Water For Elephants Is A Story About Sex

I had no idea what Water for Elephants was about when I cracked the spine of my 99¢ paperback. The previous owner had never even bothered to read it before donating it to my local Goodwill. Then, it sat on my own bookshelf for a year and a half before I got around to reading it. After seeing a copy of it at every thrift and junk store I had been in for the past month, I felt like the universe was urging me to finally read it. So, I decided it was time to find out what this book was all about.

I gleaned from the red and black stripes on the spine and the mention of “elephant” in the title that the story would have something to do with the circus. And while the story takes place against the backdrop of a depression-era train circus, it’s actually about a horny young man’s quest for his first nut despite a quick succession of life-altering tragedies.

A Not-So-Brief Synopsis Of Water For Elephants

The protagonist is 23-year-old college dropout and virgin, Jacob Jankowski. As the story begins, Jacob is filled with anxious anticipation. He is about to take his veterinary school final exam, but that’s not what he’s excited about. He’s excited because he is hopeful that after the exam, a beautiful and generous college co-ed named Catherine Hale will pop his cherry. She’s a cock-tease (my words), but he hopes things will be different this time. Oh, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story doesn’t actually begin there; it begins, ironically, in the middle of the story’s climax with a chapter titled “Prologue.” It was no doubt the publisher who added the ending of the story to the beginning of the book to stoke interest and hook the reader after the first chapter didn’t test well. I’m sure that choice helped to sell more copies of the book, but it makes it feel like the story starts over in each of the first three chapters. Why not just rewrite the opening?

So, after they spoiled the ending in the first four pages, this horny tale can finally begin. But not quite yet. We still have to endure a flash-forward or a flash present, or I suppose if you’re counting from the end of the book, it’s a flash-back, but not as far back as the flash-back the book opened with.

Not Another Notebook

Anyway, Chapter One begins in a nursing home in the present. It’s reminiscent of The Notebook, or rather, I should say derivative. I haven’t read many books from the ’90s and 00s, so I don’t know if starting stories in nursing homes was a trend at that time or if it’s just a coincidence that the two books I’ve read from that time period start off that way, but I don’t like it. Every instance I’ve seen is to add a twist to the end of the story: Noah and Allie dying at the same time, Rose tossing the rock back into the Atlantic, etc.

The twists are fun, I guess, but a nursing home as a backdrop is as uninspired, sterile, soulless, and boring as a cubicle in a late 90s movie. It’s sad in a pointless and irredeemable way, like a joke that goes on for too long. If these characters had anything in their lives worth writing about, then write about those things. I don’t need to know what happens after the curtain drops, especially if it’s just that they rotted away in a nursing home. Even the Water For Elephants movie adaptation nixes the whole nursing home subplot.

What Have We Learned So Far?

So, by this point, we’ve read the prologue and two pages of the first chapter, and all we know is that there was a stampede at a circus at some point in the distant past, an elderly person is in a nursing home, and we don’t know what, if anything, they have to do with the aforementioned circus. We don’t even know if the protagonist is a man or a woman, yet.

I know we’re not supposed to see gender anymore, anyone can be whatever sex or no sex they want to be, but the book was written in 2006, and we didn’t care about shit like that back then. Plus, regardless of sex, it’s just common courtesy to give me an image to keep in my mind as your story goes along. It takes until the top of page seven before we find out that the main character is a man, and his name is Jacob.

Jacob Is Mark

Jacob lives in a nursing home, and for whatever reason, he is unusually sensitive to people claiming to have worked in the circus. He’s gatekeeping the whole experience like it’s a zero-sum game that he thinks he can win if he can just outlive all the other carnies. We never really find out why. His disdain for a new resident who claimed to have carried water for elephants as a child isn’t explained, either. In fact, the title of the book, Water For Elephants, is never explained. I took the term to mean a job in the circus that didn’t actually exist. I think it was a rib, like how you might you might send someone on a snipe hunt.

All we learn about Jacob in the first chapter is that he’s 91 or 93 and that he has a major hard-on for the circus because he worked in it for seven years. I could understand his reverence and interest in the circus, as he entered middle age because it was a larger part of his life and not so long ago at that point. Seventy years on, however, his time in the circus amounts to 7.5% to 7.6% of his life, depending on whichever age he finally settles on. It’s hardly a significant enough part of one’s life to be affronted by someone claiming they carried water for elephants, whatever the fuck that means. That would be like me bragging about my first job as a paperboy when I was 11 and shouting down anyone else who said they also had a paper route.

His First Run At It

Like an old circus train, Water For Elephants starts slow and takes a while to build steam. Once it gets going, though, it chugs along relentlessly and doesn’t want to stop, not unlike a horny 23-year-old trying to get his first nut. In chapter two, the story finally begins. Jacob wants to get inside Catherine, but Catherine isn’t so easy, and good for her. Jacob’s about to be a homeless orphan, and classy women can sense these things.

