Small-sized reviews, raves, and recommendations.

HARPER: I don’t understand why I’m not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die.

But there’s still the rest of you. There’s your breasts, and your genitals, and they’re amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs, they don’t get it, they just want him. Want him.

— Angels in America: Part Two: Perestroika, by Tony Kushner (1994)

Why did Charley, a star in the modern dance world, suddenly decide to leave it all behind and become a cloistered nun in a Provence convent? Did Johnny, her husband and enigmatic trust-fund artist, have anything to do with it? Immersions, a novel by Kyle McCarthy, has Charley’s younger sister Frances try to answer these questions. Told from Frances’s perspective, she herself is striving for anonymity, going to college and attending a ballet class.

From the outset, Frances is convinced Johnny had something to with Charley’s decision to join the convent. Because the nuns live a cloistered existence, that means Charley will be unable to see her family again, except in brief visits. The decision devastates Frances, who idolized her older sister. Despite entreaties from her family Frances chooses to do some amateur sleuthing. She insinuates herself with Johnny. The novel shows the hyper-competitive nature of ballet and what is does to young girls and women. Think of the rigorous training and discipline involved in those training to become Olympic athletes. It is this same ferocity combined with the presumptions of class and elegance the art world feeds the general public.

Things get complicated when Johnny and Frances consummate their relationship. Frances presumes his guilt with her sister’s decision, but she herself can’t escape the emotional messiness that’s the consequence of their sexual dalliance. It is the Big Bad Wolf finally getting Little Red Riding Hood. Or is it? As the novel progresses, we discover more about Johnny and his troubled family life. Frances discovers more about him and a darkness he keeps hidden away.

Immersions is a novel of masks. On one level it is a mystery story, a narrative about finding out what truly motivated people to make life-changing decisions. On other it is a novel of intimacy and the wreckage it leaves in its wake. Johnny, Charley, and Frances make a complicated menage, linked by the sloppy physicality of sex. Frances finds out about previous lovers and the alien world of high art. Not necessarily a Louis Auchincloss novel about Society, since the characters are too bourgeois or bohemian to fit into that particular socioeconomic milieu. Kyle McCarthy explores the dark corners of high society with shades of the Gothic one finds in the work of Joyce Carol Oates or the fraught eroticism of Marguerite Duras. It is a novel that shows what happens when the characters shed their masks and reveal their true selves.