The Body of Dancers

This painfully graphic first novel shows 16-year-old Natalie Barnes exchanging one type of imprisonment for another. She has left a squalid farm in Indiana to begin an uncertain apprenticeship in San Francisco with the Bay City Ballet, but she lives at a bare subsistence level, exploited by arrogant male dancers and humiliated by management. When she advances to the corps de ballet , she discovers it to be ``a writhing pit of jealousy, disillusionment, and resignation.'' Subject to eating disorders and chronic pain, she is unable to come to grips with her past, a grotesque life of deprivation and sexual abuse that continues to undermine her daily existence. Henry, Natalie's 70-year-old mentor, coach and lover, constitutes her entire support system. Narrated at a feverish pitch, the book casts a surreal glow on a life spinning out of control. A former professional dancer herself, Brown portrays 1980s San Francisco in rich detail, dissecting the emotionally chaotic life of a dedicated ballerina with a sharp eye and an acid voice. Author tour. (Oct.)