Megan Abbott’s Latest Crime Thriller Links Ballet and Sex

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By Maggie Shipstead

THE TURNOUTBy Megan Abbott

Ballet, as an art form, exists at a remove from realism. Dancers train their bodies into instruments of superhuman flexibility and athleticism, capable of exaggerated yet nuanced shapes and movements that form their medium of expression. Performances of the classics — “Swan Lake,” for example, or “Giselle,” or “Romeo and Juliet” — are retellings of melodramatic, sometimes magical stories of passion, betrayal, lost innocence and revenge. For the audience, too, ballet offers a knowingly artificial experience: the contrast of midnight-black theater and luminous stage, the swelling orchestral music, the sets and props that play with scale through tricks of perspective.

So maybe it’s inevitable that novels, films and television series about the lives of dancers — my own ballet novel included — tend to blow past naturalism in favor of something that reaches for the heightened feeling of performance, something that might be soapy and earnest like the movie “Center Stage” or might, as in the case of Megan Abbott’s new novel, “The Turnout,” be dark and juicy and tinged with horror.

After losing their violently unhappy parents to a car wreck as teenagers, the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, inherited a crumbling Victorian house as well as their mother’s ballet school, the center of their universe, a “cramped, sweaty, stenchy place, ripe as the hollow of a dancer’s pointed foot.” Dara, once orphaned, quickly married Charlie, a dance student whom their mother had taken into their household when he was 13, and whose career later ended in a series of injuries and surgeries, leaving a legacy of chronic pain. As Abbott portentously concludes her first chapter: “It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn’t. And that was when everything went wrong.” When the novel begins, the three are in their early 30s, and Marie has abruptly moved out of the house and into her mother’s private sanctum on the top floor of the school. A dreamy, childlike woman, Marie fails to consider the dangers of ancient space heaters and carelessly destroys one of the school’s hardworking studios just as “Nutcracker” season, by far the Durants’ busiest and most important time of year, is kicking off.

Enter Derek. A beefy middle-aged contractor who limps like “John Wayne gone to seed,” Derek not only persuades the sisters and Charlie to undertake a renovation far beyond the scope of the necessary repairs, but he also becomes the immediate object of Marie’s erotic fixation (“the Big Bad Wolf,” she calls him). An affair commences, conducted blatantly in the school while little bunheads come and go downstairs and Dara frets and seethes. Slowly, ominously, Derek begins to take over sex-addled Marie like a mind-controlling parasite. His work in the ruined studio drags on and on. He encroaches, insinuates. Questions of what he knows about and wants from the odd, triangular Durant family form the central tensions of the book’s first half, while the second revolves around what, exactly, there is to know.

Abbott’s novels are often described as crime fiction, and, while indeed she works with mystery and suspense and draws on noir and Gothic tropes, her goal seems less to construct intricate, double-crossing plot problems than to explore the dark side of femininity. Her prose is often incantatory, her dialogue lightly stylized. Frequently her tone has a strong flavor, pungent and fermented. In other words, Megan Abbott is a mood. Two of her best-known previous novels (“The Turnout” is her 10th) featured teenage cheerleaders and gymnasts, spiritual cousins to ballet dancers. Her most recent, “Give Me Your Hand,” concerned rivalrous female scientists studying an extreme form of PMS. Blood is not rare in Abbott’s work, both from sudden violence and the purposeful risks and sacrifices of her characters. “The Turnout” has a bit of gore, but its deepest preoccupation is with bodies and sex.

“How a dancer prepared her pointe shoes,” Abbott writes, “was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself.” A shoe broken in by a hammer-wielding dancer had “its pinkness split open, its soft center exposed.” Not coincidentally, a dancer mastering the outward hip rotation called turnout that is essential to ballet finds herself “split open, laid bare.” When Dara glimpses Marie having sex with Derek, she sees him “turning her inside out. Turning her out.” These connections — the pinkness of shoes and of women’s genitals, the submissions required by ballet and by sex — are neither subtle nor meant to be so, and the novel is so relentlessly saturated with sexual imagery and innuendo that at times it can feel like too much. “It only hurts the first time,” Derek says before driving a hammer through the wall of the damaged studio, and in life it would be almost impossible not to tell him to give it a rest. I found myself wondering if a dancer reading “The Turnout” might be made to feel uncomfortable, even stripped of some dignity, by the description of 10-year-old Dara recognizing the feeling of turnout from “her own furtive confusions, in the claw-foot bathtub, under her bunk bed blankets, her hands tingling, her thighs gaping like a keyhole, and that feeling after, like her whole fist would not be enough.”

But the key to this novel is that while the narration sometimes feels omniscient, the story is refracted through one particular lens: Dara’s. Her consciousness is given to the reader impressionistically, through memories and associations and washes of emotion, rather than through detailed accounts of her thoughts, partly because she is living in a habitual, self-protective fog and perhaps also, more practically, because the book’s ambient mystery might otherwise be spoiled. What becomes clear is that the queasy, too-pervasive sexuality is inseparable from a haze of wrongness and trauma that suffuses Dara’s mind. To Dara, pointe shoes are “pink satin fantasies we beat into submission so they can be used and then discarded.” To Dara, “The Nutcracker” is not a pleasant holiday entertainment but a story of a “brave girl venturing into the adult world of dark magic, of broken things, of innocence lost.” It’s not that the novel is saying ballet is only about sex and degradation. It’s that, for reasons that eventually become clear, Dara has lost her ability to see it any other way.

Like a ballet, “The Turnout” revels in its own bigness, its drama, its relish for cataclysmic passion and its appetite for the grotesque, but some of Abbott’s deftest work involves an underlying interplay between strength and fragility. The Durant sisters are outwardly fortified by the rigid routines and conventions of ballet, but inwardly they are bending under the pressure of maintaining a facade. Anything might cause them to break or combust, just as a lone hairpin, fallen unnoticed to the stage, “might bring down a dancer, might take everything away.” The strain on the Durants is not unlike the inherent strain of ballet’s artifice: To portray a vision of lightness and loveliness, a delicate swan or dainty Sugar Plum Fairy, a dancer must stoically endure years of hard work and frequent pain, must hide her calloused, sometimes bloody feet in pink satin fantasies. In Abbott’s work, womanhood might be a grand illusion all its own, one we can’t help suffering for. After all, according to the motto of the Durant School of Dance, “Every girl wants to be a ballerina.”

Maggie Shipstead is the author, most recently, of “Great Circle.”

THE TURNOUTBy Megan Abbott340 pp. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. $27.

THE TURNOUT