Mind Picker: Great Circle

If you were to put a blade through any sphere and divide it into two perfect halves, the circumference of the cut side of each half would be a great circle: that is, the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere. The equator is a great circle. So is every line of longitude. On the surface of a sphere such as the earth, the shortest distance between any two points will follow an arc that is a segment of a great circle. Points directly opposite each other, like the North and South Poles, are intersected by an infinite number of great circles.

I didn’t love Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, although I might have enjoyed it more were the novel shorter by half. We follow two storylines — each feeling like they were written in turn by Kate Quinn and Taylor Jenkins Reid — the primary one of which concerns the extraordinary life of a pioneering female pilot (starting with her parents and their backstories), and intertwined, the story of a modern day movie star and her efforts to reinvent herself as a serious actor by portraying the pilot in an indy film. The novel is stuffed with interesting historical details — the sinking of a Lusitania-type ship at the brink of WWI, rum-running during Prohibition, the RAF’s use of female pilots to move planes around Britain during WWII — but it went on far too long for me, gave too much space to secondary characters (the pilot didn’t need to have a twin brother and I didn’t need to know everything about his life), and took so long to reach the crescendo of the plot that my flagging interest was hard to re-engage. There was much I liked in the pilot’s story, little I cared about in the Hollywood thread, but I appreciate that the chiming between the two storylines — that infinity of great circles that intersected their unrelated lives — was rather the point; there was, unfortunately, no payoff in this reading experience (emotionally or intellectually) that rewarded me for what felt like an overlong engagement. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge — a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.

Marian Graves (and her twin brother, Jamie) were raised by their uncle — an alcoholic artist who allowed the children to pretty much run wild — outside of Missoula, Montana. After being bewitched by a husband-and-wife barnstorming team as a child, Marian was determined to become a pilot herself; and as we know from the opening chapters that Marian will eventually go missing while attempting to circumnavigate the globe around the Poles, the majority of the book recounts her entire life up to that fateful trip. We visit a small town brothel, an Alaskan bush camp, a Seattle mansion, a Vancouver flophouse, a London Red Cross Club, a Hawaiin ranch, a New Zealand sheep farm; there are prostitutes, gangsters, the WPA; rape and incest and abortion; gender and sexual fluidity; the fog of war and the call of the wild. There is just. so. much. And through it all, Marian is restless and itchy and unfulfilled; there’s a persistent feeling of agitation that rubbed off on me as I read.

After my utter failure to fly a plane, I’d only become more determined to be Marian. I needed the relief of being someone who wasn’t afraid. It helped that she wasn’t completely alien, that we were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn’t. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky.

Hadley Baxter was raised by her uncle — a drug-abusing actor-director who introduced his niece to the business as a child and otherwise allowed her to run wild — and after starring in a Hannah Montana-type show as a tween and recently playing the female lead in a Fantasy-Romance-Thriller (The Hunger Games meets Twilight?) franchise, the Hollywood It Girl desperately wants to reinvent herself as someone more respectable (an effort not helped by a series of public sex scandals). Hadley had read about the famous Marian Graves when she was young — her own parents were lost when their Cessna crashed into Lake Superior when Hadley was two — and the fact that there are so many parallels between Hadley’s and Marian’s stories doesn’t feel a credibility-straining coincidence; it is because Hadley already had this sympathetic connection to the long lost Marian that she makes the perfect actor to portray her in a quirky biopic. Her story takes place in the Hollywood Hills, a soundstage in Alaska, a Las Vegas nerd convention; and between power lunches, paparazzi, and PR agents, I had a hard time thinking of Hadley as a real, relatable person.

I think that Maggie Shipstead is a fine writer and much is quotable here:

• Some of these women have had so much work done their words come out all mushy because they can’t move their lips. With their spooky round eyes and stubby little snouts, they look like cats transformed into humans by an incompetent wizard.

• She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.

• She’s starting to have work done. In twenty years she’ll be a skin balloon with eyeholes.

• Trout’s smile hangs between his ears like a ragged hammock.

(But I also think it says something about Hadley’s character that the two best lines in her sections were about overdone plastic surgery; and it probably says more about my character that they amused me equally and I decided to share both.)

Art is distortion but a form of distortion that has the possibility of offering clarification, like a corrective lens.

There is a lot of discussion around art in Great Circle: Not only was Marian’s uncle a painter (who would become famous and collectable after his death) but her brother Jamie also became a painter (from portraitist to war artist); and because we get many bits from his POV, we are treated to the artistic process and the struggle to capture the infinite in the finite. This discussion is picked up later by a sculptor, by art collectors, by authors and filmmakers, by Hadley as she attempts to capture the essence of Marian, and by Marian herself as she tries to overcome the pull of the infinite as it threatens to suck her into the void. I guess it required 600+ pages to fit all of this in, but it was ultimately too long and of uneven interest to me to keep my attention; distortion without the corrective lens.