the book, to Matilda Feiffer, her patron near the end, is given a solid backstory and presence. Most of them could anchor unwritten novels of their own.

The novel zips along through a series of episodes, each of which leaves you hungry for more until you reach the final unforeseeable twist. And Shipstead combines her gift for storytelling with a poet’s eye for telling details and phrases. At one point, uncle Wallace, drunker than usual, “brandished a pistol wildly, like a man trying to take aim at a bee.” Learning to fly, Marian tirelessly laps her mountain-surrounded valley “like a marble riding the inner surface of a bowl.” “Harmless clouds are “strewn loosely as spilled popcorn.” Bush planes are “spare parts, flying in formation.” Narwhals “look like unicorns crossbred with dirty thumbs.” The black fins of orcas “slice up, roll down through the water’s surface like the turning cogs of submerged wheels.” I could go on.

Conceived as it was, as a realistic narrative, “The Great Circle” includes some raw language and situations. The plight of women in a cluelessly sexist world is certainly a theme as is the fluidity of sexual roles and desires. One of Marian’s lovers is Ruth Bloom, an ATA flyer she rooms with in England. Ruth’s nominal husband, Eddie, is a gay man who finds the love of his life in a German POW camp and later becomes Marian’s navigator on her final flight. The affairs of the other characters are just as tangled and perplexed. This is not a book for someone looking for simple answers. No one in the novel knows what will become of them in this world, let alone afterward. But for most of us that, too, is true to life, another element in the book’s realism.

“The Great Circle” is a terrific novel, maybe even a great one. Several critics have already named it the best of the year. I’d like to say I couldn’t put it down, but at nearly 600 pages I’m afraid I did put it down more than once. But never without regret. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone looking for an engrossing summer read.

– Reviewed by Joe Glaser, Western Kentucky University English Department.