A bunch of guys – seven, if I remember correctly – in Jacob’s class each paid a co-ed 25¢ to fuck her in a pile of hay in a barn, so they wouldn’t have to leave college as virgins. Jacob abstained, and I have to give him credit. I know myself pretty well, so I can say with 100% certainty that if I were in that situation, I wouldn’t be the first one in the pool, and if I’m not the first one in, I’m out. It’s tantamount to the stories my dad tells about bath time when he was a kid.

Human Stew

He was the youngest of five boys, and Saturday night was bath night. His dad would go first, followed by each of his four brothers. One by one, the bathwater became darker and dirtier with each subsequent body. By the time it was my dad’s turn, 5 “baths” later, it was just a vat of lukewarm human stew.

I’m honestly not sure which of the two situations grosses me out more. If pressed, I would have to choose pushing my meat into some college slut’s cum-filled maw. I would rather abstain from either scenario if I could avoid it, though. The college whore made out like a bandit, though, didn’t she? $3,500 worth of buying power, adjusted for inflation, for, let’s be honest, under twenty minutes worth of work. Of course, she probably ended up with a baby, but if not, she’s got tuition covered this semester.

Jacob Becomes A Homeless Orphan

Jacob’s parents die in a car crash right before his final exam. Then, before their bodies are cold, the bank repossesses his house, leaving him a penniless, homeless orphan – but then, orphans tend to be penniless and homeless, don’t they? That’s kind of their whole deal. So, there’s nothing extraordinary about that.

The prudent thing to do, at this point, would be to take his final exam. A degree would ensure some stability for his future now that he’s on his own. Instead, he freaks out before touching pencil to paper, runs out of the testing room, and straight out of town. I get it. It was a huge shock, multiple tragedies all at once, and no grief counselors to help him make sense of any of it. Still, the best thing he could have done at that moment was get his college degree.

“You Want To Carry Water For Elephants, I Suppose”

Whatever. He did what he did: jumped on a circus train, endeared himself to an old carny with a heart of gold, and twenty-four hours later, he’s a bouncer in a circus coochy tent. This is seriously how this book goes. It just jumps from one sexual encounter to the next. Jacob had never seen a naked woman before, so seeing Barbara shaking her tits was a huge moment for him. Well, probably not huge. It was an average but perfectly adequate-sized moment for him.

After the show, Barbara turned five tricks for $2 each. It only took 45 minutes. That’s almost $15 an hour in 1931! I doubt she saw more than half of it, though, if any. She finds Jacob lurking around outside her tent as she shows her last John out. He doesn’t ask, but she informs him that she’s not doing any freebies that night. Bummer, but once again, he avoided contributing to the human stew; good on him.

Catherine Who?

Jacob quickly settles into circus life and finds himself a job as the circus’s vet. He meets Marlena, the star of the show, and falls in love. August, Marlena’s husband, is the circus’s paranoid schizophrenic animal superintendent, who also happens to be Jacob’s direct supervisor. Marlena reminds Jacob of his first lust, Catherine. So, naturally, Catherine, his parent’s death, the loss of his family home, and the fact that he flunked out of college all fly right out the window. His singular focus becomes fucking his boss’s wife. There are a great many obstacles between him and his conquest, though, just not parents, school, or housing.

Jacob Meets Kinko

His bunkmate is a horny dwarf with an attitude problem called Kinko. Kinko is not at all happy about having to share his quarters with anyone, especially a worker. (The dwarf is a performer, Jacob is a worker, and performers and workers are different classes.) One day, Jacob walks in on his roommate, pounding his pud – to use the parlance of their time.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he had an 8-page in one hand and his cock in the other. It sounds like an awfully unpleasurable way to whack off. At first, I remembered that the author was a woman, so what would she know about how guys masturbate? But then, I quickly realized that I have no idea how other men jack it. As far as I know, they’re all sitting upright on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, blissfully unaware of how much better it could feel. What a thought to have while reading a book, but isn’t that what art is about?

Jacob Loses His Cookies Instead Of His Virginity

Embarrassed and angry, Kinko can’t let Jacob slide. His punishment for disturbing the little wanker came cold, as revenge is best served. Jacob drank himself into a stupor, and then Barbara, the whore, and her whore friend Ella tried to double up on him. While Barbara was going down on him, Ella moved in to kiss him; he puked in Ella’s whore face and then passed out. He woke up the next morning in a trunk, dressed in women’s clothing, with clown makeup on his face and his balls shaved clean. It’s a bit ambiguous who the culprit is until the midget confesses and apologizes for the shearing. Who does that? I’m all for a good revenge prank, but I’m not touching another man’s junk to do it.

