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beefmaster's review
5.0
cross-posted on my blog
Of course, Beattie is a name I've long heard hailed, especially for her short stories. As I seem to be a little allergic to short fiction, I went with her 1976 debut novel. Set during the time between epochs, as if anticipating the upheaval and great change of the 1980s, Chilly Scenes of Winter depicts the delicious pain of waiting, the absence of events between moments. Charles, our protagonist, is waiting for his lover Laura to leave her husband. He's waiting for a new job, a new direction, a new anything to change his life. When confronted with the possibility of change, he leaps at it, hoping that this one shift will signal the momentous one, as the pebbles herald for the landslide. His mother is crazy, his sister is away at college, his only friend has just lost his job, and he can't seem to muster any interest in the limited possibilities for romance in his life.
While this does sound like ManPain The Novel, or the collected works of Jonathan Franzen, Beattie's light touch, aesthetic precision, and awareness of Charles' pathetic nature alleviate any of the gross manpain aspects. Laura, the object of his affections, is certainly objectified: when he imagines her, when he constantly obsesses over her, his thoughts are a melange of memory and fantasy. He remembers having those goofy couple moments every couple has (the kind that just can't be explained to an outsider with all sincerity and without couching it as some lark or silliness) and he imagines a life with her in the future. When they finally meet in the emotional climax of the novel, Beattie's narrator mentions twice Charles' focus on her ass. Charles' pretext for meeting is to have Laura cook him a dessert, the domestic symbol of orange souffle that he's been pining for. His dead father, his crazy mother, his dim but well-meaning stepfather have never given him the singular family unit he so desperately desires but can't really articulate. Laura and her dessert, Laura and her domesticity represent such a shift from his mother and her failure to mother. Charles is nothing but a lost child seeking stability and meaning.
The more I think about this novel, the more I think it's one of the finest things I've read in a long time. Not only in its construction and scaffolding, but in the bricks of prose of which it is composed. Her short, declarative sentences, staccato without feeling terse, have the feeling of journalism. Beattie piles on details in long paragraphs, memories and thoughts and sensations, without too much flourish (a distant relative of Gass's technique of bombardment of seemingly inconsequential specificity) and the cumulative effect is almost journalistic. It's her eye for detail: she makes mention of a can of V-8 juice on the table, during a sequence of dinner preparation; she—and Charles—notices a pair of black boots on a woman; the narrator notices an absence of Muzak in an elevator. The absence hums through the novel, a background radiation affecting everything. Near the beginning of the novel, during a conversation between Pete, the step-father, Susan the sister, and Charles, Susan provides an illuminating clue:
Of course, Beattie is a name I've long heard hailed, especially for her short stories. As I seem to be a little allergic to short fiction, I went with her 1976 debut novel. Set during the time between epochs, as if anticipating the upheaval and great change of the 1980s, Chilly Scenes of Winter depicts the delicious pain of waiting, the absence of events between moments. Charles, our protagonist, is waiting for his lover Laura to leave her husband. He's waiting for a new job, a new direction, a new anything to change his life. When confronted with the possibility of change, he leaps at it, hoping that this one shift will signal the momentous one, as the pebbles herald for the landslide. His mother is crazy, his sister is away at college, his only friend has just lost his job, and he can't seem to muster any interest in the limited possibilities for romance in his life.
While this does sound like ManPain The Novel, or the collected works of Jonathan Franzen, Beattie's light touch, aesthetic precision, and awareness of Charles' pathetic nature alleviate any of the gross manpain aspects. Laura, the object of his affections, is certainly objectified: when he imagines her, when he constantly obsesses over her, his thoughts are a melange of memory and fantasy. He remembers having those goofy couple moments every couple has (the kind that just can't be explained to an outsider with all sincerity and without couching it as some lark or silliness) and he imagines a life with her in the future. When they finally meet in the emotional climax of the novel, Beattie's narrator mentions twice Charles' focus on her ass. Charles' pretext for meeting is to have Laura cook him a dessert, the domestic symbol of orange souffle that he's been pining for. His dead father, his crazy mother, his dim but well-meaning stepfather have never given him the singular family unit he so desperately desires but can't really articulate. Laura and her dessert, Laura and her domesticity represent such a shift from his mother and her failure to mother. Charles is nothing but a lost child seeking stability and meaning.
