A circus contains three worlds—the bosses, the performers and the laborers. Up to now circus fiction has almost always dealt with performers. Yet there is a vast, living mechanism, lubricated with sweat, blood and cheap wine, without which the big top could never be torn down, loaded, moved and set up again. "Cat Man" is a chronicle of the circus laborers, told with the same microscopic detail that Melville lavished on whaling.

Structurally it is hardly a novel; it is a minute dissection of the circus' sinews. Yet the story of the shambling "winos" who hire on from town to town, who last a single jump or three or a month, only to drift away or be found dead behind the wagons, this could hardly be told by any other medium than fiction, which lets us feel the grime ground into the skin, the blood caked on...