MEG HOWREY They’re Going to Love You. Reviewed by Ann Skea
The new novel from the author of The Wanderers explores relationships within the New York ballet world.
It is clear from the very beginning that Carlisle Martin is a dancer. ‘Feel what I feel,’ she tells us, as she instructs us in the movements that will result in us taking up a ballet dancer’s ‘fifth position’. In this position, she goes on,
… under certain conditions (flexibility and training) your two feet will be firmly locked together: heel to toe and toe to heel. Your knees will be straight, your pelvis will sit squarely above your knees. It is not natural but it is elegant. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man but pulled together and not spreading all over the place.
Contained.
Now ‘See what I see,’ she continues, and she describes James, ‘in T-shirt and a pair of loose sweat pants’, instructing a class of professional dancers in a New York city studio, and his surprise at his discovery of a single dancer, Alex, who is exceptional, and who later asks if he can study with James.
It is Alex who is central to the tangle of love, good intentions, failures, pride and obstinacy that results in a 19-year estrangement between Carlisle and her father, Robert. And it is James, Robert’s long-term partner, who eventually phones Carlisle to tell her that her father is dying and he wants to see her.
As Carlisle tries to deal with the emotional turmoil this phone call brings, she distracts herself with her work as a choreographer of modern dance, but more and more, memories surface and she recalls moments of her life and of her family in vivid detail.
She remembers her own ambition to be a ballet dancer, like both her parents. Her mother had danced major roles for the famous Georgian–American choreographer Balanchine, and Carlisle has a photograph of her in the Stars and Stripes costume she wore in his popular patriotic ballet. Here is Isabelle (the stage name Robert had chosen for her) ‘balanced on pointe saluting the camera’. Carlisle is five when her mother leaves her father and a back injury ends her ballet career.
Robert, too, had danced professionally and had been company manager for the successful LaGrange ballet company, which he helped to build, until he left after a bitter falling out with Leonard LaGrange. Now he runs the annual Boxhill Dance Festival in ‘upstate New York’.
Carlisle’s mother had not encouraged her to take up ballet, but she had been allowed to attend classes and she had been talented enough to win a scholarship to a boarding school for the arts, and then to the School of American Ballet. She remembers the excitement of it all, but especially the awful time when she finally became too tall for ballet:
The summer of my junior year I get mono and spend the summer in Ohio, swollen and rashy and tired, quarantined to my room. I read a lot of books, and when I stagger upright, I’m six foot one …
Teachers talk to me about theatrical dancing. ‘You’ve got more of a showgirl physique.’ I begin to hear things about how my training might serve me in the future in ‘anything’ I do. Isabelle presses for college.
My father seconds this. ‘It will give you time to explore your interests. You’re a smart girl, you’ve got brains. And if you want to keep dancing you could take some modern dance classes, expand your technique.’
Carlisle’s relationship with her mother is strained, especially since Isabelle has remarried and now has a son on whom she dotes. Carlisle feels more at home in the Bank Street, New York, apartment where Robert and James live and which she has visited regularly since she was ten. Robert is caring and generous, but it is James she loves being with, because he has always treated her as an adult, sharing gossip, confidences, ‘the dioramas of life’. As a ten year old in 1983, it is from James that she first learns that her father is a gay man, although she in not sure what ‘gay’ means, and she learns about AIDS, for which at that time there is no test. She becomes aware of phone calls, silences, depression, as they receive news of another death among their friends.
It is James, too, that she wants to help when Alex starts to disrupt their lives. She recalls everything about this time, about her dismay at the whole situation and about her impulsive decision to seek Alex out, with disastrous results for all of them, except Alex.
Carlisle’s account of her story – of the tangle of loves and loyalties, of misunderstandings and obstinacy, and of her feelings and confusion – is immediate, powerful, moving and psychologically perceptive. ‘Fragments,’ she says, while trying to find ‘something in my life I can understand and tell’ in the new ballet she is planning, ‘They are all we can have of each other’; and she is not uncritical of herself, her motives and her decisions. Often, she realistically reassesses her account of her life:
When I finally stepped through the doorway of dance I will say, I did it as a different person. Yes. Maybe. At any rate I am here.
But another doorway remained, as did that younger version of myself. She’s here, too.
At the end of the first chapter, when we listen with Carlisle as James explains his own feelings about Alex, there is a passage which recurs twice more in the book in slightly different forms; most movingly in Carlisle’s final words:
James stops playing.
Listen to this silence, where all movement is contained.
Watch this dance, even if it’s still.
Here it comes. Here it is.
A rising, an exclamation.
All this wreckage. All this gorgeous unrepeatable wreckage. Life.
Meg Howrey They’re Going to Love You Bloomsbury 2022 PB 336pp $29.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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