So, I’m sure you could guess what happens after the ball shaving. Jacob and the midget become friends, obviously. A bunch of stuff happens: Jacob and August beat the hell out of each other, August gives Marlena the smackdown as well, and then Jacob takes Marlena to town to hide her from August in a hotel.

She Likes It Messy

At this point, Jacob’s face is unrecognizable from his fight with August; Marlena has just been beaten by her husband for the first time, and if August finds them, Jacob’s dead. Apparently, this is what gets that sexy little circus freak drippin’ because as soon as they’re alone in the hotel, she pops his cherry. He lasts seconds, as one would imagine, but they wake up the next morning and do it again. This time, there’s no rush, so they take their time, and she teaches him how to properly finger-blast a girl.

Not The Way I Would Have Watered The Elephants

I admit I don’t know anything about women. I married one 23 years ago, and I know less about women now than I ever have. So, I can’t help but wonder why the author chose this moment in the story for Marlena to deflower the virile and vulnerable Jacob. I just don’t think a woman would be DTF after having experienced so much trauma and violence earlier that same day. But, like I said, what the fuck do I know. A woman wrote this scene, after all, so she probably knows what she’s talking about, right? Or, perhaps she put plot over realism. Whatever the case, as a reader, I could have waited a few more chapters for them to finally hook up when they were in a better place, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

I would expect this sort of out-of-touch sexual fantasy from a male author like Gabriel García Márquez. He wrote a paragraph near the end of Love in the Time of Cholera that describes a woman pining for her rapist. She rejected the advance of the story’s protagonist saying, “I realized a long time ago that you are not the man I am looking for.”

We then learn that the man she is looking for was a stranger who raped her when she was younger, and “she had wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms.” She would say to anyone who would listen to her, “If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Man’s Jetty, one October fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he can find me.” As if.

I Suppose That’s Why It’s Called Fiction

But, like I said, I don’t know anything about women. Maybe they all secretly want to be raped. I think that is unlikely, but domination and rape fantasies are not uncommon among women, so who knows. Obviously, all women are different. They each have their own fantasies and desires, so it would not be appropriate to generalize. At the same time, everyone has their own capacity for discerning reality from fantasy. Some are better at it than others, and some stories are better at delineating the lines between the two.

When Harry Potter walks through a brick wall and magically appears in a parallel universe, it is apparent that we are watching a story in which the rules of our reality do not apply. Everything in the story is fantastic, and any adult with an average I.Q. would understand that. But what happens when the lines between real and make-believe are ambiguous? For instance, legal trials happen every day in courtrooms all across this country. In media, however, they become a caricature of reality. If you’ve never seen how a real courtroom operates, you might think the dramatization in movies and TV is real.

The Bad Guys Don’t Need Our Help

Likewise, a young, naive woman/girl might think that a passage about a woman who longs to be reunited with her rapist, not in a galaxy far, far away, or in the magical land of Oz, but in the real world where she lives, might be a natural reaction to non-consensual sex. She might think that giving herself to the man who took her is romantic and, dare I say, normal. Similarly, a young man might get the idea that women secretly want you to force yourself upon them.

Your eyes are rolling right now. No one is that stupid, right? Believe me, some among us actually are. Granted, they’re probably not reading books like Love in the Time of Cholera or Water for Elephants. They are definitely, however, watching movies and TV shows based on those books and others like them. Watching porn also distorts people’s perception of sex, but you don’t even have to go to that extreme.

Meet Jenny

My family hosted a foreign exchange student for three years. Every notion and idea she had about love, sex, and relationships came from movies and TV shows. She expected to be treated like Bella from Twilight. She expected grand gestures of love and intention and was disillusioned when boys fell short, which they did every time. It was pathetic to watch, knowing how disappointed she was going to be in life. Of course, people like her adjust their delusions to avoid facing reality, so they always evade true disappointment.

Holy Water For Elephants

She is just one example. The Bible has blurred the lines between fantasy and history for millions of Christians around the world. The only real difference between books like Water for Elephants and The Holy Bible is historical context and time. So, I wonder, what is an author’s responsibility to the truth? Presumably, Water for Elephants will still exist long after the collective memory of train circuses has faded into ancient history. Today, we understand it’s a work of fiction set in a time and place that actually existed. What happens in the distant future when all context has been lost?

One day, archaeologists will find our works of literature. When they piece together the meanings of the words and context, they will read a book like Water for Elephants and think that every time a man was faced with a grievous tragedy, he dropped everything to try to get off.

