I have been a patron of the arts for
almost my entire life, and I have never quite been able to appreciate ballet. Musicals
have always been an object of attraction, and while I don’t fully appreciate
opera I can on some occasions, under the majesty of it. But ballet has always
been a mystery to me. How can one tell a
narrative, a story, simply through the
art of dance of movement, with no dialogue? It is a visual art more than the
others, but at the same time it also involves restraint. The dancers faces are
usually expressionless if you can see them at all. They must show us everything through movement.
And it’s an infinitely more demanding
art that the theater or opera. Ballet is practically a competitive sport based
on the demands it has on the body. Your career in ballet is inevitably far
shorter than that of a professional singer as the body itself gives out over
the cost of the strains on the muscles and bones. Consequently, much like with professional
sports, the career for the ballet dance often begins much younger than that of
the professional singer, is over far earlier, and can often end far more abruptly.
What is the cost to those who devotes
their lives to it? Not just physically, but emotionally. Two of the greatest
films in history have been made about ballet, and both of them have an almost
surreal nature to them. Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes was a great film
that dealt with the story of ballet, expressed through a love triangle between
two ingenues and an impresario. It has one of the most famous and still
inexplicable endings in all of cinema, one that even now no one can truly
explain. In 2010 came Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, which started in
the world of surrealism where not even the protagonist could tell what was
really happening half the time. The ending was just as mysterious and
inexplicable as The Red Shoes; people are still trying to interpret it.
Buried under both of them are messages of what it costs to be the greatest in
your profession, at the expense of all else, including love and really any
other human emotion: both movies end with the heroine appearing to give everything
for art’s sake.
It's very hard to read Megan Abbott’s The
Turnout and not think of either film at least once. Not just because both
the movies and the novel are set in the world of ballet, or because both films
deal with how being raised to be the best in a certain way comes at the expense
of everything else, but because you spent much of the novel dealing with the
idea of the unreliable narrator. Not even the person the story is told from
truly accepts any aspect of what she sees as real because she can only view it
from one perspective and that one has been warped and flawed pretty much since
she was born.
I recently discovered the wonders of
Megan Abbott this year when I finally read Dare Me, a novel about a high
school cheerleader team that could be described as Bring it On meets Richard
III without doing it justice.
Throughout the novel we find ourselves looking at two leaders of a cheer
team engaged in a power struggle with their coach and we leave with no more
understanding then we did at the beginning as to what makes these teenage girls
the way they are. Perhaps we shouldn’t
be surprised because they aren’t either. This summer I read The Fever a
novel that takes place in a high school and involves a serious of mysterious
illness that afflict first one girl, and then half the class, leading to an
outbreak of hysteria among the student body, the teachers, and the community at
large. An explanation for what happens comes at the end of the novel that doesn’t
truly explain anything, perhaps not even to the girls who know why it happened.
These brief summaries may make you
think that Abbott doesn’t believe in resolution for her novels, and maybe she
doesn’t. I didn’t find this a flaw in either book because her prose is masterful,
the pace is lightning fast and the characters are fascinating. In both novels,
there was an underlying theme in the danger of sexuality among teenagers and
how the adult world tends to view it as dangerous. All the main characters in The
Turnout are adults, but Abbott clearly suggests that same tone of the
danger of sexuality and just how much danger it comes in the teenage years.
At the center of the novel are Dara and
Marie Durant, two sisters who have been dancing pretty much since they could
walk. ‘Dara and Marie were the same, but different,” Abbott says early in the
novel. “Dara was cool, but Marie was hot. Dara was dark, but Marie was light.”
They spend their childhoods in the worship of their mother (we don’t learn
either her or the father’s real name) a legendary dancer who runs the Durant School
for Dance. Both of them grow up worshipping her and dance.
The warning signs in an Abbott novel
tend to come fairly early; in this case, they start coming by the first few
pages. Their parents pull them out of school before they leave grade school,
and they are homeschooled from that point on. They spend almost all of their childhood,
then their adulthood in the house where they grew up. Charlie, another dancer becomes
their mother’s prize pupil when he is barely thirteen. At some point, he ends up
moving into their house and he and Dara lose their virginity to each other when
they are fourteen, something that their mother doesn’t seem to care about. “It
was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn’t. And that was
when everything went wrong.”
The novel is narrated entirely from the
point of view of Dara, who from the beginning of the novel seems to be the
strong one, the leader of all of them.
But even from the beginning of the book, we sense that her attitude is deeply
flawed in ways that she thinks are normal, but that are bizarre to anyone else.
Until a few months earlier, the three of them lived in their house together and
when Marie moved into the spare room above the studio, Dara seems to consider
that an affront. Then in the midst of rehearsals for The Nutcracker, the
highlight of their year but something she considers ‘a necessary evil’, there is a fire in the
studio. Dara, almost irrationally, thinks it’s Marie’s fault. Repairs are
necessary. A contractor is needed and recommended by Mrs. Bloom, whose daughter
Bailey is one of their students.
