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The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
A dark-hued, hybrid novel by a writer who delivers our culture back to us, made entirely new (A. M. Homes)
In The Complete Ballet, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality and psychology of dance.
The unnamed narrator finds himself inexorably drawn back to the pre cell phone world of Technicolor Los Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide. Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where the novel s violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person.
As the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn, Joseph Cornell and the story s presiding spirit, the film director John Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.
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In The Complete Ballet, John Haskell choreographs an intricate and irresistible pas de deux in which fiction and criticism come together to create a new kind of story. Fueled by the dramatic retelling of five romantic ballets, and interwoven with a contemporary story about a man whose daunting gambling debt pushes him to the edge of his own abyss, it is both a pulpy entertainment and a meditation on the physicality and psychology of dance.
The unnamed narrator finds himself inexorably drawn back to the pre cell phone world of Technicolor Los Angeles, to a time when the tragedies of his life were about to collide. Working as a part-time masseur in Hollywood, he attends an underground poker game with his friend Cosmo, a strip-club entrepreneur. What happens there hurtles the narrator down the road and into the room where the novel s violent and surreal showdown leaves him a different person.
As the narrator revisits his past, he simultaneously inhabits and reconstructs the mythic stories of ballet, assessing along the way the lives and obsessions of Nijinsky and Balanchine, Pavlova and Fonteyn, Joseph Cornell and the story s presiding spirit, the film director John Cassavetes. This compulsively readable fiction is ultimately a profound and haunting consideration of the nature of art and identity.
"
208 pages, Paperback
First published September 19, 2017
2 people are currently reading
283 people want to read
About the author
John Haskell
4 books10 followershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ha...
Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
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June 12, 2017Let’s talk about hybridity! John Haskell’s The Complete Ballet is self-described as a “fictional essay in five acts.” Totally straight forward, right? Play meets fiction when Haskell juxtaposes five mythic ballets: La Sylphide, Giselle, La Bayadere, Swan Lake, and Petrushka with the grizzled adventure of a nameless narrator’s descent into a lethal gambling addiction.
As a reader, cracking the book open was akin to placing a bet at a blackjack table. Would he be able to pull this off? And yet, as someone with zero exposure to the world of ballet, I quickly fell for Haskell’s otherworldly descriptions of the romantic archetypes associated with this form of dance, as well as the narrator’s enraptured eye-witness accounts.
Most compelling-- is Haskell’s blatant reverence for ballet. In a world where concepts and ideas are regularly repeated or ripped off , Haskell made me feel as if I was looking at ballet with new eyes.
In La Bayadere, he describes the romantic rivalry between a nightclub owner and Solor, a famous warrior, through dance: “[Solor] leaps across the nightclub stage in a series of grandes cabrioles, one leg thrust out, beating the air, his other leg and both his arms radiating out from the center of his torso. This move, like any movement in ballet, when danced by an average dancer, can seem like a stunt or an acrobatic routine. I walked out of a performance of La Bayadere one time because the dancer had forgotten the reason for dancing, which is life. A dancer like Nureyev, on the other hand, in the films of his body, his dancing seemed like the natural expression of human elation.” Haskell’s descriptions show the sharp contrast between the idea of dance, and transcendence itself.
I heartily encourage you to discover ballet through Haskell's eyes. It’s no gamble at all.
As a reader, cracking the book open was akin to placing a bet at a blackjack table. Would he be able to pull this off? And yet, as someone with zero exposure to the world of ballet, I quickly fell for Haskell’s otherworldly descriptions of the romantic archetypes associated with this form of dance, as well as the narrator’s enraptured eye-witness accounts.
Most compelling-- is Haskell’s blatant reverence for ballet. In a world where concepts and ideas are regularly repeated or ripped off , Haskell made me feel as if I was looking at ballet with new eyes.
In La Bayadere, he describes the romantic rivalry between a nightclub owner and Solor, a famous warrior, through dance: “[Solor] leaps across the nightclub stage in a series of grandes cabrioles, one leg thrust out, beating the air, his other leg and both his arms radiating out from the center of his torso. This move, like any movement in ballet, when danced by an average dancer, can seem like a stunt or an acrobatic routine. I walked out of a performance of La Bayadere one time because the dancer had forgotten the reason for dancing, which is life. A dancer like Nureyev, on the other hand, in the films of his body, his dancing seemed like the natural expression of human elation.” Haskell’s descriptions show the sharp contrast between the idea of dance, and transcendence itself.
I heartily encourage you to discover ballet through Haskell's eyes. It’s no gamble at all.
October 26, 2017
Haskell's previous novels, especially American Purgatorio, are some of the most original and wonderful fiction I've read in the past decade. But Complete Ballet is just a failure. It is hard to take this book seriously, since the premise is that the plots (not just the dancing or music) of classic Romantic ballets such as Swan Lake, Petrushka, etc. are interesting in and of themselves. But they are not: the plots of these ballets are ridiculous and dated. Since Complete Ballet has virtually no plot to speak of, if you aren't interested in thinking about the plots of Romantic ballets you will be just as disappointed as I was in this slender book.
