Sunday, November 13, 2022

Constant Reader Book of the Month November: The Turnout by Megan Abbott

 

 

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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