Ann Beattie

I am not a big fan of short stories, but when I saw this collection by Ann Beattie, I couldn’t pass it up. Onlookers is a compilation of linked stories that take place in Charlottesville, Virginia during the time of Covid and political distress when “any intelligent person has been driven half mad.” Readers may remember the white nationalist demonstration turned violent that occurred there in 2017. References to Charlottesville’s controversial statues and residents’ views permeate show more (but do not dominate) the stories. Rather, these are tales of a time, a place, a community, and some of the characters who inhabit it.

I loved Beattie’s wickedly clever and astute observations of life. There were many gems, but one of my favorite was that misinformation on social media has become the modern Paul Revere. It was a pleasure to read such literate pieces.

As you read the stories, try to remember the characters from each story, as relationships to them may appear in later tales.

Thanks to #netgalley and #scribner for the ARC. show less

I am half-ashamed to have not previously have read Ann Beattie. Her writing has an amazing quality of being humorous but profound at the same time, of having pathos and lightness at once. The characters have such a light touch, and yet they astounded me in their realness. (Compare these short stories in their aliveness to some full length novels filled with half-dead people.)

A Beattie story is character driven, slice of life vignettes which are really modern-day commentaries on relationship show more dynamics and the changing American family and social structure. Those who prefer plot driven, beginning-middle-end stories would not appreciate these rather advanced pieces of art. Do not underestimate the austerity of her prose, the sparseness of her characters. Yet with few words she provides an artistic analysis of the characters who inhabit her spaces. There is wisdom here. Some of the stories feel flimsy, and unfinished--even these are thought provoking. Beattie will leave you scratching your head trying to figure it out--but perhaps the point is to think and to just consider the greater meaning.

The most poignant situations in modern relationships are presented in a way so raw--divorce, step-families, emotional abuse, affairs,narcissism and sociopathy--and yet she still has the ability to sprinkle in a little humor where you least expect it. Some of these had me laughing out loud--but they are always profound, and thought provoking and they made me want to go right back to the beginning and read them again.

Written chronologically as they were published in the New Yorker from 1977-2006, we are able to see the astonishing growth of her talent. The final story, The Confidence Decoy shows this remarkable culmination, where all her best talents fuse together, and yes it is even the funniest.

My personal favorites are :
Fancy Flights
Wolf Dreams
Dwarf House
Wanda's
Colorado
The Lawn Party
Weekend
Tuesday Night
Shifting
The Cinderella Waltz
Running Dreams
Afloat
Girl Talk
Zalla
Find and Replace
The Confidence Decoy show less

Dazzlingly original, Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon is a riveting exploration of an elusive American icon and of the fiction writer’s art.

Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon’s wife: “interchangeable with a Martian,” she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and show more catastrophically self-destructive man.

Drawing on a wealth of sources from Life magazine to accounts by Nixon’s daughter and his doctor to The Haldeman Diaries and Jonathan Schell’s The Time of Illusion, Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon’s point of view. Like Stephen King’s On Writing, this fascinating and intimate account offers readers a rare glimpse into the imagination of a writer.

Beattie, whose fiction Vanity Fair calls “irony-laced reports from the front line of the baby boomers’ war with themselves,” packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom boomers came of age. Mrs. Nixon is a startlingly compelling and revelatory work. show less

My first exposure to Ann Beattie and not my last, as I love her clear and strong prose. That said, this story didn't do much for me. It's about a young woman, fresh out of college, who takes up with an older man who promises to educate her in "the ways of the world." His Svengali-like influence is cringe-y, and the narrator, Jane, seems too smart to be susceptible to it, but she isn't. This is a short work, barely 100 pages, and might have been better more fully fleshed out.