November 28, 2017
I didn't know what to make of this odd book. Its strange premise and structure made me stick around, hoping it would all pay off, but in the end it felt like some overly dramatic interpretations of ballets, plus a weird story of mobsters trying to collect a gambling debt.
Exactly.
Exactly.
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April 29, 2024logging this in lieu of haskell's "blow-ups," a publication containing two short stories/essays by haskell. goodreads is being stubborn and not allowing me to add this book to the site. anyways, these were light and interesting. nice to read. the publisher–booklet–did a great job with the small volume and were very kind when i met them at nyabf. shoutout. book-let.org
December 23, 2017
John Haskell’s The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts is a brilliant fusion of essay, memoir (maybe), and fiction, where sentences limn a peculiar kind of self-absorption, a sensibility as comedic as it is bleak.
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October 20, 2018I feel a little conflicted about this book? And I'm trying to give it a fair shake/keep an open mind. This book is a fictional essay, or something worded like that, basically, the character supports and explains his own behaviour using references to other works, drawing thematic comparisons between ballets and his life. It's a VERY compelling, interesting and inventive writing style. I'm not sure if it's flawlessly executed, there are some logical leaps that are a little flimsily supported, but as a work of fiction I don't think it necessarily needs to be held to the highest standards of logical reasoning. The narrator/main character is not a good guy, which is also not really an issue because I'm cool with unlikable characters. I don't find his development entirely satisfying, the fifth act is a ride that I wouldn't necessarily have steered in the direction it went, but I can also appreciate the somewhat dissatiafying denouement, particularly because the final ballet is chosen so perfectly to support the authorial decisions for the final act. I guess my actual issue is with the voice of the essays: it's not entirely clear how separate the protagonist's voice is from the author's voice, which made it uncomfortable for me when the essays continuously dismissed the sexual harassment of young ballerinas by creepy old choreographers. Pedophilic interests, physically and emotionally brutal instructive practices, massive age differences between a famous choreographer and the slew of wives he runs through, all his star ballerinas at the beginning of their relationship, all the same young age despite the ageing of the choreographer, all of this is explained away easily, or excused or stated without criticism, in a way that made me queasy.
Example:
"And I won't say they [18 year old ballerinas, who've usually left their homes young to devote their lives and bodies to the painful study of ballet] were under his spell, but he [a crusty old famous choreographer] must have been charming, and his offer to teach them the secrets of dance must have seemed like a dream. And because he was a great choreographer, they were happy to submit to his teaching and his attention, and the relationship worked because all of them got what they wanted. Balanchine got a muse, and they got a chance to dance..." (I mean without going too deep into this another simple fax way to write this is "in a time and environment where young ballerinas had little power and agency this crusty old dude who took experimental supplemental sheep testosterone shots to keep "vital", found at least half a dozen talented young women over the decades of his career, used their talent as inspiration to choreograph ballets for them, married them, then moved on to the next young thing". To make this seem like everyone got what they wanted and that it must've been a dream come true for the young women is a little absurd to me.)
He also said that it was okay that the lead ballerinas in ballets were underage because their roles were written at a time when girls were married younger, which is actually a very popular half truth, and I don't have the energy to go find sources to make that rant right now.
Anyway, if all of this yucky exposition is coming directly from the protagonist, it fits perfectly and establishes his personal philosophies well. However, I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that maybe the author thinks shit like this and that's why the protagonist is a shitty dude and the strippers are written as accessories without any internal life.
This is my ultimate criticism of this piece (book?): there's a lack of empathy for, an inability to recognize the humanity of, both the ballerinas, the strippers and his ex wife, that seems so unbelievable it must be deliberate (No one's that obtuse to the inner lives of others, right?). But whether it's purposeful or not, I obviously have a bone to pick with it. ESPECIALLY because the protagonist can so easily identify himself as a puppet and struggles with agency, it's crazy he wouldn't look at Rachel and realise she's probably battling the same feeling of impotence.
Finally, and relatedly, the protagonist's ex wife and dead daughter seem like an attempt to give him some context: a backstory and an explanation, or an excuse, for the way he thinks and acts. But this area goes so unexamined that the story would honestly be better without them.
Example:
"And I won't say they [18 year old ballerinas, who've usually left their homes young to devote their lives and bodies to the painful study of ballet] were under his spell, but he [a crusty old famous choreographer] must have been charming, and his offer to teach them the secrets of dance must have seemed like a dream. And because he was a great choreographer, they were happy to submit to his teaching and his attention, and the relationship worked because all of them got what they wanted. Balanchine got a muse, and they got a chance to dance..." (I mean without going too deep into this another simple fax way to write this is "in a time and environment where young ballerinas had little power and agency this crusty old dude who took experimental supplemental sheep testosterone shots to keep "vital", found at least half a dozen talented young women over the decades of his career, used their talent as inspiration to choreograph ballets for them, married them, then moved on to the next young thing". To make this seem like everyone got what they wanted and that it must've been a dream come true for the young women is a little absurd to me.)
