A few years ago I spent three days as a visiting writer on the campus of a liberal-arts college. The campus may have been small, the college in the hills of Ohio, but the English department, whose paid guest I was, ran an absolutely up-to-date operation. Among its members were a black, a Jew, an Asian woman, a homosexual, a combat-booted feminist, and a young woman whose socio-political provenance I did not immediately make out. When I inquired about this woman of the young teacher who had been assigned as my guide, a man who had himself recently been denied tenure—and to be denied tenure at such an institution is always a splendid inducement to speak plainly about it—he replied, “Oh, you mean Ruthie. Ruthie is from the 60’s.”
“From the 60’s”—the locution, I thought, was most interesting. “From the 60’s” sounds rather like from the Ukraine, or at least from another country. The 60’s do seem like another country—a country of a different time, a different spirit, but a real country nonetheless. Certainly its denizens are readily enough identified. Take Ruthie. In her early thirties, she was dark, chunky, and wore her hair in a Caucasian version of an Afro. She carried a backpack over a coat made out of the hide of some unidentifiable beast, a coat with string fringes and badly in need of a cleaning. She drove a Volkswagen bug, yellow, its back seat cluttered with books, Kleenex boxes, a large bottle of jug wine. Car and woman had a packed look, as if they might, without too great notice, take off for either coast. She was self-declared as a poet. She might have been a character in an Ann Beattie story, although I hadn’t yet read Ann Beattie, and so could not have known this.
I first heard of Ann Beattie, in fact, at another gathering of Ann Beattie characters, this one rather more prosperous. It was at a dinner given by a couple who were then living together. She was a historian who had recently been appointed to the directorship of a newly established woman’s program at a Midwestern university. He had an unfinished dissertation at Harvard and worked at intellectual odd jobs in and around the social sciences: a bit of teaching, a bit of consulting, a bit of time put in with public agencies. The other people there that evening, my wife and myself excepted, had been students in universities in the middle and late 60’s and early 70’s, a cause among them for some pride. A good deal of energy went into the preparation of the dinner, and a great deal of talk—about the bread, the wine, the pasta, the fish, the pastry—accompanied its digestion. Former hippies at least in spirit, these people took kindly to bourgeois habits while retaining adversary points of view; “the hippoisie” was the name they only half-jokingly gave to themselves. For a number of people there that evening, Ann Beattie was their writer, and to call them Ann Beattie characters would not, I suspect, have hurt their feelings.
_____________
I have now read Ann Beattie, her two novels and the three volumes of short stories that comprise her collected work to date. This is no small output for a writer of thirty-four. There are fifty of these stories. I believe I may have read some of them earlier when they first appeared in the New Yorker. I say “I believe” because I am not always certain. Reading them in her books I experienced a sense of déja lu. Have I read them before, or have I instead read stories like them, for I am told that Ann Beattie already has a number of imitators? (One line of dialogue I do clearly remember having read earlier. It runs, “Name me one thing more pathetic than a fag with a cold,” and is uttered by a homosexual.) Ann Beattie’s novels and stories do make an effect: they depress, even when they have what ought to be happy endings. Yet they somehow do not stay with one; they seem to seem to slide off the page; one story melts into another, and the whole finally dissolves in the mind, like one of those small blue pills some of Ann Beattie’s characters require to get through the day, a downer.
As I read through story after story of Miss Beattie’s, I asked myself why these stories—stories written by a writer with a true command of prose style and a deadly eye for right details—were at once vaguely depressing and distinctly forgettable? I have, for example, been reading Miss Beattie’s latest collection of stories, The Burning House,1 and turning back to the book’s table of contents I notice that I cannot connect stories to titles. Was “Afloat” about the woman about to have a child with a man to whom she is not married? Is “Playback” about the young man who works for an advertising agency? Is “Desire” the story in which everyone gets stoned, or in which the woman’s husband leaves her for another man? Beats me.
