![]() ![]() They move to California, where Joan gives birth to a son, Harry, and opens a dance studio, while Jacob becomes a teacher. ![]() She becomes pregnant, leaves the company, and marries Jacob, her "reasonably handsome, affable" best friend from home who had pined for her since high school. In America, Arslan's already stellar career keeps soaring while Joan's steadily withers. As they hole up together in her small Chelsea apartment, Joan "watches him with a hoarder's eye," fearful of the day when "he will see her in the corps, no longer his rescuer but one of many identical girls, a bit of background.and she will see him not as the man who smokes in her bed and wallows in her bathtub and splays naked in her armchair, flipping through the English-Russian dictionary, but as she had first seen him: onstage, removed, at the spinning center of everything." Eventually she helps Arslan to defect, meeting him in Toronto and secreting him to New York City. ![]() Spanning the early 1970s to the early 2000s, the story jumps between New York, Chicago, California, and Paris, where company ballerina Joan Joyce meets and has a one-night stand with her Soviet Svengali, renowned soloist Arslan Rusakov. ![]() Maggie Shipstead's new novel, Astonish Me (Knopf), swaps the privileged world of private-school prepsters that populated her best-selling debut, Seating Arrangements, for the equally rarefied realm of professional ballet- brilliantly exposing its dark, slavish underbelly with insight and panache. ![]()
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