Romance, tragedy entwined in the dance world

IN the opening scene of “First Love,” in just three spare, evocative paragraphs, Adrienne Sharp gives a glimpse of the childhoods of her debut novel’s three main characters and, in so doing, sets the stage for each of their downfalls.

American Ballet Theater star Adam LaSalle has grown up in the shadow of his parents’ ballet careers, always longing to be the center of someone’s life. Enter ballerina Sandra Ellis, his best-friend-turned-girlfriend, who has grown up caring for her mentally unstable father and, consequently, wishing that someone would take care of her.

At center stage is Sandra’s mentor, a fictionalized version of New York City Ballet director George Balanchine, an elderly father figure whose company Adam fled years ago, after deciding that male ballerinas were marginalized there.

When Balanchine takes Sandra under his wing to play the princess in “Sleeping Beauty,” a ballet he’s dreamed of directing since childhood, he sets in motion a series of events from which no one will escape unscathed.

“First Love,” like the un-Disneyfied 17th century version of “Sleeping Beauty” upon which it is based, is more tragedy than fairy tale. There may not be an evil mother-in-law desiring her twin grandchildren for dinner, but “First Love” is just as harrowing in its on- and off-stage depictions of desire and disappointment, rendered with writing that is hauntingly lyrical:

“The roots of her hair were so pale she had to have been bleaching.... She did this every time her father got sick, went white blond, as if she could vanish.... She turned her face to his, and now he could see it, now he couldn’t, as the streetlights flicked by, flicked by, flicked by, now light, now dark, now light, now dark.”

Sharp brings to life the beauty, magic and all-consuming passion of the professional dance world. The novel’s plot, however, is a different story. At first, it is fun, in the same way that it is fun to put together a jigsaw puzzle, to piece together the parallels between Sharp’s story and “Sleeping Beauty.”

If not asleep like the princess, Sandra is certainly stagnating in her life when we meet her. At age 20, the same age as the princess when the prince finds her, Sandra has spent the last several years largely unnoticed in Balanchine’s company.

Her offstage pas de deux with Adam is the kiss that awakens her and alerts Balanchine to her talent. In his role as the prince, Adam has an angry mother who resents having gotten pregnant with him at an early age, which halted her dancing career. Balanchine believes he will live to be 100, the number of years that the princess and her attendants were asleep.

The parallels become more forced, however, and the puzzle pieces less congruent. The princess pricks herself with a spindle; Sandra cuts herself (intentionally) with a razor.

Sandra, too, becomes pregnant with twins. The bitter mother-in-law is not happy about her pending grandmotherhood.

Despite Sharp’s obvious strength in creating eloquent descriptions, her plot descends into melodrama: In a span of just five pages, there is an abortion, a drug overdose, a suicide attempt; a hand punches through a plaster wall, knuckles are crushed and metacarpals broken. “Sleeping Beauty” does not get performed, and no one in this kingdom lives happily ever after.

Lea Aschkenas is a critic and author of the forthcoming travel memoir “Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island.”