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The Sleeping Beauty ReviewAdrienne Sharp's First Love is a luminescent story about the fragile but undeniable links between art and self, love and control. Set in the New York ballet world of the 1980's, the novel is told by three third-person narrators. Sandra is a young and promising ballerina who aches to be recognized by the director of the New York City Ballet - George Balanchine, or Mr. B., as the dancers call him. Adam, her friend and now lover, dances with the other company in town, the American Ballet Theater, under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov. Finally, Balanchine himself tells a magical segment of the story; although his health is ailing, he wants to direct one more ballet - Sleeping Beauty - and he wants Sandra to be the star and his muse.Sharp addresses with insight and compassion the artist's eternal debate - how to live in the real world with one's dreams and aspirations, and each character embodies this struggle as the story unfolds. Sandra must live with the realities of an ill father, a brilliant historian who has battled with mental illness since before Sandra's mother died when she was a child. Adam must deal with the pressure he receives from his parents, dancers themselves, who provide a stunted kind of support: they love him, but their own dysfunctional relationship and their need to turn away from romantic passion and seek only the passion they can find in art has made them poor role models for their son. He must learn how to negotiate relationships on his own. For solace, Adam has always turned to his godfather, Randall, the only one in the family who sees him as a person more than as a body. Yet Randall is failing, deteriorating from the ravages of Kaposi's sarcoma.
This book investigates in unflinching but breathtaking prose the layers of passion to be navigated by dancers. There is the romantic and sexual passion that Adam and Sandra share in their desperate attempts to meld their souls while simultaneously trying to extricate themselves from one another. There is the passion of the dance, the physical passion, in all of its rough and tactile glory. In one powerful dance scene, Adam has the opportunity to dance with his father, Frankie, in a ballet that his grandfather's lover has created for the three of them - Adam, Frankie, and Sandra. The scene details the movement of the men's bodies, the etchings that makeup creates in the lines of their faces, the film of sweat their hands slip over when they grasp one another's limbs for their intricate moves. Adam is at the top of his game, feeling at first intimidated by then energized by his father's presence; he executes his leaps and vaults with passion and precision. And when Sandra comes out of the wings, he uses that energy to create a dynamo on the stage. But the experience, Adam realizes, exhilarating as it is, taps into too much emotion since it involves the people he loves. For the reader, the scene highlights the question of how the artist, in his or her realm, can exert control - over self, over art, over love.
The final level of passion is exemplified by Balanchine himself, as he struggles to transform the vision in his head to the three dimensional world of the studio, and ultimately, the stage. For his passion, control is also an issue. He can control the vision of his art, but he can't control his deteriorating body, nor can he control the life of the woman he wants to birth as his final muse.
Adrienne Sharp's First Love offers a multitude of reads from passionate love story to real-life depiction of the dance world, to treatise on the evolution of an artist's vision. All are deeply satisfying.
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