Beattitudes: On Ann Beattie

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http://www.thenation.com/article/164753/beattitudes-ann-beattie

Let’s imagine Ann Beattie in the early 1970s. She was a thin young woman, bucktoothed, with an open, vulnerable face and long straight hair in the period style. She was a little waiflike, maybe, a little mournful, a little recessive. She was surely not a confident person—she’d been depressed a lot in high school, and finished near the bottom of her class. Her childhood had been ordinary, and she had been even more ordinary. Now she was treading water in graduate school, still not much of a student, bored, buying time. The last thing she wanted was to have to get a job. She shared a place with a bunch of other people, more or less aimless like herself, no doubt, mourning the ’60s and waiting for something to happen. We can imagine her sipping tea on cloudy winter afternoons, listening to people’s problems. There must have been a lot of pot, as people drifted in and out (did she smoke herself, or did she prefer to keep a clear head?), a lot of empty talk of plans and dreams.

She had a secret life though, late at night, up alone with her typewriter. It was very cold where she lived. She’d put a pillow on the floor in front of the radiator, get an extension cord, sit as close to the heat as she could and write all night. It was just a hobby. She never thought that anything would come of it. Did she write to fill the hours of insomnia? To laugh at her friends behind their backs? To keep at bay the chaos she must have felt, the sense of emptiness, anxiety, free fall? Was the writing just the manic backlash of the day’s depression, or did she feel a growing strength of craft, something she was finally good at?

She showed some stories to a friend. Without telling her, he sent one to The New Yorker. A reader pulled it out of the slush pile and passed it on to the fiction editor. The editor sent her a note: in the future, please address your submissions directly to me. The magazine rejected the first seventeen she sent. Then, in the spring of 1974—she was 26—they published one, “A Platonic Relationship.” Over the next three years, they published fourteen more, and another eighteen in the six years after that.

A generation, it was felt, had found its chronicler in fiction. Beattiesque, Beattieland, the Beattie generation: these terms were soon coined. No one had written about these kinds of lives before: children of the counterculture set down, with a thud, in adulthood. Self-involved stoners, serial wives, absentee parents, would-be hippies, women trapped not in domesticity but outside it—stunted, stunned, impulsive, lost; hungry for love but unable to give it. People without families, without contexts, without enduring relationships, without anything at all to hold them in place. People yearning to escape, then yearning to escape their escape. People who needed to feel unique and ended up making themselves completely typical. People who couldn’t grasp what was happening to them, even though they were the ones who were doing it. “What am I trying to think about,” one of them wonders. “I’d like to care,” another tells his wife (she’s talking about the daughter he’s abandoned), “but what you just said didn’t make any impression on me.”