The New Yorker Stories [Hardcover]

I am a late bloomer to Ann Beattie's austere and edgy short stories, and it proved favorable . Her minimalist style is for the veteran reader, and for those of us willing to ponder their poignancy like we would a numinous painting whose meaning is often beyond its containment and yet embedded there. Her photographic eye for surface details expose cracks and tensions that open to a scalding world of suffocation and denial. Her characters circumvent the truth by poking at it peripherally or trying to defy it, shielding covetously from the pain or cynically attempting to control it. Comprehension is lying in wait behind the ambiguity of the narratives. But Beattie isn't superior to her reader; she entices you to be the psychologist of these subterranean reveals. She isn't going to solve their problems.

There are forty-eight short stories chronologically advancing from 1974 to 2006. I feel an intimacy with her narratives that I don't always feel in this form. She isn't over-stylized. Her almost toneless, declarative sentences are wry and cinematic rather than stilted and dismal. Beattie is ingenious at blending the strident with the yielding, the clamorous with the quietly desperate. The indirect slap and the whispered howl threaten to topple each house of cards.They illuminate the weakness and dissolution of her characters. Additionally, she enhances their impotence by the presence of the animal word. The dogs (present in numerous stories) are more lively and resolute than the people, and inhabit their space more fully.

One of my favorite stories is "The Burning House," written in 1979. Amy is the only female in the story, surrounded by a boisterous number of family and friends and a husband, Frank, who doesn't love her. Her closest friend is her gay brother-in-law, Freddy, who is perpetually stoned and, although he loves Amy, remains more dedicated to Frank. This story reveals Amy's chronic alienation from her supposed "supportive" loved ones . The final sentence, uttered by Frank, in bed, is soul-ripping.

In the 2006 "The Confidence Decoy," Beattie's atmospherics include a pronounced sense of unease and self-doubt. A retired lawyer, Francis, is packing up his dead aunt's house. He is interacting with the hired movers while also attempting to puzzle out his ineffectual son's actions. One of the movers carves confidence decoys for duck hunters. These decoys serve as a metaphor for Francis' own listlessness of confidence and focus, and lead to a harrowing course of events.

Beattie's ability to inflict her characters with shame, fear, confusion, alienation, and incapacitation is chilling . These tales are dark but not bleakly executed; they are crisp and deadpan and astonishing. The author is brilliant at limning the time period of each piece in just a few short sentences, yet they are timeless in essence. The later stories are more lyrical but just as emotionally terrifying. And her opening sentences are unrivaled. I highly recommend this for lovers of erudite and commanding literature.

From "Zalla"--says Little Thomas to his mother, after being struck for mutilating some silhouettes of the family:

"Do you think I care if I didn't have a nose?...I wouldn't care if I didn't have a nose or a mouth or eyes. I wish the sperm hadn't gone into the egg. I wouldn't mind if there was no me, and you wouldn't, either."

Lethal writing.

Beattie's stories (then and now) articulate certain confusions and disappointments that often haunt the reader not as fiction but as things that have happened in real life. Now when I look at a short story writer, I am most concerned with what I, as a writer can learn, and pieces by Hemingway, Faulkner, even my favorite, Raymond Carver, often seem heavy handed, too style conscious, more concerned with the telling than with the subject. Not so Ann Beattie's work. It makes me want to look around, not for clever twists, but to overhear conversations, catch fading facial expressions, sense relationships that might prove less than what they seem.

"It's a steep driveway, and rocky. David backs down cautiously--the way someone pulls a zipper after it's been caught. We wave, they disappear. That was easy." A novel or piece of book length nonfiction is a world complete in itself. A short story is more like a spotlight that shines on a crowd of people. We see what is there but also know there are things to the right and the left of the spotlight that we can't see directly. These are the events with the characters of the short story that happened before it began or that will happen after it the words on the page are over.

As writers we have to plant clues for the reader and we depend upon that reader to create what isn't expressed. It's this partnering with an audience in the creative process that is invaluable for other types of writing. They depend upon it, but nowhere (except perhaps with poetry) is it more essential than with the short story. The secret of good writing is to get your reader actively involved doing the work for you. Great short stories show us how to do that. With Ann Beattie, words are important, but the story takes place beneath the words, in the imagination of the person who reads it.

- John Lehman, Rosebud Book Reviews.com

I would give this book only 3 or 4 stars if read like a novel. The time span of the writing is 1974 to 2006 and you can't absorb the differences if you read this book straight through. When I gave it time and read a story with pauses between it was better. Short stories are different then novels and encompass a brief period of time. I found these stories simple and good. They are mostly about people in unhappy relationships. Read the NY Times book review. It gave me some insight on the different time periods. Very good book.