Back When Men Shared Secrets
By Michiko Kakutani
Published New York Times: July 1, 2010

WALKS WITH MEN
By Ann Beattie
102 pages. Scribner. $17.

Author pic by Fred Field for The New York Times

No one’s been better than Ann Beattie at dropping a couple of brand names, book and movie titles or references to food and fashion to conjure a particular time and place and circumstance. The smart young denizens of the ’70s and ’80s who populate her best-known fiction tend to be clever, artsy types who, if they haven’t attended a notable university or law school, are taking night-school courses in poetry. They smoke joints, drink wine spritzers, eat ramen noodles, underline Russian novels and quote Wallace Stevens. They wear jackets from L. L. Bean, listen to Lou Reed, make mixtapes and know things like how to identify a Limoges plate without looking at the back.

In her slim new novella, “Walks With Men,” Ms. Beattie conjures New York in the 1980s, though it soon becomes clear that her narrator is looking back at that archaeological era through a rear-view mirror. It’s a time when hipsters looked for jazz albums in the Village, browsed paintings at the Mary Boone gallery and “contextualized” their angst “by quoting Proust, Rilke, Mallarmé and Donald Barthelme.” The Trump International Hotel on Columbus Circle was known then as the Gulf & Western Building, and Chelsea was still less than fashionable. When you were put on hold on the phone, you were likely to hear a Muzak version of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
Full report at NYT.

Footnote:
I bought this a couple of days ago at 192 Books and will write about it in due course.