The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 16 May 2014
by Maggie Shipstead
Dancers are not just people.
So mulls one of the characters of this spare and engrossing novel. Dancers are also, the reader might add, bodies. Bodies in motion. Joan, our protagonist is a body in motion, from a ballet stage in the 1970s, where she danced as an accomplished but unspectacular member of the corps de ballet, through a life as a mother who reflects often on the eventful and romantic days of her youth. Her body is in motion, though her emotional life and engagement seem otherwise passive and disconnected. Everything is about the body, from its drive to perfection on stage, to its sexual imperitive among so many other bodies, to its creative urge and its intent to pass on its beauty and drive, first by giving birth, then by guiding the motion of the child.
The body, in this story, drives the life of its character. When the story opens, in the late 70s, Joan has become pregnant and sees in pregnancy the end of her ballet career. But she is going to let this happen. She settles down, leaves the ballet, and marries her oldest friend, a man who has been in love with her since they were freshmen in high school. Her own motives are not immediately clear, though the astute reader may see some of the necessary connections. Joan's one great adventure was to dance in Paris, fall in love with a Russian dancer, and to help him defect from a Soviet dance troupe on tour in Toronto. The reader will detect strong parallels to the life of Mikhail Baryshnikov, and, later connect the great ballet company director, Mr K, to George Ballanchine. Shipstead mines their stories for some basic structure to Joan's arc, but the story is all Joan, her quest for something always out of her reach, and the ultimately distructive discoveries she makes about life decades later. Indeed, the book reaches from the 70s into the early 2000s. She settles with her husband and young son in anonymous Los Angeles suburbs. She settles in as a ballet teacher. She just settles. There is a strange passivity. But there is the body in motion, and the consciousness of the body might make one a little distracted as a person, a faraway gaze to which others cannot connect. All of the dancers here are driven artists, and, like many other artists, they are difficult personalities. Their relationships and the people they're doomed to hurt are secondary to the dance. What results, of course, is great beauty, but a trail of pain, physical and emotional. There are revelations to come. Great dances are to be danced.
Shipstead's prose has an effortless quality. While the story is episodic and jumps back and forth through time, sometimes giving it a shallow quality, the author is yet in tune with some basic truths about the search for beauty and perfection, the stretch toward happiness for which many people, not just dancers, are looking. It is a rich and revealing book, a behind the scenes glance at the life of ballet, but full of much larger concerns. Recommended.