His artistic perfection arrives gilded with political triumphalism.įor a dance novel to work, it’s got to dazzle us with great dance, and though Shipstead claims she has no aptitude at the barre, she can choreograph arresting scenes of Arslan at work: “His technique is not fusty but pure,” she writes. Handsome, seductive and narcissistic, he begins to transform Western ballet almost as soon as he bolts from his Soviet handlers and earns asylum in the United States. Inspired by the defection of Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974, Shipstead has created a similarly brilliant Russian dancer named Arslan Rusakov. Though it spans three decades, “Astonish Me” is a strikingly svelte book, composed of short, intense scenes that move back and forth in time and around the world. Something of a ballet’s structure is reflected in these pages. If you live in that brutal, beautiful world - or especially if you still long for it - this is a novel you must read.

“You can’t be weak in the ballet,” Shipstead writes, “or it’ll crush you.” In pursuit of the perfect line, extension and turnout, they sacrifice their own bones. The genetically blessed ones must worship unrelenting precision. Despite their mothers’ cooing, little girls in tutus learn early that their hips are too wide, their thighs too fat, their tolerance for pain too low. The world of ballet, after all, is not a particularly funny one. So it takes a few measures to realize that her second novel, “Astonish Me,” performs a dramatic changement. Her take on a sniping corps of cutthroat ballerinas could be another bravura comedy. Shipstead can be fantastically witty about the anxieties and humiliations of middle age. I’ve been looking forward to it since I read her debut, “Seating Arrangements.” That button-down satire of the Martha’s Vineyard set was the smartest romantic comedy of 2012. As the son of a retired dance teacher and the husband of a former dancer and the father of a current dancer, I felt the beat of Maggie Shipstead’s new ballet novel even before the curtain rose.

Astonish me by maggie shipstead