The Turnout by Megan Abbott

This book is a wild ride.

The basic plot surrounds two sisters who, along with their surrogate brother (who married one of them), inherited their mother’s ballet studio. All three studied ballet as children, and the novel deals with them getting the studio remodeled after a fire.

Now that may not seem like a particularly incandescent book, but it really is.

It reminded me of a haunted house movie subbing the studio for the house (though there is also a great deal of time spent in their actual home). There’s a villain in the house – presumably the contractor –but they can’t leave. Their life is in that house. It represents their livelihood, and more than that, it’s who they are. They are ballerinas and teachers. They are the heirs to an institution. They are there to teach these young boys and girls how to be ballerinas.

And, like any good haunted house fiction, they give the building itself a life. It’s not just a place but a living being that houses their memories and traumas. It burns and floods but doesn’t buckle. It consumes all who enter it in one way or another and looms large in the lives of our main characters.

The horror themes extend beyond the haunted house. There is an eeriness to the contractor, an unsettling sense that he is burrowing himself into their lives. It’s odd because – no offense to contractors –it’s no surprise that he’s trying to swindle them. All the characters in the novel seem to acknowledge this certainty. But from the beginning, there’s a sense that he's taking more than money and time. By entering and redoing the studio, he’s inserting himself into their lives. He’s attaching himself to the allegedly healthy host and destroying it from the inside.

I loved how Abbott subtly plants seeds in the reader's head. Often an author is too heavy-handed with something like this. They put their finger on the scale and annoy the reader into realizing something, constantly poking you to point out, “THIS IS SYMBOLISM,” but not Abbott. She organically foreshadows events to come. One such instance is the way she shows how the children (the girls in particular) taking ballet are often living out their parent’s unfulfilled dreams. This seems, at the time, like an innocuous reflection on their occupation, but later blooms into something you could never have seen coming. Only, when you look back, it seems apparent that she was delicately leading you there the whole time.

This is masterful writing.

I enjoyed spending time in the world of ballet. I can’t say I know much about it (aside from seeing it once or twice and a movie or two that discusses it), but I am interested in it. The athleticism matched with artistry. The sacrifice to one’s body. The endurance of pain. Abbott handles all these things with a deft touch. She focuses on a ballerina's feet, showing how they become worn and mangled, calloused to the point that they seem like they could walk across the glass and not flinch. This is contrasted brilliantly with ballerinas' polished, elegant, almost dainty outward appearance. The way casual viewer watch their light touches and thinks that they are practically floating on air. But they aren’t. They’re dancing on their rough, worn feet. She uses this to allude to aspects of being a woman and the difficulties of childhood.

But she doesn’t stop there. She pushes further, likening ballerinas' pain tolerance to construction workers. I particularly enjoyed how she bridged those worlds, taking something seen as high culture and connecting it with the blue-collar world.

Aside from the specific focus on a ballerina's feet, Abbott spends a great deal of time discussing their shoes. I’d never thought of them. When I think of basketball players or runners, shoes come to mind, but with a ballerina, it never occurred to me to think of shoes. Apparently, they go through countless of these pointe shoes. And they need to work each of them into shape, as one does with a new baseball glove. You need to bend and beat them until they’re worn. You cut the soles with razor blades to give them grip. It’s a laborious, violent process that Abbott details beautifully. As with the descriptions of their feet, this is a metaphor for how one must constantly shed their skin and begin anew, breaking the new one in so that it can handle the stresses of life. At least, for the characters in this novel, that seems to be the case.

As for our protagonists – Dara and Marie, they’re sisters, but more than that. They’re complimentary pieces of the same puzzle. They exist to fill out the other. Dara is stricter, harsher in some ways. Marie is more comforting. They each have their group of aspiring ballerinas to attend to. Marie teaches hers – the younger ones – through compassion and instills a friendly adoration in them. Dara, on the other hand, rules through discipline. She won’t touch her students to guide them, not even when they beg her for it. She doesn’t see ballet as a place for coddling. Her students learn to respect and idolize her for her strength while working to achieve her approval.

These two different personality types are responses to shared unresolved trauma. Some recent books, movies, and shows tend to lean on trauma in a way that can feel trite or topical. Abbott avoids that pitfall by using a deft touch to lead us to the source of this trauma without telegraphing it. She walks you down paths where you believe you know what’s coming, only for you to be shocked by the reality of the situation. In short, the revelations feel earned. You’re surprised but also not. You understand that you’ve been building to that climax the whole time, and you can see the previous action of the novel clearly through the lens of the resolution.

I know I’ve painted a pretty grim novel, but it isn’t. It moves quickly, and you won’t be able to put it down. Abbott has a brilliant, expressive voice, and her characters feel alive in a way that not all literature manages. I highly recommend this novel. It takes you inside a fascinating world and grips you right from the start while leaving you to contemplate larger societal forces.