She has reduced herself to the most essential pistons and gears. They are all thin, dancers, but Joan can discern infinitesimal variation in thinness, and Elaine's is the minimalist body of the survivor. For instance: 'Her sternum is like a turtle shell with skin stretched over it. Throughout, Shipstead depicts the physical sacrifice of dancers without romanticism or pity.

Also complex is the neighbor's daughter, Chloe, whose fierce movement style befuddles classical choreographers but finds more avant-garde outlets. With one notable exception for Joan's poor husband, Jacob, all the characters navigate the social and aesthetic channels of the ballet world to find a happy ending, and I especially enjoyed the nuanced inner life Shipstead gives to Joan's old corps buddy Elaine, who becomes not just a muse but an artistic director. The novel's graceful maneuvers through chronology make for an electrifying last stretch, as a ballet dynasty takes over the stage the way dividing cells might conquer a Petri dish.

What's a disheartened dancer to do? Flee to a safe high school sweetheart, have a baby, quit the stage and teach ballet in Orange County. Joan's triumph via Harry is two decades in coming, and the novel moves nimbly through time and points of view, jetting us to Paris of the mid-'70s, where young Joan meets Arslan, to Toronto, where she finds herself - inexplicably - chosen to drive his defection getaway car, then to New York, where the paparazzi document their fling, until Rusakov dumps her to pursue better dance partners.

As Joan reflects upon her son, Harry: 'She had not anticipated that she might be able to re-create, even improve, her young self through the body of another.' It's biological destiny in service of killer ballon. And procreation becomes Joan Joyce's subconscious means to fulfilling the drive for dancerly perfection. Her heroine is not a rising talent but a self-assessed mediocre member of the corps.

But Shipstead makes sex the fulcrum of her novel in an untypical way. Yes, as in most portraits of ballet lives, 'Astonish Me' is suffused with carnality. K' serially shacks up with his ballerinas, he is also drawn to sleeping with 'boys.' The genius expat choreographer he flees to gives each favorite female dancer an individual perfume, as Balanchine did - but though the fictional 'Mr. But recent Stegner Fellow Maggie Shipstead, whose laureled first novel, 'Seating Arrangements,' sensitively skewered the tweedy New England set, takes a composite tack in her second book, 'Astonish Me.' Her Russian defector, Arslan Rusakov, pulses with Tartar blood, like Nureyev, but is short and heterosexual, like Baryshnikov.

Astonish me shipstead