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.

Narrator Jen Tullock is extraordinary in this superb audiobook about a terrible period in the life of the American dancer Isadora Duncan. A world-famous iconoclast, Isadora was living in Paris with the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune when her two children were drowned in a motor accident. As Tullock plays out Gray's extraordinary imagining of the months that followed for this difficult, brilliant woman maddened with grief, you can instantly recognize each character by shifts in her vocal register and because she distinguishes their personalities one from another with canny intonations. She is alive to each sentence, and gifted at accents and at drama. In spite of a few groan-making mispronunciations, this is an exhilarating performance. Tullock's and Gray's Isadora is unforgettable. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine