Park City: New and Selected Stories (Hardcover)

From the start of her career, Beattie has been compared to Cheever and Updike, chroniclers of the chilly middle classes, and also to Raymond Carver, master practitioner of that school of literature known as minimalism. Beattie's stories seem smaller than life in some ways, depending as they do on an accretion of detail to round out her characters' lives. In her world, as in our own, there are no grand epiphanies, no moments of blinding realization. Instead, her characters muddle through their days in a series of small events that culminate in a whisper instead of a bang. In "Going Home with Uccello," for example, a woman on holiday with her lover in Italy watches him interact with a woman in a museum gift shop and realizes his true purpose for the trip is not to convince her to make a commitment to him, but rather to "persuade himself that he loved her so much that no one else could be a distraction--that no other woman could come between them." In "What Was Mine" another nameless narrator--male, this time--claims his inheritance from the man who had been his widowed mother's lover and the only father figure he'd ever known:

There was sheet music inside: six Billie Holiday songs that I recognized immediately as Herb's favorites for ending the last set of the evening. There were several notes, which I suppose you could call love notes, from my mother. There was a tracing, on a food-stained Merry Mariner place mat, of a cherry, complete with stem, and a fancy pencil-drawn frame around it that I vaguely remembered Herb having drawn one night. There was also a white envelope that contained the two pictures of one of the soldiers on Guam; one of a handsome young man looking impassively at a sleeping young baby. I knew the second I saw it that he was my father.

Over the years, Beattie has continued to map the psychological and emotional territory of the urban, the educated, the neurotic middle class. On those occasions when her stories are set outside of New York--Vermont, Park City, Utah, Italy--her characters are generally from there, or at least from another large city such as Los Angeles. Beattie's prose has always been crisp, smart with just a touch of the smart aleck to it--on occasion she can be remarkably funny. But there's a chilliness in her stories that discourages the reader from getting too close, or investing too much. Her often nameless narrators tell their tales in the modulated tones of well-brought-up people for whom not wearing one's heart on one's sleeve is a religion. And yet in their spare revelations of loss and disappointment, their timid essays to the borderlands of hope, more often than not these characters do get under your skin. Depending on your tolerance for ambiguity, they can either irritate or captivate. Beattie's work tends to play to the intellect rather than the gut. For readers looking for a shot to the cerebellum, she satisfies; for those who prefer their fiction warm-blooded, Park City might be a trifle too cool. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly
Remarking in an author's note that the same first names keep popping up in her work, Beattie (My Life Starring Dara Falcon, 1997, etc.) writes that she "intended no linkage from story to story?though there are a few in-jokes, of course." In fact, her stories are the in-jokes of an era. Since they first appeared in The New Yorker in the 1970s, her early chronicles of aimless youth, ambivalent love and fractured families have lost none of their wistful appeal or satirical bite. Neither has their author, as the eight new stories published here prove. To Beattie fans, her themes will be familiar. If the new work has a certain emphasis, it's surrogate parenthood. In the hilarious "Cosmos," a schoolteacher resists marriage to a man she met through a personals ad and takes guilty pleasure in exaggerating the foibles of his hyperactive, destructive little son for the amusement of her Japanese pupils. In the title story, a woman spends a week at an off-season Utah ski resort with her half-sister Janet "more or less looking after Janet's boyfriend's daughter, Lyric (fourteen), who is in turn looking after Janet's child, my niece, Nell (three)." The narrator's efforts to take care of the two girls?thrown temporarily together, like their self-centered parents, more by bad luck than design?are convincing, touching and (as always in Beattie's short fiction) funny. Re-reading the older work, one wishes that the 36-story collection were more comprehensive (one misses such gems as "Fancy Flights" or "Friends"), but this is a small complaint about a generous, very welcome volume of stories from one of the most influential masters of the form.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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