As for the depression, well, one is used to depression in modern fiction, which provides many laughs but very few smiles. One is used to it in traditional literature, too. Anna Karenina comes down with a bump. But however depressed that great book leaves you, you do feel you have got something for your sadness. The depression that comes with reading Ann Beattie is of a different order, and not just because she isn’t Tolstoy. It is depression at reading about the sheer hopelessness of her characters’ lives; from these lives, they learn nothing and neither do we. Nor, by design, are we supposed to. In one of the stories in The Burning House it is said of a six-year-old girl: “She used to like stories to end with a moral, like fairy tales, but now she thinks that’s kid’s stuff.”
_____________
Miss Beattie has a real subject, and a highly interesting one. Her subject is the fate of her own generation, the generation that was in college and graduate school in the late 60’s and early 70’s. This generation, as everyone knows, grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam war, and it was the first to have a free hand with sex and drugs, to know splendor both in and on the grass. I recall, in the middle 60’s, a Partisan Review symposium, those occasions on which intellectuals are invited to say things they are sure to regret later, in which nearly all the participants had a good word for the young. Everyone agreed that this was to be a generation of great promise. The members of this generation felt that they were promising, too, but they also felt that they were, in some odd and never quite defined way, promised. Promised what? Because of their own intrinsic superiority, moral and intellectual, they felt they were promised a freer and richer and happier life than any known before here in America and possibly on earth.
But the world of the 60’s ended neither with a bang nor with a whimper but, it would seem from Ann Beattie’s fiction, with an album. “Rachel cried when she heard Dylan’s Self-Portrait album, because, to her, that meant everything was over.” In the story “The Lawn Party” from the collection Secrets and Surprises (1979) we read: “When Janis Joplin died Elizabeth cried for six days.” A character in Miss Beattie’s first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1978), remarks of his sister: “You could be happy, too, Sam, if you were nineteen in 1975, and you hadn’t had your eyes opened in the 60’s.” In the same novel another character says: “Everybody’s so pathetic. What is it? Is it just the end of the 60’s?” And a character in Falling in Place (1980), Miss Beattie’s most recent novel, remarks: “There were a lot of things for which graduate school did not prepare you.” One of them being, the reader is tempted to answer, the rest of life.
About all of Ann Beattie’s fiction there is something of an after-party atmosphere. Her stories begin after the 60’s binge is done and gone. No mention is made of the Democratic convention of 1968, of the marches and protests, of any other of the momentous happenings of those years. In one of her stories a maimed Vietnam veteran appears, in another a woman’s brother is mentioned as having been killed in Vietnam, and in yet another a veteran is said to be unable to stop talking about Vietnam. Yet Miss Beattie does not hammer away at Vietnam or speak of politics except obliquely, though a foul air of things gone wrong hovers about her characters and their world. Anxiety, disappointment, despair, these are the pollutants in the Beattie atmosphere, and both characters and readers are made to choke on them.
Already in Distortions (1976), her first book of stories, the general pattern of Ann Beattie’s fiction is set. Distortions is very much a young writer’s book, and hence rather more experimental than the more mature Ann Beattie’s fiction will be. The book’s opening story is about a marriage of dwarfs. Another story is done in short takes, rather like blackout sketches. “Wesley has gaps between his teeth,” one such take begins; “Janie Regis’ hair is all different colors,” the next one picks up. Another experimental story is entitled “It’s Just Another Day in Big Bear City, California,” a title which is almost a story in itself. But the less experimental Ann Beattie’s stories are, the better. Taken by themselves, some of the straighter stories are quite impressive—“Wolf Dreams,” for example, written when Miss Beattie was only twenty-six. Nearly all the stories show a high degree of professional polish. The dialogue always feels right; the interior monologue, too, seems on target. The flat style, a Beattie trademark, is already in use in Distortions, as in this opening passage from a not very good story entitled “Hale Hardy and the Amazing Animal Woman”:
Hale Hardy went to college because he couldn’t think of anything better to do, and he quit because he couldn’t see any reason to stay. He lasted one and a half years. He did not exactly quit; he was thrown out. When that happened he went to visit his sister Mary, who was living with another girl, Paula, who was being supported by some dude. Hale didn’t know the dude’s name, or why he was supporting her, or why his sister was living there. He just went.
