Still Point - Softcover

What a delight to find that the showy cast of this titillating, gossipy roman a clef , set in the tiny world of New York's fictitious Perrot Ballet, includes no sulky prima ballerinas. Instead, the major drama spins around aging dance master Achille Perrot, a classic autocratic and exacting artist, and his impatient lead dancer, Alexander Ives, who covets the choreographer's crown. Meantime, Alexander's on- and offstage partner, Caroline Harbison, a dancer mainly beautiful in motion, unhappily watches her longtime lover drift toward a pretty, jejune ballerina recently elevated from the corps. Stage left is Perrot Ballet patron Eveline de Charny, a rapacious dilettante whose debauched father shares her interest in a talented, thoroughly self-destructive male dancer. Arts journalist Weisgall aptly captures the hunger of the dancers and the hangers-on, and laces her stagy, yet smoothly told, commercial debut with wry humor. As a front-row seat on the rivalries and sheer hard work that lie beneath the beauty of Swan Lake , it's pure satisfaction.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This intensely told tale of a New York ballet company could have used a stronger plot and a soupcon of frivolity. The subject of this first novel by a respected arts journalist is the power that's up for grabs when a major corps de ballet prepares to lose its master choreographer to a fatal illness. A talented choreographer who lacks the genius of his predecessor plays with the affections of the two prima ballerinas. Meanwhile many of the characters play around with drugs and with each other, interchangeably. The author is skilled at describing interiors, but the people who live in them never come to life. Preferable are arts novels with a lighter touch, such as Michael Levin's Settling the Score (LJ 4/1/89) and Edward Stewart's Ballerina (LJ 1/79).
- Joyce Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.