The spellbinding story of a father and son, both married, who fall in love with the same alluring ballerina. Oscar Kornblatt has been a first violinist with the New York City Ballet for so many years that he scarcely notices the throngs of eager young dancers who fill the ranks of the corps de ballet. But Ginny Valentine catches his eye, and when he comes to know her he becomes utterly enchanted by her. One night when Ruth, his quietly independent wife, is away, he brings Ginny back to his Upper West Side apartment and the two become lovers.
While the affair doesn’t last, Oscar’s attachment to Ginny continues to flourish. He invites her to join his family for Thanksgiving dinner, where she meets and falls in love with Oscar’s eldest son, Gabriel, home from San Francisco for the holiday. Gabriel, married to a beautiful, highly unstable woman, finds himself falling under Ginny’s spell. As the bonds of the family begin to erode, Ruth takes drastic and shocking measures to salvage what is most precious to her: her baby granddaughter, Isobel.
Set against the glamorous, exciting world of the New York City Ballet, The Four Temperaments explores the ways in which love and marriage are tested. Through its unforgettable cast of characters, this novel reveals how the demands of the flesh can suddenly, almost inexplicably, turn lives upside down. With the assurance and virtuosity of a seasoned storyteller, Yona Zeldis McDonough presents the powerfully sexy story of two adulterous affairs and imbues them with an irresistible emotional undercurrent.
Father and son fall for the same girl in this uneven debut. Oscar Kornblatt, first violinist for the New York City Ballet, finds the quiet routine of his life shattered when he meets Ginny Valentine, an ambitious member of the corps de ballet. Although Ginny is unlike the more sophisticated women who have caught Oscar's attention in the past, she has a fiery energy that he can't resist and the two begin an affair. Unaware of the extent of his involvement with Ginny, Oscar's wife, Ruth, invites her to Thanksgiving dinner. When she catches Ginny in the guest bedroom kissing not Oscar but their married eldest son, Gabriel, the delicate balance of the family is imperiled. McDonough focuses on one character in each chapter, which gives the reader a sense of the various histories and tensions involved, but this technique also makes the narrative somewhat halting and disjointed. Ruth emerges as levelheaded and understanding, while Ginny is stereotypically selfish and narcissistic and Gabriel's wife, Penelope, is unstable. Lust and jealousy consume Oscar and Gabriel, although there is not much about Ginny that can really account for this. Events unfold in a predictable manner for most of the book, until things take a tragic turn and Ruth flees to Mexico, taking Gabriel's one-year-old daughter with her. McDonough has a knack for building solid characters, though they are overshadowed by the melodrama of their situations. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The Four Temperaments is a celebrated Balanchine ballet based on the medieval concept of the body's four prevailing humours. Ballet figures large in this strong and intriguing debut novel, though the humours angle doesn't entirely mesh with the narrative. This morality tale of lust, ambition, love, and heedlessness centers around Ginny Valentine, a fiercely talented but amoral ballerina with the New York City Ballet who wreaks havoc in the pleasant, orderly life of Oscar Kornblatt, a middle-aged violinist with the ballet's orchestra. Ginny is supremely ambitious; to dance, for her, is truly to live, and nothing else comes close until she meets the violinist's older son, Gabriel, at the Kornblatts' Thanksgiving dinner. Never mind that Gabriel is married (and having problems with his obsessive-compulsive wife, Penelope) or that Ginny has already had an abbreviated affair with Oscar. The tragedy that ensues brings out the worst in everyone, even Oscar's levelheaded wife, Ruth. McDonough weaves a controlled, engrossing tale replete with authentic ballet atmosphere and fraught with human frailty that unfolds in five alternating voices. Recommended for all libraries. - Jo Manning, Barry Univ. Lib., Miami Shores, FL Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
When I was young, I didn't think about becoming a writer. In fact, I was determined to become a ballerina, because I studied ballet for many years, and by the time I was in high school, I was taking seven ballet classes a week. But I was always a big reader. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and I used to frequent all the different libraries in my neighborhood on a regular basis. I would look for books by authors I loved. I read my favorite books--ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, A LITTLE PRINCESS, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN--over and over again. I probably read each of those books twenty times in all. I read lots of other things too: I loved comic books and magazines, like Mad and Seventeen. But when you are reader, you just need to read. Sometimes you read books that change your life, like OF MICE AND MEN, which I read--and adored-- when I was in sixth grade. Other times, you read the latest adventures of Betty and Veronica. You'll read a three-day old newspaper days or the back of the cereal box if that's all that there is available, because readers just need to read. So I kept reading, and I kept dancing too, though by the time I was a senior in high school, it was pretty clear to me that I was neither talented nor driven enough to become a professional ballet dancer and I stopped taking lessons and went off to college instead.
As a student at Vassar College, I never once took a writing course. I was not accepted into the poetry workshop I applied to, so I avoided all other writing classes, and instead focused on literature, language and art history, which was my declared major. I was so taken with the field that I decided to pursue my studies on a graduate level. I enrolled in a PhD program at Columbia University where I have to confess that I was miserable. I didn't like the teachers, the students or the classes. I found graduate school the antithesis of undergraduate education; while the latter encouraged experimentation, growth, expansion, the former seemed to demand a kind of narrowing of focus and a rigidity that was simply at odds with my soul. It was like business school without the reward of a well-paying job at the end. Everyone carried a briefcase. I too bought a briefcase, but since I mostly used it to tote my lunch and the NYT crossword puzzle, it didn't do much for my success as a grad student. But I have to thank the program at Columbia for being so very inhospitable, because it helped nudge me out of academia, where I so patently did not belong, and into a different kind of life. I was allowed to take classes in other departments, and by now I was recovered from my earlier rejection so I decided to take a fiction writing class--also, the class was open to anyone; I didn't have to submit work to be accepted. This class was my aha! moment. The light bulb went off for me when I took that class. Suddenly, I understood what I wanted to do with my life. Now I just had to find a way to make a living while I did it.
I finished out the year at Columbia, got a job in which I had no interest whatsoever, and began to look for any kind of freelance writing that I could find. In the beginning, I wrote for very little money or even for free: I wrote for neighborhood newspapers, the alumni magazine of my college. I wrote brochures, book reviews, newsletters--anything and everything that anyone would ask me to write. I did this for a long time and eventually, it worked. I was able to be a little choosier about what I wrote, and for whom I wrote it. And I was able to use my clips to persuade editors to actually assign me articles and stories, instead of my having to write them and hope I could get then published.
But all the while I was writing articles and essays, I was also writing the kind of fiction--short stories, a novel--that had interested me when I was still a student at Columbia. And eventually I began to publish this work too. I've written two novels for adults, THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS and IN DAHLIA'S WAKE--and my third novel, BREAKING THE BANK, will be out in September. I presently live in Brooklyn, NY with my husband and our two children and two small, yappy dogs. I have been setting my recent novels in my own backyard so to speak; Brooklyn has been fertile ground in all sorts of ways.
I really enjoyed this book. It sat on my bookshelf for a long time before I picked it up, and then I was sorry I'd waited so long. It was a terrific read. Yes, it was uneven in places, but the characters were so well-drawn and so alive, I didn't care. I didn't even care that some of the plot points didn't work for me -- like Ruth taking off with Gabriel's child. I was just having too much fun reading. I really wanted to give this book 4 1/2 stars, but since I couldn't, and since I save 5 stars for books I wouldn't change at all, I had to settle for 4 in this case. I'd like to thank the author for the intimate glimpse into the world of ballet. I found it fascinating. I love it when a story is fun to read, plus I learn something. This book delivered on both counts.
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