Dara and Marie Durant are sisters, daughters of a ballet dancer and teacher. Their mother’s life was ballet, so their lives were also ballet. They learned to dance, they became part of her classes when she turned some of the rooms in the house into studios, and eventually, they took over the Durant School of Dance. It was her mother that started their yearly tradition of putting on The Nutcracker, offering roles for the youngest students up through the teenagers aching to dance as the Nutcracker Prince or Clara. Every year, it was like a fairy tale.
Dara and Marie, now in their late 20s, run the Durant School with Dara’s husband Charlie. After the car accident that killed Marie’s and Dara’s parents a dozen years back, black ice that had sent the car skidding, the sisters had grown into their roles. Charlie, once one of their mother’s prized students, had married Dara when they were only 16, and now the three of them run the school together. Charlie, injured to the point he can no longer dance, takes care of the office work, while Marie teaches the youngest students and Dara teaches the teenagers.
As the time draws closer to The Nutcracker, to the cast list being posted and the rehearsals and the costumes and the fake snow, there is a fire at the school. Studio B is destroyed by a space heater, and the Durants need it to be fixed in time for The Nutcracker rehearsals. They find a contractor, a man named Derek who brings them promises and big ideas about expanding and tells them he understands about their time constraints. He’s recommended, so they hire him, and he starts gutting the room. He rips away damaged walls and floorboards, bringing chaos and noise to the space.
But he also has an energy to him, an animal nature, that Marie is drawn to. She finds that she can’t stay away from this man.
Dara worries. She knows that Marie runs hot, all passion and fire. But she’s just a twig of a woman, a ballerina who has broken her body for decades to keep dancing, to raise up on her toes, to be lithe and lean, the artist and the art at the same time. Dara knows that Marie has a short attention span, so this thing she’s feeling, it will pass. The contractor will finish the work on the Studio and move on.
Except that the work never finishes. There are issues with materials, deliveries, electrical problems, a flood that sets them back days. And while the work seems to go on and on, so do Marie’s feelings for this man, this interloper. And Dara worries.
With the deadline of The Nutcracker looming, the bills piling up, and the noise and dust of the work in Studio B continues, Dara also feels like the contractor is digging in deep with Marie. He’s finding her vulnerabilities and using them to stay entrenched in her life, in all their lives. But as the days go by, with the chaos ratcheting up, secrets start to leak out, making them all vulnerable to losing everything they hold dear.
Dancers have to be strong, to hold themselves together through indescribable physical pain, to perform while their bodies are ground down, to keep their shoulders high no matter what. But they are only human, and enough stress can break them. Will Marie and Dara be able to survive the consequences of their choices, or will the consequences bring them down?
Megan Abbott’s The Turnout takes the beauty of ballet and shows the darker backstage that the dancers go through. The blood and guts, the danger and denial, the camaraderie and the cut-throat competition—it all comes out in those dressing rooms, and Abbott doesn’t turn away for our benefit. And just as she shows the darker parts of being a teenaged dancer, she also shows the dynamics of a dysfunctional family. The Turnout is layered with pain and sacrifice, anger and entwinement, the subtle dance that binds us together as we rip ourselves apart.
It’s certainly not easy to read The Turnout. This isn’t the right book to take to the pool, for some light entertainment and simple chills. But it is brutal and it is honest, laying bare the secrets that we don’t want to see, the lies we use to cover those up, and the price that takes on our minds and souls. It was fascinating to see how Abbott created this world just to tear it apart piece by piece, so just when you thought you knew something, it would get taken away from you.
The Turnout is beautiful, painfully so, the way the beauty of the dance goes along with pain, with years of hard work, with sacrifices. You are not asked here to be the dancer, but you see what it would take to become that young woman. I can’t say that I loved reading this book, but I am so glad that I did. It’s like The Nutcracker. It’s a beautiful story told well, but it’s dark and a little creepy, and it changes how you see the world for a while.
Egalleys for The Turnout were provided by G.P. Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks.
