The Spectacular
The Spectacular takes place over a few months and is a brief 1990s story incorporating long retrospective flashbacks to 1956, when 19-year-old Marion Brooks successfully auditioned for the Radio City Rockettes, much to the chagrin of her father. The restrictions of her patriarchal family cause Marion to defy expectations and take her future into her own hands, and the ensuing issues are integral to the story.
Quite apart from the magical pull of the Radio City Music Hall itself, the meticulously detailed reflections on dance rehearsals, synchronisation of eye-high kicks and smiles, and clever height adjustments, using line placement and costume, are fascinating. Four shows a day, seven days a week, three weeks on, one week off – this gruelling regimen drew me into Marion’s and her friend Bunny’s world. I felt deeply involved in this part of the novel: the camaraderie, the troupe mentality, the slightest mistake exposing human fallibility in clockwork precision, and how the visual lure of synchronised harmony in human movement touches the deepest part of our psyche.
Hence, for me, the first half of the book is the most compelling. Following a terrible tragedy at Radio City which affects Marion personally, the latter part of the novel delves into family drama. Marion’s behaviour, though fully understandable emotionally, doesn’t feel credible. With a fraught relationship already in tatters, references throughout the book to Marion’s father as Simon distance him from the usual nuclear family father-daughter connection.
The novel dwells on historical events from 1956, when the New York City police hired a psychiatrist to help identify the Mad Bomber who terrorised NYC for sixteen years. The history behind these events was the lead-in to criminal profiling. In The Spectacular, Davis continues to shine the spotlight on extraordinary New York landmarks.