That passage reveals more than the style of Miss Beattie’s fiction; it reveals the peculiar will-lessness of her characters. Passive agents, they do not act but are acted upon. “The important thing,” one character in a story in Distortions advises another, “was to know when to give up.” Here is a note Ann Beattie has held through all her books. The first story in The Burning House ends thus: “What Ruth had known all along: what will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for grace.”
Amazing grace. If grace is what Ann Beattie’s characters aim for, very few achieve it. But then they don’t aim very carefully. Not much in life interests them. Politics doesn’t—though they are all convinced that America is hopeless—neither conventional politics nor emotional politics. “There aren’t any answers,” says a Beattie character. “That’s what I’ve got against woman’s liberation. Nothing personal.” Although people have love affairs, once a couple moves in together, the end is in sight. Sex is no big deal. Miss Beattie rarely describes it. Detailed description tends to be reserved for getting stoned. Few relationships endure. Work is pointless. Things fall apart; the center, hell, in Ann Beattie’s fiction not even the fringes seem to hold.
_____________
In a diary entry of 1945 Noël Coward wrote: “Read Elizabeth Bowen’s new short stories; exquisite writing but a trifle too inconclusive.” Perhaps it is well that Coward did not live to read Ann Beattie’s stories. Miss Beattie specializes in the inconclusive; inconclusiveness, in her fiction, is quite deliberate. It is part of her method. E. M. Forster once wrote that the king died and then the queen died is a story, but the king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot. Miss Beattie does not go in much for plot. Her work is, in some respects, anti-plot. In the story “Greenwich Time” in The Burning House a man is at the house of his former wife and her current husband; the house was one he once lived in with his wife. Now he is alone in it with his young son and the maid. His ex-wife and her husband are late—unusually late. Generally they are home long before now. It is worrisome. Yet why they are late, whether they will eventually arrive home safely, these are things we never learn. Instead, “Greenwich Time” ends with the maid telling the man that, though he may have been dispossessed from this house, she is still his friend. “Then they stood there, still and quiet, as if the walls of the room were mountains and their words might fly against them.” That’s it. End of story. Cut and print that (the New Yorker did, originally).
Chekhov instructed that if a gun appears on the Wall in a scene in the first act of a play, before the play is over the gun will be fired. Not in Ann Beattie’s stories; more likely the wall will disappear. This is again by way of saying how little interested she is in plot in the conventional sense. What her fiction strives to achieve is not development of character, accounts of motivation, or moral resolution—no, what she strives to achieve are states of feeling. This she often succeeds in doing. Thus in a story such as “A Reasonable Man,” from the collection Secrets and Surprises, she can show what a woman feels who is mismarried and on the edge of nervous breakdown—loneliness, frustration, anxiety, quiet terror—and you will feel it, too. Attempting to capture states of feeling, as opposed to doing so within the construction of careful plots, is of course a great aid to composition, which helps explain why Miss Beattie has been so prolific. What is less clear is why the states of feeling her stories reveal are always those connected with sadness and loss.
Another problem arises: the states of feeling Ann Beattie strives for, workable though they may be within the brief compass of a short story, are not sufficient to keep a longer work afloat. This is why her novels, in my view, sink. The first of them, Chilly Scenes of Winter, is about two young men, veterans of the 60’s, who are now in their late twenties. One is a Phi Beta Kappa who hasn’t the money to go to law school, so instead has to settle for a job selling men’s jackets. The other has a government job that bores him stiff, a mother who goes in and out of mental hospitals, and a love for a woman with whom he had an affair but who is married to someone else and about whom he cannot stop thinking. The novel’s title is also the title of a song by a group called the New Lost City Ramblers and Cousin Emmy.