Laura is baking bread. She is probably not still baking. It is probably out of the oven. The Ox [Laura's husband] is probably eating it. Charles is hungry; he would like some of that bread. More than that, he would like that dessert. More than that, he would like Laura.He meanders from encounter to encounter, just as the novel does. In the review at The New York Times, J.D. O'Hara makes mention of Beattie's skill with situation, rather than plot. He writes:
Little in our own lives corresponds to this orderliness, and our own sensibilities are seldom so goal-oriented, except in supermarkets. Beattie understands and dramatizes our formlessnessO'Hara's aside of the supermarket is a sly nod to one of the recurring jokes in the novel; Charles has a nervous tic, since time immemorial, of checking and rechecking his wallet for sufficient funds when visiting the grocery store. He can't stop himself from this, even when he knows he has enough. He always has enough but he still feels anxious about having enough. A symbol, yes, but without the bright neon flashing signs directing our attention to its symbolic function. O'Hara calls attention to Beattie's gentle and skilled hand with symbols: "Such moments, with their texture of sadness and comedy, evoke our own lives directly, with none of the fashionable evasions of symbolism; they imply that life signifies...."
The more I think about this novel, the more I think it's one of the finest things I've read in a long time. Not only in its construction and scaffolding, but in the bricks of prose of which it is composed. Her short, declarative sentences, staccato without feeling terse, have the feeling of journalism. Beattie piles on details in long paragraphs, memories and thoughts and sensations, without too much flourish (a distant relative of Gass's technique of bombardment of seemingly inconsequential specificity) and the cumulative effect is almost journalistic. It's her eye for detail: she makes mention of a can of V-8 juice on the table, during a sequence of dinner preparation; she—and Charles—notices a pair of black boots on a woman; the narrator notices an absence of Muzak in an elevator. The absence hums through the novel, a background radiation affecting everything. Near the beginning of the novel, during a conversation between Pete, the step-father, Susan the sister, and Charles, Susan provides an illuminating clue:
"Kids dance nowadays, don't they?" Pete says, riding down in the elevator.The Sixties and its promise are over: Nixon is a crook (Charles imagines him tanned and golfing) and Kennedy is dead (Charles read the National Enquirer, which teases JFK is a vegetable with Jackie O tending to him, in secret). All that's left is the gaping maw of the future, a dark abyss to be filled with the hope of something—anything—happening.
"Not much," Susan says. "Nobody does much of anything any more. I don't even think there are many drugs on campus."
ckrupiej's review against another edition
"Passam junto à secretária do guarda-noturno.
-Nada a declarar - diz Pete, expondo o sobretudo. O guarda não sorri. Charles lança uma olhadela ao livro pousado na secretária: Poesia do Século XVII- provavelmente aquele foi o único emprego que o homem conseguiu arranjar." - tão actual !
-Nada a declarar - diz Pete, expondo o sobretudo. O guarda não sorri. Charles lança uma olhadela ao livro pousado na secretária: Poesia do Século XVII- provavelmente aquele foi o único emprego que o homem conseguiu arranjar." - tão actual !
biedermeier_margo's review
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
3.25
zasey's review
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
idaida's review
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism
It is a bit edgy.kcnoun's review
5.0
i have this thing where i sometimes find small, arbitrary things that probably wouldn’t bother anyone else really depressing for no particular reason. i have no idea why but it can weirdly make me feel just as awful as if i actually had something to be upset over. anyway, i bring this up because this entire book is composed of people experiencing life this way, of seeing and hearing casual things that quietly devastate them for reasons they can’t quite place, and having these mundane conversations that maybe mean nothing to one person involved but the world to another. so of course i loved this book but it made me feel like i was dying the entire time and i would never recommend it to anyone. five stars
dayofthelords's review
4.0
Bleak and humorous with a lot of subtle and not so subtle baby boomer loneliness and lament. Really liked this. More than the few short stories of her’s I’ve read.
slothrop's review
5.0
Just incredible. I laughed and winced. Characters so real I thought I knew them. I will read everything Beattie writes.
tipi's review
5.0
The comfiest title and the comfiest novel. What it might have looked like had Raymond Carver ever sat down to write a full length project, and it's arguably better than anything he ever wrote. It's about young adults plagued by disenchantment, but not in the adolescent sort of way. Where the prospect of financial independence might excite a teenager, it only makes these characters wearier. Independence is really only another word for loneliness, we quickly learn.
