It’s carny time again. We’ve plowed through numerous novels with this theme—the titillating Carnival of Passion, the straight-up raunchy Carnival of Sex, the meh Girl of the Midway, the sublime Madball, and more. Max Gareth’s, aka Stuart James’, Carnival Girl came in 1960 from Chariot Books with uncredited cover art, and it’s a little different from the light sleaze it presents itself as.
Nearly a quarter of the story is spent on young Norma Chiari’s fraught days as a drifter before she’s taken in by Kirkland’s World of Wonders, carted to a fairground in Bloomington, Indiana, and there taught to earn her keep as a stripper. She spurns the good boy, falls into bed with the bad, and reaches the expected moral crossroads, but the tale doesn’t come off as totally predictable because Gareth is a better author than you usually find in this tier of literature:
The carny rolled. Headlights slanting across the dull black macadam. Road dust boiling from under the heavy double wheels, whipping the refuse and sailing it with the gravel, high and wide into the scrabble-grass dark, to settle and still.
Hawking, grinding, sweating, swearing. Throat-rasping dust of the red Missiourri clay, when the sun beat down baking the midway. Mud that seeped and clogged and clung, when the skies opened up the rains. Cursing, bellowing, scheming, praying, the carny rolled.
It blared into stolid show-me towns like a honky tonk messiah, bringing relief from the tv and the corner movie, lights and noise and when-I-was-a-kid memories, the chance to win the cupie doll, to ride the ferris wheel and the whirl-o-plane, to see the woman who fondled reptiles the way a mother woud fondle her baby.
So that’s not bad. There’s effort within those lines to evoke appropriate mood, and it mostly works. There’s a sense of thinking, not just typing. It also feels like Gareth actually knows something about this subject matter. In the end, despite the unsurprising travails he puts poor, dumb Norma through, the result is readable, and even occasionally involving. It was a good purchase.
