Isadora

March 27, 2017
Gray follows her powerful 2015 short story collection Gutshot with an uneven novel about dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan. In 1913, at the peak of her career, Duncan’s children, six-year-old Deirdre and toddler Patrick, drown in the Seine when the car in which she has sent them home from a restaurant lunch plunges into the river. To assuage her grief and guilt—and avoid a clamoring public—Duncan, the children’s ashes in tow, departs Paris for Corfu, Turkey, Albania, and the Italian port of Viareggio. As she battles physical illness and mental collapse, she spends time with her brothers Augustin and Raymond; her sister, Elizabeth, who runs a school in Darmstadt based on Isadora’s methods; and legendary actress Eleonora Duse, among others. By the time she returns to France to dance again, she is forever changed, if not fully healed. Gray’s striking, sensual language is perfectly suited to her visionary protagonist, and the novel shimmers with memorable prose. But a surfeit of mundane moments narrated in the perspectives of secondary characters (including Elizabeth, her lover Max Merz, and Duncan’s lover, sewing machine heir Paris Singer) blunts its emotional power. Gray’s 2012 novel, Threats, used similarly brief, disjunctive segments to build toward a compelling whole; in contrast, Isadora spreads its attention too thin to fully capitalize on any of its narrative’s—or its author’s—rich possibilities.

March 1, 2017
Captivating historical fiction from the award-winning author of Threats (2012) and Museum of the Weird (2010).As the "mother of modern dance," Isadora Duncan pioneered a style of movement that released the body from the rigid discipline of ballet. Her choreography favored free-flowing movements designed to seem more like spontaneous expression than a practiced performance. At first, the feverish, practically Gothic voice that Gray invents for her protagonist seems an odd fit for a woman inspired by the simple lines and unadorned grace of classical art and architecture, but, as the reader goes deeper into Isadora's world, Gray's choice begins to make perfect sense. Duncan's modernism included the concept of the artist as rogue and celebrity--someone whose creativity demanded freedom from everyday norms. And, certainly, fate played a role in making Duncan extraordinary in life and in death. This novel begins when the dancer's two small children drown in the Seine, and early chapters depict Duncan's immediate reaction to this awful tragedy. To say that she is not restrained in her grieving would be a dramatic understatement, but it soon becomes clear that restraint simply is not part of her makeup. Gray's prose is over-the-top but utterly apt. Isadora's words are gorgeous even when they are grisly, and Gray does a terrific job of depicting not just the bereavement of a mother, but also the bereavement of a mother for whom life is a source of fuel for art. Gray also makes the canny choice to include other narrators, observers whose cooler viewpoints are expressed in the third person. Paris Singer, heir to his father's sewing-machine fortune and the father of her son, is the one who takes care of quotidian details while Isadora pursues her muse. And her sister, Elizabeth, is also an excellent foil. As the administrator of the schools founded by the dancer, Elizabeth depends upon Isadora. But, more than anyone, Elizabeth recognizes the performative aspect of Isadora's everyday existence. Together, these interwoven voices tell the story of a singular genius at one of the turning points of history, the moment when the promises of modernism give way to the first total war. A novel equal to its larger-than-life protagonist.

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Starred review from April 15, 2017
Historical novels about artists abound, but few attain the psychological intricacy, fluency of imagination, lacerating wit, or intoxicating beauty of Gray's tale of Isadora Duncan, the courageous mother of modern dance. Gray (Gutshot, 2015), known for her venturesome short stories, focuses on one traumatic year in Duncan's altogether dramatic life as a seductive dancer who scandalously rejected the rigidity of ballet to return to the essence of dance, performing her flowing choreography barefoot and in gossamer tunics. Isadora is in Paris in 1913, amid the dark stirrings of war, when her young daughter and son, along with their nanny, drown in a bizarre car accident. Gray's deeply inquisitive and empathic story of epic grief is composed of short, intense chapters expressing the divergent points of view of four contentious characters: extravagantly theatrical Isadora; her exceedingly wealthy and pragmatic lover, Paris Singer; her frustrated sister, Elizabeth, who teaches the radical Duncan method; and her fellow instructor, the ineptly scheming Max. As Isadora plunges into near madness, then slowly reclaims her artistic powers, Gray, performing her own extraordinary artistic leap, explores the nexus between body and mind, loss and creativity, love and ambition, and birth and death. The spellbinding result is a mythic, fiercely insightful, mordantly funny, and profoundly revelatory portrait of an intrepid and indelible artist.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2017

A PEN/Faulkner and NYPL Young Lions finalist, Gray envisions Isadora Duncan not as a modern-dance genius but as a mother mourning the death of her two children. How does she keep performing?

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