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lucasmiller's review
5.0
I found a copy of this in my childhood bedroom at my parents house on a visit over the weekend. It had been purchased from McKay's Used Books and Media for $1.50. My all time favorite used bookstore, it is exceedingly odd that the price sticker was still on the cover. Over the years it has become a custom bordering on ritual to get home from McKay's and look through my newly acquired books, slowly peeling the price stickers off of each one. When I found the book their was a bookmark at the end of the ninth story of the fifteen in the collection. I started there. I do not recall when or if I read the first two thirds of the book, but I'm confident I did.
Ann Beattie is a wonderful writer. At the sentence level, she can describe things vividly with a simplicity that amazes me. Some people might read these stories and feel like not much happens, but that is at the core of what I love so much about them. Beattie's stories are all about aftermath. The dislocation, the divorce, car accident, death, birth, or other big life event has already occurred in these stories, and the quiet moments Beattie writes about finds characters trying (or not) to put the pieces back together and go on living, somehow.
I joked on twitter that these stories feel like Denis Johnson short stories before all of the characters started doing heroin. I'll stand by that joke, but both authors have written plenty of stuff that proves me wrong.
The late 1970s feel palpable in this collection of stories. Small details about lifestyles, the big houses in the country, rural New Hampshire and Vermont. A self-conscious nonchalance about drugs and drinking. Divorce and small children. A national hangover, it's piercing just by its reality, the authenticity of the settings.
Read this. Read Chilly Scenes of Winter. Read the New Yorker Stories too. Highly recommended.
Ann Beattie is a wonderful writer. At the sentence level, she can describe things vividly with a simplicity that amazes me. Some people might read these stories and feel like not much happens, but that is at the core of what I love so much about them. Beattie's stories are all about aftermath. The dislocation, the divorce, car accident, death, birth, or other big life event has already occurred in these stories, and the quiet moments Beattie writes about finds characters trying (or not) to put the pieces back together and go on living, somehow.
I joked on twitter that these stories feel like Denis Johnson short stories before all of the characters started doing heroin. I'll stand by that joke, but both authors have written plenty of stuff that proves me wrong.
The late 1970s feel palpable in this collection of stories. Small details about lifestyles, the big houses in the country, rural New Hampshire and Vermont. A self-conscious nonchalance about drugs and drinking. Divorce and small children. A national hangover, it's piercing just by its reality, the authenticity of the settings.
Read this. Read Chilly Scenes of Winter. Read the New Yorker Stories too. Highly recommended.
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