Grueling and gorgeous

Ballet is a notoriously brutal profession. From early childhood through their teens, dancers must train and practice relentlessly, until they make it to a professional dance company with the hope of eventually attaining principal dancer status. An injury can derail their careers, most dancers get paid very little, and their careers generally end by 35. What drives these people to do what they do? Inexorable passion combined with grueling discipline, says Maggie Shipstead in Astonish Me.

Shipstead seamlessly weaves the ballet dancer’s lifestyle into the novel. The skimpy meals (‘half a banana for breakfast’). The fuel for the exhausting days of practice (‘Elaine ingests a steady but restricted diet of cocaine without apparent consequence’). The partying. The men. The miserable wages that leave one sleeping ‘in a twin bed against the far wall of their small living room’. The physical exertion hidden behind the lovely swoops and jumps:

the dancers who come smiling and leaping offstage and give themselves over to violent exhaustion, standing stooped, hands on hips, heaving like racehorses.

The main protagonist, Joan Joyce, is in the corps de ballet at an unnamed company in New York. Joan is talented, but like Salieri in Amadeus, she is just good enough to realize she will never be great. Her roommate Elaine is already a soloist, and on an upward trajectory. And there are the principal dancers:

two Russian stars are out alone in the light, both defectors.

Joan has an alternate claim to fame, though — she helped one of these Russians, Arslan Rusakov, to defect, and had a short-lived affair with him thereafter. Arslan is very much along the lines of Mikhail Baryshnikov — ‘his stage presence is aggressive and masculine, arrogant’ — and the company, headed by artistic director Mr K is much like the American Ballet Theater headed by George Balanchine, who was known as ‘Mr. B’.

When the novel starts in 1977, Joan is pregnant. Parenthood is career-ending for ballerinas.

Joan has known plenty of pregnant dancers but only a handful who stayed that way and only one who then returned to the company — a principal famous enough to be forgiven for the months of leave, her slow battle back into shape.

Joan leaves professional ballet, marries her high-school sweetheart Jacob, and has a baby. The reader is aware early on that the father is Rusakov, but that is a secret held close to Joan’s heart. The child, Harry, grows up in LA where Jacob studies gifted children and Joan runs a ballet school for small children. The novel jumps back and forth between the 1970s and 1990s, filling in and enhancing the plot outline, but there are few surprises until the last third of the novel. The first developments are predictable: Harry shows noteworthy promise as a dancer, moves from strength to strength, and is accepted for a ‘summer intensive’ at the New York company, where he inevitably meets Arslan Rusakov.

The characters are sometimes defined by their own voices (Joan, Elaine, Jacob, Harry), and sometimes by another perspective.

Elaine watches Joan watch [Rusakov], forlorn and puzzled as an abandoned dog. She is torn between sympathy for her friend’s pain and scorn for her vulnerability. It was ridiculous for Joan to imagine that a man as brilliant and hungry and capricious and sought after as Arslan would make a rewarding object for her love.

Rusakov is the only main character whose voice we never hear. He is the cynosure of all eyes, entirely secure and confident in his astounding talent, central to the plot and to their lives, but he bores easily when asked to explain his own actions or thoughts, so it seems quite right that he never bothers to tell his own tale.

Despite the centrality of Joan, she comes across as a rather remote and distant figure through much of the book, with opaque motivations. In the second half of the book, Joan seems largely passive; it is hard to see the Joan who was so determined in the first half. Perhaps this is intended to reflect the shattering reality for dancers who have spent all their lives training with one goal, only to fall by the wayside?

A more interesting side character who grows in importance over the course of the book is Chloe, the next-door child who grows up along with Harry, and eventually becomes a dancer in her own right. Shipstead does a nice job of showing her evolution from a ‘popular’ schoolgirl through a period of teenage lassitude, then fierce determination, to the realization that her body does not match that of a classical ballet dancer. (At fourteen, ‘her pelvis has spread like a stain, pulling her femurs and knees out of alignment, changing everything forever’).

It is unusual to read a novel about professional dance without any gay male characters (although Mr. K is bisexual). Jacob appears to have noticed this too.

He defends his son and wife fiercely, and when [Jacob’s mother] once asked Harry why he couldn’t have a hobby that wasn’t for queers, Jacob had taken her outside and told her she had a choice between being banned from seeing her grandson or shutting up.
Still, he has wondered – wonders everyday – if Harry is gay.

The last fifty pages of the book involve a rather melodramatic plot twist, with a ballet based on real life, characters dancing as each other, and ever more complicated relationships. The ending is rather pat, be warned, but overall this is a well-done peephole into an vivid, intense world.