Customer Reviews

Walks With Men: Fiction

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I've read most of Beattie's books and have liked them very much; I've even loved some of them. Thus, I was shocked by the postured unreadability of her novella, Walks With Men: Fiction. At only 100 pages, I thought I'd fly through It. Instead, I felt like I was trying to work myself through quicksand.

The premise starts with a young woman of 22 years going out with a 44 year-old man. Besides his being twice her age, he is married, which she doesn't know. Their relationship is based on her letting him teach her how men think. "I explain anything you want to know about men, but nobody can know I'm the source of your information." The book goes downhill from there. The young woman breaks up with her organic farmer boyfriend to live with the older man. She and the older man end up getting married and develop a pre-nup that takes into account the possibility of his future philandering.

I don't know why Ann Beattie published this book. She has such talent and has written so many lovely works. I'd skip this one.

I picked this book up almost by accident. I was looking through the Paul Auster books at the store and WALKS WITH MEN happened to be faced out on the next shelf.
Something about it, don't remember what, caught my eye so I read the back and decided to buy it. I'd never read Ann Beattie before and had no preconceived notions of what it ought to be.

I enjoyed the book immensely. The minimalist style worked perfectly -maybe it helped that I was born & bred in New York City and know what a Chelsea brownstone looks like, know Gramercy Park & the other parts of the city her characters inhabit -because it allowed me to get past the trappings of scenery and focus on the characters. I'm glad Ann Beattie didn't spend lots of time developing every aspect of her characters. It forces the reader to just dive in and go with it, to take what she chooses to tell us about them for what it is and to form impressions of them based on what they do and say.
I couldn't disagree more with the other reviewers on this one.

I read this book twice. 1980's Manhattan became very real to me. The story left me thinking. The "lack of emotion" seemed appropriate in a microcosm where characters weren't connecting or living from their hearts. They were detached, so my own detachment didn't bother me. I loved the main character who was an incredibly accomplished woman, but regressed to a dependent state.

I actully enjoy shorter novels, but this is one of the most pretentious books I've ever attempted to read. I couldn't get beyond the first 25 pages. I used to like Ms. Beattie's writings, however now it seems Ann thinks we're all interested in her self-centered world. The sad thing is the book's premise is a good one. But all the upper crust references are just silly and boring.

I am shocked at how AWFUL this book is. I am SO SORRY I didn't read the other reviews before I bought it. WHAT A WASTE OF MONEY. (I'd like a refund!) Shame on Ann Beattie and shame on her publisher for this mess. There is NO MORE to say.

Two insufferably dull, uninsightful and pretentious New Yorkers have a relationship, if you can call it that. It's boring and they're boring. If you knew these people in real life you'd do everything you could to stay away from them. And even though it was a mere 100 pages, Walks With Men felt like a short story that was padded out past page 20. And the writing had no style or wit.

... I read "The Burning House" and really liked it (I should probably go give that a positive review to balance this one out). I got this book at a closing Border's location for something in the neighborhood of two dollars. Turns out that I didn't get much bang for my buck. This may be the only book that I've ever put down after seven pages. Seriously, I put this book down after seven pages and now think even that amount of effort was overly generous. Ugh. How does this happen? How does a very, very talented writer release something this bad?

I have been a fan of Anne Beattie's since she began publishing in the seventies, and yes, I am that old. I have all of her novels and short story collections, and have even had the pleasure of meeting her at a writer's workshop. I was so pleased to see a new Beattie novel out that I even ignored the recently published collection of her New York short stories; after all, I reasoned I probably had all these stories, but a new book! Well, the joke was on me----Walks With Men is not a novel, or even a novella. I paid ten dollars for a bad short story with a sexy cover, a story that reads almost like a parody of Ms. Beattie's stories. Possibly it's an old one that she took out of the trunk from her earliest days of writing, before she really honed her craft. The characterizations is ridiculous (a young woman who keeps telling us how beautiful and brilliant she is), and older man who seduces her, educates her and marries her, all in the most charmless, sexless manner imaginable and then leaves her. Some of this is partially autobiographical (Beattie did speak at her Ivy League college explaining how her whole education had been a waste of time, and she was going to live back in Vermont off the land (cue the joni mitchell songs).

In a masochistic moment I read it twice, and it was just as bad the second time, so I did what I have only done with one other book: I threw it in the trash. Fortunately, my nephew gave me the collected New Yorker stories which I have been reading with the greatest of pleasure, and getting the bad taste of WALKS WITH MEN out of my mouth or brain. Ms. Beattie---I implore you---don't EVER do this again. If you just need the money I will organize a walkathon or something---but with all the wonderful work behind you and, I believe, still to come, please do NOT foist trash like this again on your readers who love you.

Do you want to pay $17 (or $10) for what is really a short story? I don't think this can even be called a novella. At barely 100 pages in a very small format book, this feels like a rip off. As a short story in the New Yorker I'd have been content to read it, though not excited.

This is far from the author's best, and I don't think this is going to do much for her somewhat flagging career.
Set in early 80's New York City, it is oddly disconnected from time or place, the few things that do anchor the story in time/place feel gratuitously tacked on, not organic. The characters are barely explored, and that combined with the lack of detail in the setting adds up to a very superficial and unsatisfying reading experience- far short of what we know Beattie can do at her best.

This feels like an attempt to go back in time, but Beattie did all this better a long time ago.

This novel has very little to offer to a male reader, although the Nora Ephron-ish style and theme do offer some mild entertainment. Ongoing shifts in the time frames, characters and perspectives, however, are markedly annoying, and the people we meet in this book are unpleasant and unsymapathetic for the most part. One can't really say too much more, except that this novel is very short and quick to get through.