By Ann Beattie514 pp. Scribner. US$30
By Judith Shulevitz
New York Times Sunday Book reviews, November 21, 2010
One thing that this collection of short stories by Ann Beattie makes it possible to do is imagine your way into the head of a New Yorker fiction editor at the moment of discovery. Roger Angell turned down more than a dozen stories sent to the magazine over 22 months by a very young Beattie, who was then in the process of dropping out of a graduate English program. But he wrote encouraging rejections (“I hope you will let us see more of your work, and that you will address your future submissions directly to me”) and finally accepted “A Platonic Relationship” (“What I like most about the story is its sparsity. Almost everything except the essential has been done away with, leaving one with the vision of a Giacometti”).
The story was published on April 8, 1974, when Beattie was 26 years old. Reading it all these years later, you may have to work a little to pick up the electrical currents pulsing beneath its dry, self-contained surface — Beattie’s style wasn’t called “minimalist” for nothing — but if you do, you will see some of what Angell must have seen.
(Left -Ann Beattie - Illustration by Joe Ciardiello)
The story’s protagonist, Ellen, has left her “lawyer husband and almost-paid-for house” to become a teacher. But she doesn’t fit in with the other teachers; her students laugh at her; and her husband refuses to go along with her urge to fight with him and instead helps her find a new place to live, “an older house . . . with splintery floors that had to be covered with rugs.” In short, separation from her husband does not make life self-evidently better for Ellen, and in some ways it makes things worse. Into this life comes a male college-student roommate named Sam — the relationship is platonic, she tells her husband — and though at first Sam is so passive he’s almost creepy, soon she realizes that his calmness keeps everyone around him calm, including her. She comes to rely on him. Then, one day, Sam tells Ellen he’s not happy.
Remember, it’s 1974. Ellen is acting on the imperative to self-actualize that is fast becoming the norm for women her age. Instead of happiness, however, she finds a different kind of misery, then an even freer spirit than herself, then the experience of having him do to her what she must have done to her husband. Beattie was simultaneously reporting on and satirizing her generation. She understood its elaborate alienation and self-pity; she heard, beneath the jaded, post-1960s self-mockery, the hope that nontraditional lifestyle choices were still viable, and the fear that they weren’t. She knew how to work these complicated sentiments into light, easy dialogue. And she was able to deflate the pretensions of her peers with a wit so laconic it was practically unnoticeable. Angell must have been beside himself.
Beattie’s next story, “Fancy Flights,” was published in The New Yorker six months later, and it featured Michael, an amiable stoner indifferent to material possessions whose self-absorption and childishness take on the dimensions of an American tall tale. How self-absorbed is Michael? “You walk out on your wife and daughter, then call because you’re lonesome,” his wife points out. Actually, he says, it’s because his dog ran away: “I really love that dog.” What about their daughter? his wife asks. “I don’t know. I’d like to care,” he replies. How childish is Michael? He brags to his daughter that he lives off his grandmother, who sends him money: “Daddy doesn’t want to work.”
And on Beattie goes, publishing one wry story after another in the welcoming pages of The New Yorker (three stories in 1974, five in 1975, four in 1976, and so on); she becomes so intimately associated with the magazine that people begin to talk of a New Yorker school of short fiction, with her as its exemplar.
Full piece at New York Times.
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