Onyx reviews: The Turnout by Megan Abbott

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 12/23/2020

Certain things are universally acknowledged as being stressful: a fire at a person's place of business, directing a troop of juvenile ballet dancers in preparation for the annual production of The Nutcracker, building renovations and contractors.

Sisters Dara and Marie run the Durant School of Ballet together with Dara's husband, Charlie, who handles the financial aspects of the business. Charlie was once a promising ballet dancer himself and was unofficially adopted into the Durant home as a teenager after his mother moved to England. The rigors of ballet were too tough on his body, though, and he is no longer able to teach let alone dance.

The school was started by Dara and Marie's mother, who was a famous ballerina, killed with her husband in a car accident a dozen years before the novel begins. A late-night fire causes major damage to one of their studios, which brings a contractor named Derek into the mix. Although he was hired only to repair the damage and bring the studio quickly back into service, Derek has grander ideas. The building is aging and could do with major renovations. A fast-talker, he manages to convince the Durants to spring for a major redo, which means Derek and his work crew are around for far longer than originally anticipated.

The Durants' energy is completely devoted to staging the obligatory Christmas production of Tchaikovsky's famous ballet. The renovations are a distraction and so is Derek—particularly for Marie, who catches his eye and vice versa. Derek's insouciance graduates into insolence as he inserts him more and more into the Durants' lives. He seems to have designs on the family home, and his machinations begin to turn the family members against each other, especially once Marie begins to divulge long-held secrets to the man.

For all its beauty, ballet is a painful art, and highly competitive as dancers (and their parents) lobby for the plum roles. Its impact on the body is hard to fathom—although Abbott does a terrific job of delving into every aspect of it. The book's title comes from a fundamental ballet move that all dancers must perfect, the act of rotating the legs from the hips down to the toes so the dancer's feet end up pointing away from each other. This is both difficult and painful, stressing hips, knees, ankles and a whole range of muscles. One might consider Derek to be a turnout, pushing Marie and Dara (already polar opposites in many ways) in different directions and placing a great deal of strain on their once-tight relationship.

Abbott builds a prevailing sense of dread as Dara finds her once well-defined life spinning out of control and everything she ever created threatened with destruction. Revelations about the family's past are dealt out meticulously, removing the blocks that supported Dara's carefully constructed life. Watching everything come apart is as fascinating as watching a car wreck. The novel has a gothic feel, viewed through the lens of Shirley Jackson. In carefully worded sentences there are clues to the reality of the extended Durant family that can only be appreciated in retrospect.

In recent novels, Abbott has used juvenile athletics as the focus of her stories (gymnastics or cheerleading, for example). The dancers in The Turnout are young and their lives are as complicated as those in her previous books, but this novel has more to do with the trials and tribulations of a small group of adults whose lives are interrupted by an interloper. A contractor might be able to rebuild what was ruined in the fire, or even improve upon what was previously there, but this particular contractor's actions cause much more damage. He pushes the carefully constructed versions of the past Dara and Marie have developed to the breaking point and beyond.