Having been very impressed by Abbott’s The End of Everything, I was thrilled to get hold of another of her novels. This one is about ballet and ballerinas. Not a world I know anything about, but Abbott is a consummately skilled writer and storyteller, and plunges the reader into the backstage and intimate details of what it takes to stage an annual Nutcracker performance.
Dara and Marie Durant run the Durant School, which was set up by their mother, herself a famous ballerina. Of course, both daughters are taught ballet from a tender age:
The sound, forever, of the barre squeaking. Dara’s or Marie’s eager hands on it, their mother’s voice intoning Lift through the leg! Turn that foot out! Their house was all ballet, all the time.
p26
After their parents die in an accident, the girls take over the house and the running of the school. They are joined by Charles, then a teenaged a male ballet dancer, who marries Dara, and becomes an integral part of their family as well as the Durant School. After injuries, he can no longer dance, but he does the administration, marketing, paperwork, and sees to other parts of the school. Dara teaches the older students, while Marie teaches the little ones, and the school flourishes, with anxious parents sending their children (more girls than boys, as expected) to classes to learn “grace and bearing” from the Durant sisters, who fully appreciate their teaching, communications, and discipline is a performance as much as dancing is.
Ballet seems a terribly demanding lifestyle, and terribly injurious to the body:
her own body, hard and scraped raw from dancing” (p152)
all those years of bone spurs and labral tears, the stress fractures and torn tendons, grinding his body to a fine powder” (p175)
a severe Russian beauty famous for having her feet surgically broken, her bones realigned so she might have a more natural line, a more perfect pointe” (p123).
The book is called The Turnout partly with reference to a turnout, which is the ability to rotate one’s body “one-hundred-eighty degrees, from the hips down to the toes” (p123). Dara’s own mother had struggled to achieve her turnout,
Every day for the six weeks of the program the Great Diva scolded and berated their mother for her turnout.
Every day she yanked and dragged their mother’s legs, twisting them, muscles straining, bones nearing twanging until they rotated so far at the hips that the knees, the feet turned outward. But still, it was not enough. […] Every night, their mother sobbed into her pillow, sobbed from the pain of cranking her body like an old motor.
p123
But through the pain, the exhilaration too,
“Suddenly, something snapped inside and her hips and legs felt infinitely pliable, soft taffy, a slinky expanding.
Her hips, hot and newly supple, opened like a book from the centre of her body. It felt glorious and so painful she saw stars. […]
It was, she told them, the greatest feeling of my life.
It will be, she told them, for you too.
p124
But it is not just about pushing one’s body to astounding lengths, it is also about life changing injuries:
Charlie’s body was a glorious wreck – his jumper’s knee, the rotator cuff tendonitis, the hip arthritis from overuse, and most of all his spine, which had never been the same since the surgeries, Since they put his spine back together with wires, plates, screws. […] Charlie wasn’t even certain how it happened. It could have been any number of falls, collisions, a dancer aloft in his arms crashing down into him. That was how it was for a dancer. […] The problems started with the broken bone, but it affected everything else. Nerve damage does not discriminate.
p63-64
And yet of course, there is no shortage of students wanting to learn ballet, to become dancers, to perform, whatever the risks and costs. And no shortage of desire to produce the Nutcracker,
A necessary evil […] It took over everything. Eight weeks of stress headaches and fainting and nervous stomachs, Eight weeks of injuries and near injuries, jumper’s knee and growth spurts, bloody blisters and heel spurs.
p13
So teaching classes and staging annual Nutcracker productions had been the Durant girls’ life. At one point, Marie takes it into her head to run away to Europe, selling out her share of the house to Dara, but soon returns (after only 25 days away) to resume her old life teaching ballet, except that she moves out of the house and takes up residence in the third floor of the school. When a space heater Marie is using catches fire, a lot of their school is burnt down, and with the need to renovate, comes the contractor, Derek, who upends their settled lives. Derek is coarse, crude, brazen, presumptuous, an intrusion into the delicate world of ballet and the Durant School, but Marie falls in love/lust with him. Marie is a strange character, who seems to have no filters. She tells Dara what she does without editing, and seems not to mind or care when Dara speaks harshly back to her:
“I’ve done everything he asked me to. Such filthy things,” she said, voice rising. “I’ve done it all and liked it.” […]
“That was your mistake,” Dara said. “you have to hold something back. Now you’re no longer his conquest. Now you’re just his whore.”
But Marie wasn’t listening.
p116
Dara and Charlie hope it is just another fling, that Marie will soon be over, but the affair with Derek seems to deepen into something more serious, disquieting their family and school. Then it begins to threaten their very home. Things rapidly take darker and darker turns, as Abbott novels always seem to contain mystery and suspense as well as stories of families, home, and domestic set ups. It is riveting stuff, but the real beauty of the novel is in how it gives the uninitiated reader seemingly intimate glimpses of a life of ballet. It seems to be a world of pain predominantly, for the dancers, pain concealed behind a backdrop of carefully created glamour and artifice, depicting elegance, beauty, impossible mobility. The way Abbott tells it, one ends up wondering if all serious ballet dancers are at least in part masochistic, the way they embrace pain:
“This is what happens, Dara thought, when you’ve entered the ballet. When you’ve finally gone beyond your old ideas of your body’s limits, of what you would push yourself through.
The pain is real and abiding.
The pain is bracing and makes you feel alive.
The pain is your friend. The pain is you.”
p179
When reviewing a Megan Abbott book, there is such a temptation to quote at length, because her writing is so quotable, so powerful, her short sentences so infused with meaning and impact. It is the writing style which creates the magic, turning an otherwise ordinary, everyday story of family secrets and betrayals, into a spellbinding recounting.
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