'The Turnout' review: Ballet and suspense are both en pointe

"You've never seen true longing until you've seen a theater of young girls gaze upon the opening moments of 'The Nutcracker.' "

That line comes toward the end of Megan Abbott's "The Turnout," but it could as easily have been the novel's opening. Desire and ballet are entwined in a smoldering pas de deux throughout this tightly choreographed thriller.

"The Turnout" follows two sisters, Dara and Marie, who run the Durant School of Dance, which they inherited from their exacting mother, Madame Durant. After their parents died in a car accident, Dara and Marie remained in the family house, along with Dara's young husband, Charlie. And each year, they stage a highly anticipated production of "The Nutcracker" that turns little girls into scheming monsters — everyone wants to be Clara — but keeps the school financially en pointe.

Anyone who has ever attended a performance of Tchaikovsky's famous ballet will enjoy the myriad references to Dewdrops, Snowflakes, mice and toy soldiers as the novel whirls along. A number of characters also correspond to Nutcracker figures from the original, much darker story by E.T.A. Hoffmann (the first Mouse King had seven heads). Marie, for example, is the name Hoffmann gave his young heroine, who became Clara in the ballet adaptation.

Abbott's interpretation of Clara/Marie as an adolescent riven by erotic awakenings is cleverly based on Hoffmann's story. Though Marie Durant is a grown woman, she seems like a teenager, despite her recent bid for independence by moving into an attic room above the dance studio. Compared to the businesslike, disciplined Dara, Marie is impulsive, disorganized and "often gave off the grimy energy of someone never fully clean." And just as Clara is infatuated with the Nutcracker Prince yet thrillingly menaced by the Mouse King, Marie has her own divided attractions.

Chief among those distractions is the huge, smarmy Derek, a fast-talking contractor who persuades Charlie, the Durants' business manager, to agree to a major and expensive renovation. Derek is repulsively fascinating, with his power tools, "his too-tight dress shirts, his dual phones, his throbbing beeper," and obviously a rat. Marie is smitten.

Derek leers, speaks in salacious double entendres and has a thuggish dalliance with the willing Marie, all while ripping the studio apart. Remodeling becomes a full-scale assault. The sisters, once so close, turn on each other, and fantasies shudder into nightmares. Yet this year's performance of "The Nutcracker" must go on.

At times, the plot's inevitable murder, sexual intrigue and family secrets seem almost incidental to the auditions and rehearsals, the bickering dancers and complaining parents, the punishing toe shoes and pulled muscles. It's soon apparent that "The Turnout" is as much about female rage, jealousy and sexual desire as it is a suspense novel set in a dance studio.

Achieving a "turnout" — a dancer's ability "to rotate her body 180 degrees, from the hips down to the toes" — an excruciating position likened to "a doll with its legs put on backward," makes this point all too clearly. "The moment you achieve it," Madame Durant told her daughters, "you've become a dancer. You've become a woman."

Fortunately, the novel's real focus is on how Dara and Marie begin to reexamine their mother's damaging legacy, learn to dance to their own music and separate "true longing" from the fairy tale kind.