He also said that it was okay that the lead ballerinas in ballets were underage because their roles were written at a time when girls were married younger, which is actually a very popular half truth, and I don't have the energy to go find sources to make that rant right now.
Anyway, if all of this yucky exposition is coming directly from the protagonist, it fits perfectly and establishes his personal philosophies well. However, I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that maybe the author thinks shit like this and that's why the protagonist is a shitty dude and the strippers are written as accessories without any internal life.
This is my ultimate criticism of this piece (book?): there's a lack of empathy for, an inability to recognize the humanity of, both the ballerinas, the strippers and his ex wife, that seems so unbelievable it must be deliberate (No one's that obtuse to the inner lives of others, right?). But whether it's purposeful or not, I obviously have a bone to pick with it. ESPECIALLY because the protagonist can so easily identify himself as a puppet and struggles with agency, it's crazy he wouldn't look at Rachel and realise she's probably battling the same feeling of impotence.
Finally, and relatedly, the protagonist's ex wife and dead daughter seem like an attempt to give him some context: a backstory and an explanation, or an excuse, for the way he thinks and acts. But this area goes so unexamined that the story would honestly be better without them.
June 21, 2022
All my peeps - READ THIS BOOK! I almost don't want to review it, but any surface explanation fails to convey the incredibly complex multi-leveled artwork realized here. I still don't want to review it - just be intrigued by the idea of a fictional essay in five acts, that actually encompasses the incredibly fascinating interweaving pretty well.
I hold all the stories now in my mind, a series of painting on transparencies that can all be viewed together, traveled through and revisited many times.
I hold all the stories now in my mind, a series of painting on transparencies that can all be viewed together, traveled through and revisited many times.
April 20, 2018
I am a sucker for writing about art, and dance especially, and this book is a satisfying examination of living as a ballet aesthete, that slippery turn from art as deeper engagement with life to art as distraction or escape from life. There's a Black Swan vibe but this story is more interesting--you would think, because dance is such a visual medium, that film would be better suited than a book to blur the line between life and dance, but I thought this book was more successful at accomplishing that retreat. It also introduced me to the writing of Arnold Haskell, which I very much appreciate.
April 27, 2018
I picture a pool, Olympic sized with windows for walls. Instead of water, a solution that ensures everything dropped in floats, balanced in relation to anything else dropped in. Haskell’s books all relate to each other, this book fits somewhere between American Pugatorio and Out of My Skin while also overlapping the ballistic story/essay of I Am Not Jackson Pollack. The position of aesthetics, the viewer’s experience of creative immersion, empathy and transference fills this pool- the phenomenon and physicality of dance counterposed to narrative. More people should see Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
December 24, 2017
I cannot recommend this book enough--it is entertaining, tragic, smart, fascinating. It captures in words the enchantment of ballet as well as gems from the history of dance. And does this while introducing a narrator who's own tragedy and fall seems, like so many ballets, pre-destined. Haskell's books always rivet me--others have had a kind of wry humor to them, an excellent dryness. This hasn't that quality but is as edifying and marvelous as his other works.
January 16, 2018
This book is a wonder. Having never read this author, I wasn't quite prepared for the hybridity of the form. The narrator weaves together so seamlessly the threads of ballet and his own experience that it feels as if one's best friend is telling his most painful, shameful secrets in the most profound way. What talent!
February 6, 2018
An interesting project with a few fascinating parts, but his reading of the ballets was limited/blinkered and and very male-gazey in a way that's especially unilluminating in this context, and I can also remember few narrators I've recently liked less.
January 29, 2018
3 1/2 stars
March 28, 2018
Intense, ferociously attentive, kinetic writer. I love his work.
didn-t-couldn-t-or-wouldn-t-finish
January 8, 2018I've been waiting for the next John Haskell book for years. Out of My Skin really got me and I'm not Jackson Pollock blew me away.
But this book? it just wasn't what I was hoping for. Don't get me wrong. The writing is still on point. But, for me it's too much about ballet. When I read the title, I thought ballet would be a metaphor. Haskell is great at metaphors. And it is a metaphor. But it is also itself, and I'm just not as interested in ballet qua ballet.
But this book? it just wasn't what I was hoping for. Don't get me wrong. The writing is still on point. But, for me it's too much about ballet. When I read the title, I thought ballet would be a metaphor. Haskell is great at metaphors. And it is a metaphor. But it is also itself, and I'm just not as interested in ballet qua ballet.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews