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The Beattie generation >> Are Ann Beattie's stories getting older or better? by JULIET WATERS
Deservedly or not, Beattie has been labelled the voice of stark, ironic yuppie grief. Along with eight new stories, Park City includes selected stories from a 25-year period, starting from her first collection Distortions (1976) up to What Was Mine (1991). They chronicle the post-modern, pre-Prozac years in the lives of characters who seem permanently swaddled in layers of mild but chronic depression, and who are described in the kind of lucid, perfect detail you might experience just before a car crash Typically, an early Ann Beattie has three or four people in their early 30s gathered at someone's house for a weekend. There's an artist, a professor, a carpenter, an ex-wife, a fag... and at least one of them has brought along a child. Someone is in love with someone he or she shouldn't be (best friend, sister of spouse, illegal nanny). The house has a lot of exposed wood and other stuff described in Beattiesque (i.e. microscopic) detail. Usually, these characters prefer smoking pot to drinking cocktails. They reminisce about the time they all got stoned and watched a loofah sponge expand in the water, "back before everyone had loofah sponges." There is a minor crisis, like the child who expresses his psychic wound by mixing wasabi into the toothpaste. But this is just a distraction from the fact that there has been, or will soon be, a car crash. Ann Beattie in her minimalist stage is even easier to parody. The perfect specimen from this phase is "Janus" from Where You'll Find Me (1986), a three-page story about a bowl. "The bowl was perfect. Perhaps it was not what you'd select if you faced a shelf of bowls, and not the sort of thing that would inevitably attract a lot of attention at a crafts fair, yet it had real presence." The bowl is brought from house to house by a real estate agent who believes that it subliminally encourages people to buy from her. Increasingly, it becomes clear that maybe she feels a bit too strongly about the bowl. She wants to tell her husband about the bowl, but she can't because it was given to her by her lover. It's the kind of story you finish expecting to find a list of questions from a high school fiction anthology starting with: "How does the author use (or overuse) a simple strategy to develop character?" Still, just because you have a low tolerance for yuppies doesn't mean you can't like sushi. And just because some of Beattie's characters make you cringe doesn't mean you can't appreciate her craft and sense of humour. What usually saves a Beattie story is a narrator with a subtle sense of irony and an honest compassion for the emptiness that turns people into materialistic narcissists. Even if there is one car accident too many in her early work, it stands the test of time because at the core of these stories are themes that will survive trends: people vainly trying to protect themselves against death and the insatiability and dissolution of love. Beattie has arranged the anthology with the new stories first. But one pro-Beattie reviewer recently recommended reading the stories chronologically, saving the new stories until last. I'd give the opposite advice. Beattie seems to have made a huge leap in consciousness between this and her last collection, and I suspect this is why she's coming out with a compilation of selected stories while she's still in mid-career. Somehow her characters seem to have developed more vitality and the scenarios are much less predictable. Occasionally someone seems to be on the verge of real happiness. The first story, "Cosmos," is so tender and painful, it's almost an Alice Munro story. "The Four Night Fight" is a classic picture of a fucked-up but basically healthy marriage. And the title story, "Park City," shows that Beattie has more talent for dialogue than she usually indulges. While the early stories are still worth reading, anyone who isn't already a fan might appreciate them better in retrospect. Park City: New and Selected Stories by Ann Beattie, Harper Collins, hc, 477 pp, $32
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"I felt like I was living in an Ann Beattie story," I once heard someone say, in a tone implying that this would be an experience roughly like living in hell. After finishing Park City: New and Selected Stories, I'll concur that there is such a thing as an Ann Beattie story and that I wouldn't want to live in one. But, to be fair, I'd modify that to say I wouldn't want to live in an early Ann Beattie story. Current Ann Beattie might not be so bad.