The next book on my reading docket this summer was the recently published American Oz, a book by journalist Michael Sean Comerford. The tale is described on the book cover as “An astonishing year inside traveling carnivals at state fairs and festivals.” And it is.
Comerford was not so naive or ultimately as frail in purpose as the peripatetic McCandless (featured in the book Into the Wild, John Krakauer). He tore into his journey to work at carnivals with patent determination. He chronicles the doubts this decision created at times yet stands as solidly as one could imagine almost every situation he encountered. Such are the challenges and joys of immersive journalism.
Those were not days filled with comforts. Working at traveling carnivals is a nomadic existence on its own. Traveling between caravans was even tougher. Comerford learned how to live lean. Beyond that, he learned to make do in often depressing circumstances.
He was robbed and had precious bikes stolen. His life was even threatened at times by co-workers. But at 6'5" and possessed of a cutting sense of humor, he avoided potentially fatal confrontations. He was his own form of badass.
Perhaps the best parts of the book are found in the man’s ability to laugh and sing his way through life. Standing on a roadside for hours at a time, even days on end, the author sang to the skies. On the carnival midway running games and rides, he turned his resolute humor into a sales pitch. Along the way, he created and immersed himself in the fantasyland in which people long to be deceived in order to be entertained.
In this respect, Michael Sean Comerford bridged the gap between what America once was and what it has now become, a playground of half beliefs disguising themselves as eternal truths.
The grittiest part of American Oz is its unflinching look at how economics, race, and culture collide at the seams of existence. As one rightly imagines, carnies are not the most stable population of people in the world. Many exist entirely on the money they can earn week-to-week. Others hide from their past. Yet some embrace the peregrinations of carnival life for the exact reasons most of us would shun it. It asks everything from you, and in a raw sort of way, gives everything in return.
That is just one of the lessons one takes away from American Oz. As Comerford swings from south to north, east to west, he sees the country for what it is: a mixed-up and often conflicted carnival of misperceptions and fateful illusions.
As it turns out, some of the most reliable and organized carnival workers are Mexican by heritage. They travel north on well-documented visas organized by a trusted manager back home. They work for months on the carnival circuit. When the season is over, they travel back home to mix with family and see how badly the drug cartels are messing up lives in the mountains.
They are some of the most inspiring survivors and providers you’d ever want to meet.
The compassion with which these tales are shared is remarkable and honest at the same time. Comerford clearly grew to appreciate people of all kinds. He embraced their quirks and flaws. He followed their stories back to the roots of their upbringing to discover how people badly wounded by life can still make it work somehow.
Those principles of appreciation are especially strong when eyes are cast upon the carnival attraction called the Freak Show. One might think such public displays are banned entirely in the age of the politically correct. Not so.
Yet ironically, the lives of the people who work the Freak Show are the least deceptive of all. They are folks making the most of their condition in a money-making proposition. Let us never forget that Munchkinland was the first stop made by Dorothy on her way to the Emerald City. American Oz is no exception. If you’ve never noticed it for what it is, Keeping Up With the Kardashians is a freak show all its own.
By way of revealing my connection with Michael Sean Comerford, we once worked together at a newspaper in Illinois. I recall our lunchroom conversations as wry exchanges about the vicissitudes of the changing industry in which we were both long employed. Soon enough, he’d be launched from his profession like so many other American journalists. I took my own wild leap into the world of marketing, joining an agency that could best be described as a carnival of speculation and Kabuki theater.
So reading American Oz was, for me, a shared journey of sorts. I think you’ll find many moments of shared insight as Comerford hides nothing about his own complex challenges as a human being; a father away from his child, a writer seeking some form of truth, and a journeyman through the American Oz in which we all live.
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American OZ - The Greatest American Road Story
Michael Sean Comerford
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Reviews with images
Surprising, humane stories of a world few really see.
I don’t recall how I came to know this boom existed. Perhaps it was an algorithm, perhaps it was the same rare luck you need to beat the Tub Thug. No matter. Overall, an enjoyable read that inspires me to stop when passing a hitchhiker and avoid games at our next carnival.
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Top reviews from other countries
Max I
You'll definitely never see your next fair or festival the same again!
Reviewed in Canada on November 26, 2020
