Dancing for Degas

January 11, 2010
From Wagner’s debut, a fictional portrait of an aspiring ballerina who inspires famous works of art by Edgar Degas, a living picture emerges of dancers at the turn-of-the-20th-century Paris Opera. After gangly 12-year-old Alexandrie’s brother marries a girl even poorer than himself, Alexandrie becomes her provincial family’s last hope for prosperity, and soon she’s taking lessons in ballet and culture to prepare herself for Paris society. Once in Paris, Alexandrie follows star performer Cornelie’s lead and quickly snags a prospective patron, but she’s most powerfully drawn to Degas, who captures on canvas the dancers’ beauty and humanity. Like Tracy Chevalier, Wagner imagines how layers of meaning pervade works of art, but her real forte is detailing the sexual politics of poverty and evoking the rivalry among dancers, especially between stars and the newcomers who wish to replace them. Wagner’s description of art and sacrifice in old Paris doesn’t have the heft of the classics, but her abandonment of the masterpiece-in-the-making formula is a nice turn.

March 1, 2010
Paris Opera Ballet promises a new life for young Alexandrie, who welcomes the discipline of dance to escape rural poverty. Encouraged by her greedy, desperate mother, who knows the true tradition of the Opera Ballet, the naive little dancer marvels at Paris, endures humiliation by dance masters and established ballerinas, and finally grasps the cold facts about the well-dressed, entitled men who turn many a Paris dancer into a high-class whore in slippers. Alexandrie models for the successful, acerbic painter Degas, who describes his dancer-subjects as terrible pigs, to increase her desirability in the eyes of the predatory, married men frequenting the opera until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War temporarily shutters it. Ultimately, Alexandrie falls for the self-absorbed Degas. First-time novelist Wagner skillfully compresses the war into a series of brief letters in this engaging tale illuminating the dark side of French society, high and low. With appearances by Degas peers C'zanne and Monet, this fascinating visit to a bygone world of art and sex, war and love will draw many.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)