The Complete Ballet
. . . is an intricate pas de corps in which fiction and history combine to describe a life. The stories of the great romantic ballets are both reflected and refracted in a cinematic journey through Tinseltown, a Technicolor Los Angeles in which desperation and obsession are woven together with memories of love. Pas de corps means, literally, the steps of the body, and we follow the mythical stories of Nijinsky and Pavlova, Balanchine and Joseph Cornell, while simultaneously entering into the life of a narrator who seems to resemble the film director John Cassavetes.
Haskell writes deftly, meaningfully, about the fluidity of experience and the self. —Kirkus Reviews
Haskell is a choreographer of a dance in words. [His} achievement lies in both the sustained emotional stakes of his book and in the fruitful experiment in adaptation and ekphrasis. —Jo Livingstone (The New Republic)
John Haskell writes deceptively breezy and engrossing fiction that simultaneously introduces readers to the future of storytelling. He has always been ahead of his time, and now, with The Complete Ballet, he proves without a doubt that he is among American fiction's most undaunted visionaries. —Heidi Julavits