What a daunting challenge this author confronted when crafting "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life."
Three incompatible players vie for attention in the book's 300 pages: the author, Ann Beattie; the husband of the woman first mentioned in the title, Richard Nixon; and the ostensible subject of the book, Pat Nixon. Each of these persons is known for practicing a kind of obscurantism, by which I mean deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known. For Beattie this has been an aesthetic choice. The writer Jay McInerney once described Beattie's preferred style as "a refusal to overdetermine her characters, a reluctance to explain their behavior." For President Nixon the withholding of information was a practice that dragged him ultimately to the brink of impeachment. For his wife Pat Nixon this behavior was an emotional defense, how she chose to preserve personal dignity in the face of prying inquisitors.
So what have these three jousting protagonists created? In the judgment of most readers who've posted reviews, the result is an odd, unstable, and ultimately dissatisfying book. Beattie, the ringleader, comes across as showy and self-indulgent. Nixon emerges as self-pitying, a boor to be around. And Pat Nixon? Even with all the creative forces at her disposal, Beattie fails to inspire the First Lady to escape her comfort zone. Mrs. Nixon remains, at book's end, an enigma.
What's to like about MRS. NIXON? Answers come from some professional critics who say the book is an interesting literary concoction, unclassifiable, genre-bending, playful and polymorphous, and unlike anything Beattie's written before. But notice how these descriptions avoid answering the question of whether the book is a worthwhile read.
My advice: MRS. NIXON is a book for the adventurous, literary minded reader, and for Beattie completists. Others need not apply.
For die-hard Beattie fans who pick up the book, one aspect you'll find yourself monitoring is the author's empathy for Mrs. Nixon. This won't be a surprise. Consider how many of Beattie's stories focus on the incomprehensible mystery of an oddly paired (here, oddly married) woman and man. MRS. NIXON stitches together a series of chapters, over 40 in all, each an attempt by Beattie, using a slew of different means, to conjure up something -- anything -- of the elusive, real Pat Nixon.
Beyond the circle of Beattie acolytes, what may be of interest are the chapters that interrupt the chunks of experimental literary fiction and instead offer Beattie's thoughts on the art of writing. In these pages Beattie analyses her favorite authors (Chekhov and Carver especially) and dissects her favorite short stories. Reading these asides is a little like auditing one of Professor Beattie's creative writing seminars at UVA. She glides from thoughts about the limitations of language to a haunting realization of the limits of knowing, really knowing, anyone. All is not dour, however. The book occasionally is animated by Vaudeville-like antics. Past its dark opening pages come segments that are like an experimental variety show. Think of a stylistically diverse -- and perverse -- exhibition whose theme is, So Who Was Pat Nixon?
Here Beattie's guiding spirit is Donald Barthelme. His stories she admires for their mix fact and fiction, high and low, art criticism and gossip and comic strips. Some of the shortest chapters in MRS. NIXON adopt Barthelme's brand of flash fiction. Beattie drops Pat Nixon into exceptionally compact stories that focus only on incident rather than rolling out a narrative arc. For example, the serious and the unserious meet in the chapter in which Elvis visits the White House. One delight: Beattie's mimicry of President Nixon's speechifying and verbal tics, which he carries over even to his private moments with his wife. Beattie is as clever as Philip Roth in his extravagant Nixon-era satire,
Our Gang. Her humor is more elliptical, though, as when she sums up the President: "This is not a little boy to whom you would have wanted to give an ant farm."
What's not to like? MRS. NIXON is not a book for history buffs. Nor is it a good choice for readers seeking a conventional biography. Beattie does not hold herself out as an historian, not even one of amateur status. She's made no effort to uncover new facts or fresh details about Pat Nixon. Instead she relied on existing published sources. In the Notes section she lists material she read; the one book that looms largest is Julie Nixon Eisenhower's loving biography of her mother,
Pat Nixon: The Untold Story (1986). I recommend that book be your first choice if you want an insightful biography for yourself, or as a gift to a traditional reader. Certainly you should take a pass on MRS. NIXON if you were resistant to
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999), Edmund Morris' unconventional and largely fictionalized biography of President Reagan.
After the hit-or-miss quality of the middle sections of MRS. NIXON, I was struck by the simple power of its concluding two chapters. These serve as twinned goodbyes. In the first farewell Beattie presents some final personal thoughts on writing ("All writing is about altering time" . . . "You erase yourself every time you write"). Then, in the final goodbye, Mrs. Nixon -- "quietly loyal and enigmatic" to the end -- is set free.