The winter in question is that of 1974-75, the scene of such action as there is Washington, D.C. Very little sense of the city of Washington comes through. The characters are not described elaborately. What does come through, though, is that the characters in this novel are under a malaise. It is almost as if they had come back from a war, except they haven’t. “‘The goddam 60’s,’ Charles says. ‘How’d we end up like this.’” What, exactly, went wrong? A number of things, it turns out. The country, the United States, seems partly to blame: it provides no good work, it throws up characters like Richard Nixon, it is killing off its wildlife. Parents, partially, are to blame as well; at least most parents in Ann Beattie’s fiction, as in Chilly Scenes of Winter, have troubles that they seem to pass on to their children: divorce, alcoholism, madness. The old dreams, from Norman Rockwell to the legend of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, are dried up and dead. Things are grim. “Unhappiness,” said the young Henry James, “is a disease,” and Ann Beattie’s characters have caught it.
Perhaps I make this sound slightly grimmer than it is. Miss Beattie has a sly sense of humor. From time to time she will toss an interesting flake into her fiction, such as, in Chilly Scenes of Winter, the young woman who is making up her mind to be a lesbian, and who says of a friend in California: “She claimed she screwed Peter Fonda on the kitchen floor in an all-night health food restaurant, but I don’t believe it.” The novel’s hero thinks perhaps he ought to move to California but then concludes that, at twenty-seven, “he is too old for the West Coast.” The two principal characters in the book have longish exchanges—conversations are not quite what they are—about food, their pasts, their futures, that are Beckett-like in their comic hopelessness.
And yet a dark doleful cloud hangs over everything. At the close of Chilly Scenes of Winter, the married woman whom the hero of the novel loves, and about whom he ruminates at great boring length, leaves her husband and returns to our hero. “A story with a happy ending,” he says. But that seems unlikely. Why mightn’t she leave him again? Why mightn’t he soon grow tired of her? Why not any of a thousand possibilities—in fiction that is so weightless, where events occur without cause and life has no lessons to teach, anything can happen. If Ann Beattie’s fiction makes a single point it is this: the one thing you can depend on is that there is nothing you can depend on.
_____________
“It’s selling you such a bill of goods to tell you that you should get married and have a family and be secure. Jesus! What your own family will do to you.” So says a woman in Falling in Place, mother of three, whose husband, an advertising executive of forty, is having an affair with a young woman of the 60’s generation currently resident in a small apartment along Columbus Avenue. Falling in Place is Ann Beattie’s first novel about suburban, upper-middle-class family life, and that life—surprise, surprise—turns out to be hell. Not that the book is exclusively suburban. The cast of characters includes another assortment of 60’s casualties. Among them are dropouts from Bard College; pilgrims from the West Coast; a drug dealer worried about Three Mile Island (“No way drugs explain why this is a bad world”); and a woman graduate student teaching high school in the summer who “was born the year Howl came out, but she still felt sure that she was one of the people Ginsberg was talking about.” In Miss Beattie’s fiction there are, finally, two classes of people—those who came of age in the 60’s and those who didn’t, and those who did are better.
The interesting characters in Falling in Place, however, are the children. The advertising man and his wife have three: Mary, a fifteen-year-old who is mad for Peter Frampton and who responds to everything she doesn’t care for—which covers a great deal—with the phrase, Suck-o; John Joel, her younger brother, detached, a compulsive eater, who spends a lot of time reading violent comics or perched in a tree in his yard; Brad, the baby, who lives with his grandmother. Their father wants to leave their mother, but cannot quite bring himself to do so. A friend at his advertising agency tells him, “The real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.” Mary and John Joel, it must be said, are not the right children. They loathe each other, and such denouement as the novel provides comes about when John Joel, quite by accident, shoots and wounds his sister.
This act forces the hand of their father, who can barely grasp what he feels to be the enormity of it, and who because of it determines to leave his wife at last. Only—and this seems to me a decisive only—he, the father, does not know that the shooting was an accident. He acts on incomplete knowledge, and Miss Beattie, in the course of the novel, sees no need to complete it for him. That characters get things wrong, that their vision of events is more than a little occluded, none of this seems to matter. The world, Ann Beattie seems to be saying, goes sourly on its way. Things fall in place.
