Astonish Me

By Maggie Shipstead, 2014, Knopf, 272 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, December 28, 2021

Sometime between 2012 and 2014, Maggie Shipstead lost her sense of humor.

A few years ago, I read her first novel, “Seating Arrangements,” and I wrote (for my own purposes, not for publication) a brief review that I ended this way: She is a brilliant writer, both funny and insightful; her sentences and metaphors glow brightly, and the dialogue is strong, too. I’ll be looking for more books by Maggie Shipstead.

Well, I kept up my part of the bargain; Shipstead didn’t.

“Astonish Me,” her second novel, is 353 pages of grimaces, and I’m not talking about only my own reactions. I can’t recall – and I sure as heck am not going to go back through the book to confirm this – that any character even cracks a smile.

Maybe Elaine, who is a ballerina and best friend to protagonist Joan, laughs (a little) or smiles while under the influence of cocaine or weed, but she is the exception. I think Jacob, Joan’s patient, put-upon husband, tried joking one time, but so attenuated is his sense of humor, he would have needed a roomful of coked-up Elaines to elicit a single giggle.

Like Elaine, Joan is a ballerina; Elaine, however, is a star – I know, I know, “star” isn’t exactly ballet lingo, but as I was reading, this ballet-drenched novel, I promised myself I wouldn’t soak up too much culture and thereby lose my edge – while Joan is a bit player (another non-ballet term), one of the many rhinestones arrayed onstage to make the few diamonds look brilliant by comparison.

Improbability is more of a protagonist than dreary Joan. A nobody, she seduces The World’s Greatest Dancer, a Baryshnikov knock-off named Arslan Rusakov, who somehow engineers his defection through the skillful getaway driving of Joan and incompetence of his Russian handlers.

Go ahead, scoff.

Joan and Rusakov do the bedroom pas de deux for a short time, then he, accustomed to nonstop female fawning – damn, why didn’t I get into ballet? – predictably dumps her. Down in the, you know, dumps, she consoles herself by running to, then marrying, reliable, scholarly Jacob, who has unrequitedly loved her since both were kids, and so gladly would take over erotic duties from Rusakov even if Joan had done a five-way with Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Putin.

“Astonish Me” is one of those arty books with all kinds of flashbacks, flash-aheads, doodads and doohickeys, and I, the reader, am responsible for keeping all of it straight in my head. You know what I say? I say that’s Maggie Shipstead’s responsibility, and naming the chapters for the time-and-place about to be written about – “February 1976 – Paris” is one – isn’t much of a help.

Jacob and Joan marry, a son, Harry, is born, their neighbors have a daughter, Chloe, Harry and Chloe become best friends and both take up ballet, Chloe’s mom starts as a friend of Joan’s, then dislikes her – I know the feeling (nobody likes Chloe’s dad; I know that feeling, too – so he is (unmercifully) expelled from the plot, Arslan and Elaine keep popping up – every Elaine sighting is welcome – and, Harry becomes a ballet star, and, and, and that’s about all I can say without giving away too much, although ruining this particular plot would be redundant.

Shipstead’s problem, I think, is that ballet isn’t fun on any level, everything is just so laboriously disappointing. Readers can’t escape the pain when a writer’s central metaphor is based on blisters.

Just before Joan meets Arslan for the first time, moments before she seduces him, she surreptitiously watches him rehearse: But the beauty of Arslan’s dancing is not what moves Joan to cry in her red velvet aerie: it is a dream of perfection blowing through the theater. She has been dancing since before her fifth birthday, and she realizes that the beauty radiating from him is what she has been chasing all along, what she has been trying to wring out of her own inadequate body.

Uplifting, right?

What is so odd is that morose approach of “Astonish Me” is so opposite from the breezy tone of “Seating Arrangements,” which perpetually places characters in slapstick peril, then enjoys watching them try to wriggle free. The central character is a middle-aged Connecticut banker as outwardly upright as his name: Winn Van Meter. Lusting uncontrollably after one of his daughter’s close friends, his awkward escapade with her includes climbing the roof of an under-construction mansion topped by a weather vane he is determined to reach. As Winn is losing his grip on the rain-slick shingles, Shipstead, with her wicked, pruned prose, rescues him: He embraced the chimney as though it were a dance partner.

In “Astonish Me,” so many dance partners, so little fun.

Only once did I spot Joan’s straying from the discipline in which ballet clearly has straitjacketed her. In a scene in which Elaine, in front of 14-year-old Harry, smokes pot, Joan goes full-tilt Nurse Ratched, bawling out Elaine for corrupting a child.

Although Elaine ditches her joint, she and Harry challenge Joan, pointing out that as a worldly teen, he no longer requires cossetting.

Shaken, Joan stalks into the kitchen, grabs her hidden pack of cigarettes and lights up. In a lifetime of sneaking, it is the first time she has smoked in front of Harry.

“I guess we’re all adults now,” she says.

“I knew you smoked,” Harry says. “I have a nose.”

“Okay, then. Don’t start, though. You’ll never be able to stop.”

“I don’t do things just because you do them.”

That would have been a perfect time for Joan to free herself, to ditch the straitjacket, to renounce her own smothering mothering, to laugh at her son’s swift flashes of insight. Instead, she again retreats inside herself, into a maze of cold, bewildering introspection, all because Maggie Shipstead has misplaced her sense of humor.