Friday Fiction: Ann Beattie: Chronicler of a Generation?

--by Hanje Richards

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After publishing several stories in The New Yorker, Ann Beattie burst on the literary scene in 1976 with not one, but two books – a collection of short fiction and a critically acclaimed debut novel. Almost immediately, she was proclaimed the unofficial diarist of an entire generation, evoking the lives of feckless, young, middle-class baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s yet never really grew up, choosing instead to lug around their dashed expectations like so much excess baggage.
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Indeed, Beattie's fiction is filled with such unhappy characters – intelligent, well-educated people whose lives are steeped in disappointment and a vague sense of despair. Yet, Beattie vehemently denies that she set out to chronicle an era or to describe a particular demographic. ''I do not wish to be a spokesperson for my generation,'' she told The New York Times in 1985.
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Ann Beattie has been compared to Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and John Updike. She holds an undergraduate degree from American University and a Masters degree from the University of Connecticut. Beattie has taught at Harvard College, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Virginia.
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These are some Beattie titles held by the Copper Queen Library:

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Another You - Marshall is an English professor at a small college in New Hampshire, and he seems to be experiencing one of those pesky midlife crises, as is Sonja, his wife. But Beattie explodes this convention and creates a drama of escalating intensity about how easily ordinary lives can go completely out of control. Every character has a secret, and, unnervingly, every secret is connected. When Evie, Marshall's charming stepmother, dies, the door opens on the long-concealed facts of her life. As truth proves to be more elusive than a subatomic particle, Beattie's addled but resilient characters cling to love and strive for compassion, if not comprehension.
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The Doctor’s House - The novel opens to Nina's account of her brother's sexual appetites and betrayals, and leads into her mother's narrative. As new shadows and light are cast on Nina's story, painful secrets of life in her father's house – the doctor's house – emerge. In the dramatic third movement, the brother gives us his perspective. Through subtle shifts, The Doctor's House chronicles the fictions three people fabricate in order to survive their lives and showcases the keen observances of family and culture that have made Beattie one of our most admired voices.
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Follies - Odd but subtle coincidences, missed connections, strained family relations –these are the major dynamics in this collection of nine stories and a novella. In the latter, "Flechette Follies," a random accident – George Wissone rear-ends Nancy Gregerson at a stoplight – in Charlottesville, Va., sparks a connection that affects far-flung people..
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Beattie's stories of adult children attempting to make sense of their aging parents and their own relationships are also compelling. In "Find and Replace," a woman tries to comprehend her mother's decision to suddenly move in with another man following the death of her husband; "The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation" spools out the strained relations between two siblings after their mother has a stroke.
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Love Always - The book opens at a Vermont retreat, where the sophisticates of a trendy New York magazine, Country Daze, have gathered. Lucy Spenser, for example, writes both the letters and answers for a tongue-in-cheek Miss Lonelyhearts column. Lucy's niece, 14-year-old Nicole, is a TV actress who portrays an adolescent alcoholic on a popular soap opera. The brilliance of the novel results from Beattie's intertwining how the real-life Vermont group is defined not just by the bucolic fantasy of country life espoused by the magazine but also by the fantasies and grim truth of the Miss Lonelyhearts column, as well as the melodramatic, selfish, and sometimes cruel world of television and Hollywood soaps.
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Park City: New and Selected Stories - Eight of the 36 stories in this collection have not been previously published in book form; the rest are selected from earlier collections, thus offering an interesting survey of how the writer has changed – and how she hasn't. From the start of her career, Beattie has been compared to Cheever and Updike, chroniclers of the chilly middle classes, and also to Raymond Carver, master practitioner of that school of literature known as minimalism. In her world, as in our own, there are no grand epiphanies, no moments of blinding realization. Instead, her characters muddle through their days in a series of small events that culminate in a whisper instead of a bang.
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Picturing Will - This novel unravels the complexities of a postmodern family. There's Will, a curious five-year-old who listens to the heartbeat of a plant through his toy stethoscope; Jody, his mother, a photographer poised on the threshold of celebrity; Mel, Jody's perfect – perhaps too perfect – lover; and Wayne, the father who left Will without warning and now sees his infrequent visits as a crimp in his bedhopping. Beattie shows us how these lives intersect, attract, and repel one another with dazzling shifts and moments of heartbreaking directness.

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What Was Mine & Other Stories - A collection of short fiction, twelve works in all, including two never-before-published novellas. Here are disconnected marriages and uneasy reunions, nostalgic reminiscences and sudden epiphanies – a remarkable and moving collage of contemporary lives.