The contractor is Derek. He’s fifty,
big, brutish, an oaf. Dara looks down on
him, but that’s nothing new; she spends the novel looking down on everybody
including her sister. Derek offers to
repair the studio, but then he offers more, the idea of expanding. He does not
impress Dara, Marie seems scared, and Charlie speculates. Why play it safe?
Dara is persuading when he uses the magic words: “It’s what your mother always
wanted.”
Dara goes along with it. The repairs
proceed apace. And then one day Dara comes to the studio early and Marie is
with the contractor. “Like animals,” she thinks to herself.
And now I think I’ve told you enough
about the plot. In a sense, it does unfold like the typical noir: financial
scheming, an unwanted interloper into a safe environment, a dangerous affair,
increasingly reckless behavior, and finally a brutal death. You might be able
to see some of the twists and turns coming and it’s not like Abbott is subtle
about them. The reason I think The Turnout is such a brilliant book is because
it’s a story not about the horror show that unfolds but that somehow it’s taken
this loss for something like this to happen.
The hints are there throughout the
novel. Derek makes a discussion about friends, and Dara says: “We don’t have
any friends.” Her constant looking down at everything Marie does to assert her
independence as if somehow that is an affront to everything they stand for. Her
disgust at basically everyone, with the possible exception of some of the
students she monitors. And the message of sexuality throughout the novel in a
dangerous way, how Dara constantly thinks of waking Charlie in the middle of
the night for sex by use of a stimulus that is excruciatingly painful.
Most of all, there is the worship of
the Durant mother and the condemnation of the father. Everything we learn about
the mother throughout the novel would be considered aberrant if not perverse by
any reasonable standard. The father is rarely
shown, but always as the villain in the story, the brute her mother had to live
with. Only as the novel progresses to we get to see that the mother was no
doubt as bad as the father at times and no doubt did psychological damage that everybody
= Dara, Marie, and Charlie – have never been able to escape from. Their parents died in what was considered an
accident for which Dara has always blamed her father, even though her mother
was driving the car at the time. We don’t
realize why until the very end of the novel, and it makes almost everything
else the mother did far worse by comparison.
There is a clear reason as to why all
three are as badly damaged as they are. The final revelation comes in the last
thirty pages, though Abbott has hinted at it several times before. It is one of
the most shocking details I’ve read in a contemporary novel but what will now
doubt shock the reader the most is how even when it is revealed, Dara is still
trying to defend it. “Some people can ruin
everything,” she says when the ugly truth is revealed and the fact that
she still is defending explains that of the three, she is by far the most
broken, probably beyond repair. The
three of them have been controlled all their childhood by the mother, and even
decades after the fact are still under her spell. It explains the actions of at least two of them
and explains Dara’s counter reaction by default.
And gliding over all of this is The
Nutcracker: the dramas that go on between all of the dancers, particularly
Bailey Bloom. In a lesser novel, Bailey’s struggles as Clara would just be a
sub-plot barely paid attention too. In The Turnout, Abbott spends nearly
as much time with the rehearsals and actions going on as she does to what happens
the plotting go on in the studio itself. The show must go on, as they say, and
the Durant sisters do everything in their power to keep it going, even as the repairs
drag on and wreck the studio inside and out, as the fights go on, not even the
suspicious death can stop the show…until something they can not control does.
Equally important to the novel is the idea
of construction and buildings. The repairs of the studio take on a life of
their own and a pure cataclysm, literally involving fire and floods. The house
the Durants live in has the sanctity of a cathedral, with basements and rooms
with bunkbeds and furniture that lingers.
At one point, we learn about the construction of a bathroom and how that
person says: “I wish I could burn this place down.” Buildings are given the illusion of permanence
and Derek is the force who keeps tearing them down. Nature always seems to
triumph over whatever we mere humans can accomplish, and this seems abundantly
clear by the last section of the novel.
I began this review by mentioning The
Red Shoes and Black Swan. One of the things they both have in common
is that the story of each ballet underlies the plot. In The Red Shoes, a
woman puts on a pair of the title objects and dances until she dies. In Swan
Lake, we are told of the story of
the Black Swan and White Swan, portrayed by the same dancer showing us the duality
of a person,
Why did Abbott use The Nutcracker as
the ballet at the center of The Turnout, aside from the fact it’s the most
well known ballet in the world? As Dara tells us the story of the ballet and
the folk tale it is based on have very different endings. In the ballet, the
heroine is Clara who follows the Nutcracker to a magical world but at the end
of it must return to the ordinary world. In the folk tale, the heroine ends up
staying in the magical world forever.
In the folk tale, the heroine is called
Marie.
The ending of The Turnout is not
obscure the same way The Fever or Dare Me is. It seems perfectly
clear what everyone’s fate is. But nevertheless, when the book was over I kept
asking myself the same question that may occur to the reader? Which sister is
Clara, the one who escapes? And who’s Marie, the one who stays in the world of
fantasy forever?
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