Watching 'The Invisible Circus,' you'd never know that the '60s were about anything bigger or more important than a young girl's sense that, darn it, she just didn't fit in. And just to be clear, by feelings I mean something distinct from the messiness and largeness of emotion, something small, insular and precious. 'The Invisible Circus' is the film equivalent of the literary women's novel, the type of book that reduces every topic - no matter what the social or political context - to feelings.

I haven't read the Jennifer Egan novel on which the film is based, so I can't judge its faithfulness, but the movie unfortunately plays out like a lot of other books in a weird genre that has emerged in the past 15 years. It's about the '60s kids who got caught up in radical politics and the decade's general topsy-turviness and never found their way back to a stable life.

As it confronts the ambiguous legacy of the sixties, The Invisible Circus also beautifully and powerfully describes a journey essential to all of us.On the surface, Adam Brooks' 'The Invisible Circus' has a big, still-potent subject. Jennifer Egan portrays this fundamental passage with a mastery of riveting narrative extraordinary in a first novel. Only by dispelling the ghosts of a romanticized past does Phoebe come into full possession of her world. But the truth Phoebe discovers is darker and more complicated than anything she has imagined, and finally she must face the human price her sister paid for taking her quest for personal liberation to the very edge. Finally she reaches Italy and traces her sister's last steps. Phoebe follows the itinerary Faith had spelled out in postcards home - London, Amsterdam, Paris - but the millennial excitement of Faith's Europe has vanished, and Phoebe finds herself vulnerable and isolated. Believing that her sister's fatal journey holds the key to her own transformation, Phoebe bolts to Europe. Living in San Francisco with her widowed mother, Phoebe drifts along the edges of her life, obsessed by the memory of her charismatic older sister, Faith, a true flower child who died mysteriously in Italy eight years before. Phoebe O'Connor, eighteen in the summer of 1978, is too young to have partaken of the riotous carnival of the sixties, but old enough to feel the anxiety of its influence.

The invisible circus by jennifer egan