Customer Reviews

Park City: New and Selected Stories

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was my first encounter with Beattie, and I must say that I was completely taken with her prose and the ease with which she provides us glimpses into her characters' lives. As a reader who revels in the chance to read writers who are technical masters of the short story form, Beattie did not disappoint. What I did find disappointing was that the stories became repetitive in theme and style so that powerful effect of the excellent ones ("Vermont, The Burning House, "Where You'll Find Me") was ultimately diluted by some of the other weaker stories. Finally, it is nice to read a female author who is unashamed to write about the human heart without an artifial device like southern charm or supposed female wackiness, both of which can sometimes be a distraction and detraction from a story

Out of frustration at not being able to find the stories in this collection, I am posting them here:
Cosmos 3
Second Question 38
Going Home with Uccello 51
The Siamese Twins Go Snorkeling 58
Zalla 75
Ed and Dave Visit the City 82
The Four-Night Fight 90
Park City 100
Vermont 137
Wolf Dreams 154
Dwarf House 166
Snakes' Shoes 175
Secrets and Surprises 185
Weekend 196
A Vintage Thunderbird 211
Shifting 226
The Lawn Party 238
Colorado 251
Learning to Fall 273
The Cinderella Waltz 283
Jacklighting 300
Waiting 306
Desire 316
Greenwich Time 325
The Burning House 335
Janus 351
In the White Night 356
Heaven on a Summer Night 361
Summer People 368
Skeletons 381
Where You'll Find Me 386
The Working Girl 403
In Amalfi 410
What Was Mine 421
Windy Day at the Reservoir 431
Imagine a Day at the End of Your Life 474

This is the most stunning selected stories I've read since Raymond Carver's "Where You'll Find Me." People portray Beattie as cold, but then so is the world her characters live, and so are ours. Perhaps the reason some people dislike Beattie is that she works her way gently into the reality of our lives and without our noticing, with an elegance of prose virtually unmatched, she shatters the safety in which we live, forcing us to seek for something other than the illusory grasping we call our lives. This is a fabulous book and perhaps the world of her characters seems sterile, but then look around as you stand at a busstop and you'll see what she means, how humanity lies beneath the thinly constructed facades of society and love.

When I think of Miles Davis, the word virtuoso comes to mind. When I think of Ann Beattie's short stories, the music from Miles' classic album "Kind of Blue" plays in my head. Spare, taut, controlled, yet so emotionally stripped down as to be poetic in the truest sense. This is fiction that rings like a tuning fork, humming inaubibly to the fragile souls that inhabit these works. Short stories like "Vermont", "Burning House", and "Where'll You Find Me" resonate with despair and, yet, at the same time tremble with a glimmer of hope. Bawdiness and loudness of voice, a brawling style, does not prevail in these quiet tales. But then again Ms. Beattie isn't trying to be Hemingway. She in her own way moved the short story beyong Hem and Cheever and even Carver, taking it to a realm where readers and writers are innured to listen.

Park City is a big, hefty collection of wonderful short stories from one of our most talented writers of short fiction. Beattie writes with a detached affection for her characters and a wonderful sense of clarity. This is a collection of new stories and the greatest hits from her earlier collection. I read a lot of these stories in the 80s, but I can still remember them. The new ones are fabulous. The characters and their stories will stay with you long after you put this book down.

Life is about growth. Beattie's latest batch of characters haven't learned a damn thing since they first slumped onto the page. Park City is been there, done that (so much more alertly in earlier books.) Still, it's Beattie and a bad Beattie is better than a good - you name it.

Reading Ann Beattie is an odd experience. She's not a good writer, but not a bad writer either. She's that most forgettable of all writers: barely competent, dull, and uninspired. She is perhaps the best living practitioner of the classic New Yorker formula tale about upper crust New Yorkers who vacation in New England and worry of their fading sexuality, or sip champagne with brie at chichi art galleries and museums, bemoaning the encroachment of barbarianism or philistinism in one form or another- for the better or the ill. It is no irony that AB's short story corpus is almost an unbroken chain of the same from that earlier New Yorker formulaicist, AA, aka Alice Adams. And even Adams' tales were watered down versions of the two New Yorker Golden Age Johns: Cheever and O'Hara. This makes Beattie a third generation hack, but with only fifth or sixth rate ability. There is not a moment in any of the selected tales that a reader is wowed, or believing that Beattie is going to knock your socks off. Her tales are mattresses, not silken sheets. And Park City, New And Selected Stories gives the reader thirty-six reasons to sleep.

Too often she is longwinded, and has the Postmodern habit of thinking the dropping of a celebrity or brand name is a substitute for real character development. Her tales are too long, larded with ponderous prose (most telling in her unrealistic dialogue), and too soaked with details of insignificant things barely relevant to the main narrative thrust. One need not know the color of some tea set in an apartment to gauge the mood of an impending divorcee. And failed marriages are a staple of her tales, where people often lounge around on piano stools in the nude with their uncouth younger lovers (Secrets And Surprises), jet to exotic locales with a book of Romantic poetry in tow, or photograph selected naked portions of their bodies, all under the gaze of a Julia Child cookbook's cover photograph. Her tales all end with no real insight, no sense that a sojourn has been undertaken, but, instead, with minor material fillips and almost silent film type irises....Beattie's tales are populated with the very same Woody Allenesque characters, but with none of the depth. And this is precisely what Beattie's tales lack the most of- depth. Yes, they are often too long, but they are well-crafted most of the time. What really kills them is their lack of intellectual depth, and their one dimensional narratives. This would not be fatal had she a great sense of warmth and emotion in her tales, but they are bereft of that, as well humor. Even worse, the characters seem to be perpetually puerile. They are supposedly in their thirties or older, yet act with the passionate stupidity of teenagers, or younger. They are people who were never cool, but thought they were. And they speak in floral shades of purple about everything, even when the moment does not call for it, such as when the schoolteacher in Cosmos opines in this manner on her lover's parents' deaths: `What could it have been like, to fall out of the sky over Anchorage, Alaska, into endless drift of snow? For a few seconds there must have been such color in the air: the engine sparking; detritus blown like confetti, far and wide; a free fall of bright winter clothes.'

Alas, the years wrought no improvement in Beattie. She seemed to have reached a groove in the mid-1970s, and she's rutted there ever since. So, when you feel a slight malodor as you read her tales know this: it's only rubber....burning nowhere fast.