Astonish Me

Astonish Me is the third book I read by Maggie Shipstead. After the joy of reading Great Circle, which quickly became my favourite book of 2023, I was somewhat disappointed by her short story collection You have a friend in 10A. Since Astonish Me was published before both of these, I was curious to see how I liked it.

Unfortunately, despite the title, this novel did not astonish me all that much. The book centers on Joan, who is a ballet dancer in New York in the seventies, turns housewife in California in the eighties, but returns to the ballet world in the nineties when her son turns out to be a ballet prodigy. While she was young, she played a role in the defection of a Russian dancer; she drove his getaway car and had a short relationship with him. But her ballet skills were not up to par and she returns to her high school boyfriend, to let him take her into a world of domesticity. This, in a nutshell, is the entire story.

If you love ballet, you will probably love this book. There are long descriptions of ballet class, of dance design, of differences in styles between French, Russian or American dancers, of entire performances even. Joan is always stretching her muscles or refusing to eat, two stereotypical images one has of a ballet dancer. This could have easily turned into a caricature, but it is clear that Maggie Shipstead really loves ballet and probably cannot imagine that anyone could tire from reading about plies and fourth or fifth positions for page upon page.

But the characters were nice, both Joan and her husband, her best friend, who sticks with ballet dancing, and later on her son, with some outside views thrown in by their neighbours and their daughter. They are nothing special, but they have a personality, a will of their own. I was not really rooting for them, but I enjoyed spending time with them.

Structure-wise, the book is set in a mix of chronology. We first meet Joan as she decides to stop following her ballet dream and leaves the company. Then we jump back in time to meet her as a young girl learn about her formative time in Paris and her relationship with the Russian. Then we jump forward in time again, to meet her young family, with a son growing up and discovering ballet for himself. Then we jump back in time some more, and forward again. In my opinion, these time jumps are unnecessary; telling the story in a normal time order would have been just as fine (but more on that later).

But that was not the thing that annoyed me the most. Towards the end of the book, with the second jump backwards, we get a 'big reveal'. You somehow know this plot twist is coming, as the convoluted structure seems to exist only to create some confusion, to keep something hidden, so you just feel something is up. But the thing is, when the big reveal is revealed, it is as if we should have known about this all along. The book continues as if it is nothing special, nothing new. Added to that, most of the characters turn out to know all along. But we, as readers, had no chance. There was no way we could logically have thought about this, given all the information the book gave us. 

Now I love a book with a plot twist. Great Circle contains one of the best plot twist I've read in a while. But in that story, we find out what is going on before the characters do. We have some extra bits of information, so that we understand a hidden message in a letter way before the characters know. The book does not assume we have this extra knowledge and we can slowly enjoy the other characters coming to grips with the big reveal we already knew. It makes you feel smart, it makes you feel involved, and it makes the process the characters go through recognisable.

With Astonish Me, the process was exactly the other way around. It was as if all the characters were sitting on this piece of information and at the moment it was convenient for the plot, the author threw it in our face. It was not so much a twist, as a hugh bit of exposition. Combined with the forced structure, it was more like reading an instruction manual that had to get a bit of background out of the way, than slowly getting to meet a new part of a character.

Now Astonish Me is mostly a book about ballet. There isn't much of a story there. The plot isn't the point, the characters aren't the point, the writing style isn't the point, it is an ode to ballet, to techniques and historical events, to people committing themselves to an art form, to dedicating their lives and their bodies to something greater than themselves. As such, it is a good read. But as a work of literature, it unfortunately disappointed me once again.