Will they understand the story was crafted by a woman who may not have had the most accurate perspective to write for a male character? Will they understand Gabriel García Márquez wasn’t a young black girl and John Greene wasn’t a teenage girl with cancer?

Should We Stay In Our Own Lanes?

That’s not to say that authors shouldn’t write characters whose experiences they haven’t lived. On the contrary, writing about a character as different from you as a person can be could be an enlightening and even therapeutic exercise for the author and could potentially lend a perspective to the reader they might never have seen otherwise. I just wonder about the potential ramifications of the author getting it wildly wrong, though. Could writing a character through the lens of the opposite sex distort the reader’s reality of their own experience? Would a woman have written a scene like the one I highlighted from Love in the Time of Cholera? And if so, would that validate the character’s experience?

Similarly, does a female author falling back on the trope of young men being horny to the exclusion of all else invalidate the character’s experience? Would a 23-year-old man really be so horny and emotionally stunted that he could forget all of his very recent hardships at the mere sight of a woman? Now, I’ll grant you, as I write this, 23 is literally half a lifetime ago for me, so my memory of that time is a little fuzzy. Still, as horny as I might have been at 23, I don’t think that I would have been so easily distracted, even by pussy, in the face of so much tragedy. Maybe a normal 23 year old would be, I don’t know.

The Ballad Of Chip

In 1997, I worked with a man who definitely would be. He was in his early 40s, but he was still living in his 20s. All he ever talked about was how much sex he had in Reno in the 70s. He had a van with a bed in the back and spent his free time looking for girls to bang. Then, he’d bang them once they’re on the van. Occasionally, he would change it up and talk about how much he regretted getting married, too. He seemed to think the pussy parade would have kept up with his advancing age had he remained a bachelor.

The story he repeated most often was the time he bagged three chicks in one night. Not at the same time, but one after the other. I believe that was his record. He reveled in how before he fucked them, they had each sucked his dick. That meant that lucky ladies two and three had to suck the essence of his previous conquest off his dick. I’ll admit that initially, I was impressed. As the months dragged on, though, and the topic of conversation never varied from how he scored four touchdowns in one game at Polk High, he became more and more pathetic, living in the memories of his youth. Having not had even .0001% of the sexual experiences that he claimed to have had, I have a hard time imagining that that level of promiscuity is normal.

Sex In The 90s

I came of age in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. Sex ed in the 90s largely revolved around the idea that having sex, even once, would invariably lead to a long and painful death. If it didn’t lead to death, it led to pregnancy. So, I grew up scared of sex, which dovetailed nicely with my fear of girls generally. That’s probably why instead of fucking my way through the circus at 23, I got married.

So, I think I can safely say that even if I had somehow found myself in Jacob’s shoes at 23 – in a hotel room with a married woman with a black eye, my face looking like a busted tomato, my life in danger, etc., and she started to initiate sex – I don’t think I would have gone through with it. Call me a prude; call me a gentleman; call me gay; I just don’t think I could switch off everything else I was feeling just to get off. Am I the outlier? Or did Sara Gruen miss the mark the way she wrote Jacob Jankowski and shoe-horned so much sex into a story about a circus? Even Love in the Time of Cholera didn’t have as much sex in it as Water For Elephants did, and that was an actual story about sex.

Water For Elephants and Sex for Veterinarians

I don’t think the average person encounters sexual activity as often as Jacob did, whether they engage in it or not. There was sexual activity happening all around him, not just in the circus but back in college, too, and the whole story takes place in less than a year.

Sex In The Wild

Once, back in 2012, I saw a couple having sex in a car in a gas station car wash. And then, on a camping at Carpinteria State Beach in 2013, everyone in the campgrounds got laid. First, it was the couple in the tent next door. Then, a woman got the shit railed out of her in the bathrooms; she could be heard for miles around. And I’m pretty sure there was a whole orgy at the far end of the campground. That’s it, though. That’s 46 years of random sexual encounters in the wild. I don’t think real life is as sexual for most people as it was for Jacob Jankowski in those few brief months when he was 23. If the rest of his life continued that way, he would have more stories than Penthouse Forum.

Edward Plays Jacob

But as I said before, Water For Elephants is not a story about a depression-era train circus. It is a story about sex. It’s a story about a young man’s blind pursuit to lose his virginity. The sex is the story. If it wasn’t, then you could remove the sex without changing the story. Don’t believe me? Watch the film adaptation. They left out almost all of the sex, and the movie was the poorer for it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that removing all of Jacob’s sexual encounters shifted the focus of the story to the elephant, which made the film flat, boring, and interminable, not unlike a life lived without sex.

So, I guess Mrs. Gruen has the male of our species pegged, if not the whole human race. Sex is the point of life, or life is the point of sex. Either way, sex is the point of Water for Elephants, and the story would suffer without it.