Rules For Aging by Roger Rosenblatt.
Harcourt, 2000. $8.95 — 160 pp.

Adrienne Sharp’s opening story in White Swan, Black Swan sets the tone and the theme for the rest of the short stories in this collection.

In this story, “Bugaku,” Sharp tells us of a young dancer, Joanna, who is on the verge of stardom in the ballet. When we meet Joanna, she is irritated with her boyfriend, another dancer named Ridley, who is the star of a dance company when they meet. As Ridley’s fortunes begin to sink and Joanna’s to rise, we see through her eyes her own shift toward independence from Ridley while Ridley himself begins to cling more closely to her. The last few lines show us both their fates and the fact that Sharp’s writing style is — well, sharp:

The audience takes a collective breath. I let my head roll back. Then my arms. My tiny headdress grazes the floor, and from this inverted, disorienting posture, I see Ridley staring at me from the wings. His expression is hard to fathom, and for a moment, as Nilas rotates me almost parallel to the floor and almost at its level, I try to fathom it. But then Nilas is pulling me upright, pulling me further into the dance, and I don’t look for Ridley again.

All of the other stories in White Swan, Black Swan are also concerned with the ballet. Whether looking at the immortals of the ballet and modern dance — George Balanchine, Margot Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and a half-dozen other well-known dancers and choreographers — or at the unknowns and the failures, Sharp blends together her knowledge of ballet and her writing skills to give us insight into the minds and hearts of her characters.

My own personal favorite story in this collection was “Wili.” Katherine, who has danced in a professional ballet company for five years, is slowly arriving at the realization that her dancing days are numbered and that she will never be more than “a wili, which basically requires me to stand on one foot with the other one pointed behind me for about the whole of Act II.” Fighting constantly with her boyfriend, taking drugs to help her perform, Katherine finds that her only place of comfort is with her widowed sister and her sister’s 4-year-old daughter. Through Katherine’s examination of her life and that of her bereaved sister, we see the effects of failure and of ways to come to grips with that failure. Katherine says of her sister Alison, whose husband died so young and who must now sell her home, that “I’m rich suddenly, with grief, for what she thought her life would be. It’s not her fault, it’s not what she deserves, but it’s what she has to take instead.” Such a bit of wisdom, so utterly true and yet so frightening to many of us, makes the reader achingly aware of life’s vicissitudes and our own personal failures.

Readers more familiar with the ballet than I will doubtless take a good deal of interest in stories such as “Don Quixote,” “The Immortals: Margot + Rudolf 4 Ever,” and “A Short Season.” In these stories Sharp blends reality and fiction as she looks at the lives of various stars from the world of ballet.

Ballet fans and lovers of good storytelling will find much to appreciate in Adrienne Sharp’s White Swan, Black Swan.

Readers who are looking for some post New Year’s moral instruction humorously presented should turn to Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules For Aging. Rosenblatt gives us 58 rules to help us live longer and to enjoy it more while we’re at it.

Take rule 40, for example: “A long and happy life lasts five minutes.” No one likes to hear such a thing, of course, yet Rosenblatt points out that many people actually believe that a long life of uninterrupted happiness is a real possibility. Happiness is wonderful, Rosenblatt says, “but if you’ve had more than five consecutive minutes of it, it means that you weren’t thinking.”

Rule 47: Culture Rules states:

See no movie that has been called “exquisite”

Read no novel that has been called “brave”

Attend no concert that has been called “long, but worth every minute.”

Attend no opera that begins with the word “Der.”

Attend no other opera.

Several of the rules urge readers to look outward rather than inward in order to live a longer, more contented life. Though he presents these rules in a breezy, witty manner, Rosenblatt understands that we inhabit a world in which we tend to focus on ourselves. Rule 2, for instance, states, “Nobody is thinking about you.” Rule 8 gives Dylan Thomas’s old dictum: “If someone is boring you, it’s probably you.” Rule 37 — “The waitress is not waiting for you” — reminds older men that 20-year-old women are not waiting with bated breath to date them. Rule 42 — “The unexamined life lasts longer” —contradicts Socrates, but Rosenblatt is making the point that we need to look outward as well as inward.

If you’re looking for some light but instructive reading, or simply for a birthday present for a colleague or friend, try Rules For Aging.

(Jeff Minick is a teacher and writer who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)