I say the world goes sourly on its way, but some might argue that Falling in Place is a relatively sunny novel. The father of these children goes off with his lady-friend. His wife, without him, will have a better chance to pick up the pieces of her own shattered life. His children, being young, presumably will pull themselves together. Another couple in the novel—an Abbie Hoffman type minus the genius for publicity, and the graduate student born the year Howl was published—settle in after troublous days. Near the novel’s close, a young man, a practicing magician, remarks: “It’s a rotten world. No wonder people want answers. No wonder they want to have parties and get distracted. Sometimes something nice happens, though.”
But not very often. How could it in a world seen through such dark glasses? As Chilly Scenes of Winter finishes off work, Falling in Place does the job on family. The surrounding culture provides no relief; there menace chiefly lurks. Join the magician in Falling in Place in his interior monologue: “He knew the real world was the Pentagon . . . and he was at least thankful that he was not involved in the real world.” Cop a thought from the advertising man in the same novel: “It was true that someone could dress very conventionally and still be evil: Nixon with his jacket and tie walking on the beach, for example.” (What would so many contemporary American novelists do without good old Dick Nixon still there to kick around?) Without work, without family, without support in the culture, what, really, is left for knowing people but such pleasure as can be taken on the run and the hope for some measure of personal salvation through awareness?
Awareness of what? Awareness, I believe Ann Beattie wants us to know, of what a dreadful crock life is. Philosophy resides in composition, and the method by which Miss Beattie creates her stories and novels tells much about their author’s view of the world. There is, to begin with, the causelessness in her fiction. Her characters are seldom allowed to know why things happen as they do, and without such knowledge there cannot be any deliberate action. It is for this reason that almost every Ann Beat-tie character is so passive and, finally, so depressing. What, after all, can be more depressing than to be certain that one has no control whatsoever over one’s destiny? Destiny, in the grand sense, simply does not exist in Miss Beattie’s fiction. Her characters neither know about it nor seem to care about it. All that they do know is that they are living in the shade of a malaise; since this malaise is rather vague, so are the reasons for their unhappiness. Can it be, one sometimes wonders, that the reason they are so unhappy is that they do not feel happy enough—that they feel life has reneged on its promises?
What is more, as they grow older, it continues to do so. Certainly, Miss Beattie’s fiction grows more and more cheerless. The first two stories in her latest collection, The Burning House, bring forth a brain-damaged child and a brain-damaged adult. The word cancer pops into the discussion fairly regularly. The intake of pills seems greater: yellow Valium, blue Valium, green Donnatal, reds. In one story a child is read to from the works of R. D. Laing, and in another a woman thinks, “Children seem older now.” Many is the miscarriage and no fewer the abortions. Meanwhile, the 60’s themselves begin to fade: Dennis Hopper—the usual prizes for readers who remember that name—puts in a cameo appearance in one story in The Burning House, and in another, set in Virginia, it is said that “Art Garfunkel used to have a place out there.” People sit around and tell where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot. But I had better stop—this is beginning to get me down.
_____________
What does Ann Beattie think of all this? I happened to note that The Burning House is copyright under the name Pity & Irony, Inc. I don’t know if that denotes a tax shelter or a self-regarding literary criticism. Miss Beattie pities her characters, true, but in the end her irony does not go very far. In her fiction it is not always easy to distinguish author from subject, dancer from dance. Her identification with her characters is nearly complete. In the biographical note to The Burning House she is made to sound like nothing so much as one of them: “She occasionally teaches writing at the University of Virginia and lives, with her dog, in New York City.” Ann Beattie is a generation writer, and that is a severe limitation. Milan Kundera, in his novel The Joke, has one of his characters say: “The very thought of a generation mentality (the pride of the herd) has always repelled me.” But a more severe limitation is that, while she knows a good deal about life’s phenomena, she chooses to deny life’s significance. In so doing, she ends by denying significance to her own work, for literature is finally about the significance and not the phenomena of life. At this point in her career, Ann Beattie is the chief purveyor of her own generation’s leading clichés—the L. L. Bean of what passes for 60’s existentialism.
1 Random House, 256 pp., $12.95.