Two Brief Reviews

1.  The reader who approaches Colum McCann's Dancer: A Novel seeking "information" about Rudolf Nureyev will be sorely disappointed.  In fact, those not already in the know about either Nureyev or his contemporaries may find themselves baffled by the parade of people named (Erik Bruhn, Margot Fonteyn), unnamed (an anonymous "genius," a.k.a. Mikhail Baryshnikov), or Christian-named ("Pablo," "Jacques").  McCann makes no attempt to reconstruct Nureyev's career: there's nothing about his rivalry with Baryshnikov and almost nothing about his work with the Paris Opera Ballet, and even his defection occurs in a narrative gap. 

Instead, McCann wants to capture Nureyev's effect--the artist as high- and fast-burning flame, destroying himself in the name of aesthetic greatness.  But he also wants to imagine Nureyev as inspiration; as pop culture idol; as a means of escaping the gloominess of Communist Russia; as gay icon; as symbol of the West's allure; and so on, and so on, and so on.   Not surprisingly, McCann deliberately fragments his narrative.  There are multiple narrators--including Nureyev himself--all of them writing letters, keeping journals, reminiscing, or flowing along in a stream of consciousness.  McCann heightens the slightly kaleidoscopic effect by rapidly switching narrators, sometimes offering up several different first-person speakers in succession; this is not a novel which allows the reader to coast.  For me, at least, the only really unsuccessful sections belong to "Victor," Nureyev's tour guide to the pre-AIDS sex scene.  The problem with writing about hedonism is that, on the page, it's usually rather boring, and Victor's hyper-kinetic presence ultimately exerts a rather soporific effect.  Overall, the novel probably could have used more focus--for example, on Nureyev's simultaneous desire for and resistance to "star-making"--and it doesn't quite succeed in conveying why Nureyev had such an impact.  Still, as a take on artistic rage, it's quite compelling. 

2.  In stark contrast to Dancer, Madison Smartt Bell's The Stone that the Builder Refused aspires very much to the status of historical novel-as-history.  Stone completes Bell's trilogy about Toussaint Louverture, and there's absolutely no point in picking this one up if you haven't read All Saints' Rising (1995) and Master of the Crossroads (2000); even if you have read the earlier novels, be warned that Bell doesn't spend much time refreshing your memory about who's who in his character-filled canvas.  Bell's main narrative takes us through to Toussaint's capture and, eventually, his death (from cold, it would appear) in a French prison.  The ugly aftermath appears in an afterword narrated twenty years after the fact by the trilogy's only first-person speaker, Riau.  In addition to the main text, we also have a glossary of French and Creole terms, a detailed chronology, and some primary documents in the original French. 

I found this final installment somewhat less impressive than the first two, but it's hard to put my finger on the problem.  Part of it may be the novel's serial quality--military picaresque, perhaps? Both Toussaint and the key white characters, especially Antoine Hebert, spend the entire novel moving from one spot to the next--in Hebert's case, usually in circumstances not altogether under his control.  Obviously, the constant motion is a necessary part of the historical plot, but at times the book feels as though Bell just wants to be done with the enterprise.  Part of it may be that Bell's interest in developing his characters appears to have waned; we don't really learn anything new about Hebert, his wife Nanon, the other female characters, or even Toussaint.  In a sense, this flattening is appropriate, as historical events overwhelm and threaten to erase just about everyone in the novel.  Once again, though, it reduces the novel's effectiveness, and it also undermines what Robert Stone correctly identifies as the trilogy's larger point: "the imprisonment of human nature in a fallen world, forever chasing utopias." 

More successfully, Bell continues to utilize points-of-view rooted in Voudou, especially in Riau's sections.  Not surprisingly, Ghede--the god of death--haunts the novel. (Master of the Crossroads takes its name from another Haitian god, Legba.)  Of necessity, this is a blood-soaked novel, but there's nothing here as graphic as, say, Choufleur's murder of his father in the first novel or Choufleur's own death in the second.