Twenty-somethings with their own apartments who sleep over at their friends' places not because they love each other, but because it's better than sleeping alone. Anytime somebody mistakenly refers to their significant other as "Mom" or "Dad," I recommend them Chilly Scenes of Winter.
It gets my vote for the most under-appreciated novel of all time.
------------------------
Reread. Now that I'm 22 going on 23, and only just a few years shy of 26‰ЫУthe age of the protagonist, Charles‰ЫУI figured this was due for a reread. I was a freshman in college when I read Chilly Scenes of Winter for the first time, and it didn't hit me nearly as hard then as it does now that I'm entering my first year of postgraduate life. But god damn. I forgot just how dismal this is. The characters are in an absolute rut, and that fact only further reveals itself as the novel progresses. At the onset, Charles spends most of his time with his best (and arguably only) friend Sam, and two-hundred odd pages later, not much has changed. My heart breaks a little bit when Charles and Sam go out for pizza and beer on the third Friday night in a row, or when Charles fails to actualize a party he spends a bulk of the novel planning. These are real problems that twenty-somethings face. But what's even more heartbreaking is when Charles gets on the phone with his aging stepfather, a man who never has anything interesting to say beyond that he got a new car, or what he cooked for dinner last night, and whose life is so pathetic that he seeks vicarious amusement from his stepson's reluctant intimations of his own banal life.
Chilly Scenes is set in the winter of 1975, a fact we're constantly reminded of whenever a character expresses his or her anticipation of a Bob Dylan album which is about to release. Whenever Charles turns on the radio, he keeps expecting to hear the lead single, but never does. The characters have no way of knowing it, but no album befits their gloomy lives better than the one they can't wait to hear. The novel ends just before Blood on the Tracks hits the shelves, but I just hope that it helped them all feel a little less alone.
- I don't know. I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for everybody.
- If you just categorically feel sorry for everyone, it must be something bothering you.
Twenty-somethings with their own apartments who sleep over at their friends' places not because they love each other, but because it's better than sleeping alone. Anytime somebody mistakenly refers to their significant other as "Mom" or "Dad," I recommend them Chilly Scenes of Winter.
It gets my vote for the most under-appreciated novel of all time.
------------------------
Reread. Now that I'm 22 going on 23, and only just a few years shy of 26‰ЫУthe age of the protagonist, Charles‰ЫУI figured this was due for a reread. I was a freshman in college when I read Chilly Scenes of Winter for the first time, and it didn't hit me nearly as hard then as it does now that I'm entering my first year of postgraduate life. But god damn. I forgot just how dismal this is. The characters are in an absolute rut, and that fact only further reveals itself as the novel progresses. At the onset, Charles spends most of his time with his best (and arguably only) friend Sam, and two-hundred odd pages later, not much has changed. My heart breaks a little bit when Charles and Sam go out for pizza and beer on the third Friday night in a row, or when Charles fails to actualize a party he spends a bulk of the novel planning. These are real problems that twenty-somethings face. But what's even more heartbreaking is when Charles gets on the phone with his aging stepfather, a man who never has anything interesting to say beyond that he got a new car, or what he cooked for dinner last night, and whose life is so pathetic that he seeks vicarious amusement from his stepson's reluctant intimations of his own banal life.
Chilly Scenes is set in the winter of 1975, a fact we're constantly reminded of whenever a character expresses his or her anticipation of a Bob Dylan album which is about to release. Whenever Charles turns on the radio, he keeps expecting to hear the lead single, but never does. The characters have no way of knowing it, but no album befits their gloomy lives better than the one they can't wait to hear. The novel ends just before Blood on the Tracks hits the shelves, but I just hope that it helped them all feel a little less alone.
- I don't know. I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for everybody.
- If you just categorically feel sorry for everyone, it must be something bothering you.