The New Yorker Stories

The New Yorker Stories, by Ann Beattie, is just what it sounds like: a collection of all of her stories published in that august magazine, from 1974 to 2006. I think I went about reading it the wrong way, though it was from necessity; since I checked the book out from the library I had a limited time to read the 48 stories contained within, so I had to read them in bunches. Ideally, they should have been read one per day. When reading them in bunches, they tend to blur into one, negating some of the effect.

Beattie is known for a certain style--an eye surgeon's skill at portraying detailed sketches of life among a certain kind of quasi-bohemian slackers. This is very true of her 70s stuff, which has a hold over from the hippie 60s. It was interesting to see her work change over the years, as her last few stories were about older people dealing with elderly parents or irresponsible children.

As I look back over the book a few stories stand out. From the early work I enjoyed "Wanda's," in which a young child is sort of kidnapped by her father while staying with her mother's friend. In a similar vein, "The Cinderella Waltz" deals with a girl who lives with her mother, as her father has moved in with another man. The mother is friendly with her ex-husband's lover, and an interesting family dynamic is established.

Many of her early stories don't have much plot to speak of, but her later work is more complex, story-wise. "Second Question" is about AIDS, and heaves with empathy, while two terrific stories from the new millennium deal with daughters and their troublesome mothers. "Find and Replace" has a woman shocked to hear her widowed mother is going to move in with another man (and has a lot of computer jargon, which is interesting since when Beattie began writing stories there was no such thing as e-mail), and "The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation" has a woman trying to cope with a mother who has dementia from a stroke.

The last story, "The Confidence Decoy," is a wonderful shaggy-dog tale about a man and his strange encounter with a couple of moving men, and his son's girlfriend's experience on a crashed plane.

Many of the stories, as I look back on the table of contents, are forgettable, but again, I think that's because I had to rush through the book. If I read three stories in succession, by the third I was running out of steam. I did mark a few lines that made me stop and admire: "She...found that she didn't mind literature if she could just read it and not have to think about it," or similes like "The bartender passed by by, clutching beer bottles by their necks as if they were birds he had shot."

Beattie is also a stickler for detail. A typical opening is this one, from "Gravity:" "My favorite jacket was bought at L.L. Bean. It got from Maine to Atlanta, where an ex-boyfriend of mine found it at a thrift shop and bought it for my birthday. It was a little tight for him, but he was wearing it when he saw me. He said that if I had not complimented him on the jacket he would just have kept it. In the pocket I found an amyl nitrate and a Hershey's Kiss. The candy was put there deliberately." Those few sentences are so fraught with possibility it's hard to know where the story will go--it's as if the story were spring-loaded.

My advice to those who favor minimalist American short fiction is to definitely seek this book out, but savor it. Read a story every few days, but do read them in order, and follow the progression of an artist as she ages.