The Complete Ballet
A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A dark-hued, hybrid novel by a writer who “delivers our culture back to us, made entirely new” (A. M. Homes)
In The Complete Ballet, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality—and psychology—of dance.
The unnamed narrator finds himself inexorably drawn back to the pre–cell phone world of Technicolor Los Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide. Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where the novel’s violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person.
As the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn, Joseph Cornell and the story’s presiding spirit, the film director John Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fiction and essay share the stage in Haskell's captivating, erudite novel, both a metafictional history of romantic ballet and the story of a young man's missteps in L.A.'s underworld. The unnamed narrator's interest in dance comes from his daughter, whose tragic early death also broke up his marriage, sending him from Chicago to L.A. to build a new life as a masseur. Falling under the spell of the charming club owner Cosmo and his girlfriend Rachel, a dancer, he behaves recklessly, losing more money than he can afford in a poker game run by the mob. Entwined with this noirlike account are the narrator's musings on the plots of famous ballets including Giselle, Petrushka, and Swan Lake and the lives of balletomanes (like Joseph Cornell) and dancers (including Anna Pavlova, Baryshnikov, Nijinsky, and Nureyev), which help the narrator reflect on the turns of his own life. In imaginative, analytical, affectless prose, Haskell gives new life to well-known stories danced onstage, constructing interiorities and motivations for the characters, and drawing connections between the emotions of the ballets and his narrator's story (which to readers well versed in cinema may begin to seem familiar, too). Meeting a stranger, the narrator thinks that "I could see in her face the same kind of eagerness my daughter used to have, the same willingness Nijinsky had, to risk his common sense."
