Would she like to dance? You bet

Faith in Carlos Gomez

A Memoir of Salsa, Sex, and Salvation

Samantha Dunn

Owl Books/Henry Holt: 214 pp., $14 paper

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TAKING up salsa dancing can be an embarrassing, unpredictable and ultimately life-changing experience, author Samantha Dunn confesses in her new memoir, “Faith in Carlos Gomez.” She did it in the name of romance, but salsa itself became the object of her affection, her therapy, her religion.

Describing salsa merely as a kind of dance doesn’t begin to explain “what it becomes in your body, how it infiltrates your soul, the stuff it moves around in your head, the places it takes you, the things it makes you do,” writes Dunn, author of the 2001 novel “Failing Paris.” It quickly becomes an addiction, one she says defies her best attempts at analysis.

As someone who considers herself a lifelong tomboy and “all wooden-limbed like a dumb puppet,” Dunn isn’t exactly a natural on the dance floor. In fact she feels most herself at home in the Pacific Palisades, with her beloved aging Thoroughbred, Harley. Having lost in the last five years “a marriage, all my money, and one live-in boyfriend,” she says the fact that she is “steward to a horse and a big dog, and daughter to my mother, constitutes the anchor of my life.... That’s pretty much it.”

Dunn, whose 2002 memoir “Not By Accident” recounts nearly losing a leg in a serious equine accident, is surprised when her handsome Argentine farrier, Rafael (Dunn has altered names and biographical details), asks her on a date and suggests salsa dancing. Intensely attracted to him, she gives herself a week to learn the art of salsa.

At first, this appears to be a story about the author’s clumsy efforts and eventual triumph in both love and dance. “They make movies about this exact scenario,” she notes, “two friends finally sleep together and realize what they’ve been looking for has been under their noses the entire time. Right?”

But Rafael is a two-timing scoundrel and the affair ends. Yet her ardor for salsa endures, becoming a kind of spiritual quest for fulfillment.

Dunn adds just enough candor, drollness and self-deprecating humor to keep “Faith in Carlos Gomez” -- the name of a mystery man with whom a friend tries to set her up -- from becoming an eye-rolling cliche. Approaching a street-level dance studio for her lesson, she sees in its huge windows people trying hard to capture dance rhythms. “Imagine. Give it a minute and let the abject horror of that picture sink in.”

Dunn has her weaker moments, in which her prose veers perilously close to New Age-y, pseudo-profundity: “What I don’t know yet is that this dance is a practice of empathy; it demands you inhabit the history of another, forcing into you a kind of knowing that transcends all intellectual understanding.”

For most of the book, however, Dunn rises above such Oprah-esque musings. As she navigates her way through a new affair (with her dance teacher), she explores how dancing affects her domineering mother, a graceful former dancer.

Throughout, Dunn attempts to understand her sudden immersion in salsa and in Latin culture (she enrolls in Spanish classes, dates her dance instructor), and why salsa remains alluring even as she considers herself a failure at it. Being a writer, she enjoys the relief of dance’s nonverbal communication: “Entire conversations are conducted through pressure and touch and momentum and sight and a shift of weight.”

In the end, Dunn comes off vaguely as a cross between Bridget Jones and writing/self-help guru Anne Lamott. Luckily Dunn is closer to the former than the latter, as each chapter in her love life seems to stir a new sense of dismay, defeat and sardonic humor. As the plucky heroine of her own story, Dunn has an appealing voice. Yet it’s hard to justify why her narrative deserves to be anything more than a magazine feature. At book length, “Faith in Carlos Gomez” seems compelling to a rarefied audience at best, which means that salsa aficionados are in for a treat.

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Carmela Ciuraru, editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Motherhood: Poems About Mothers,” is a regular contributor to Book Review.