Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 15, 1990 TAG: 9003142929
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARTHA SHERRILL THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Are you kidding?" she says to somebody who's called to see if she's got any unpublished short stories left to sell. "I can't get arrested at the New Yorker."
Maybe the New Yorker magazine - which first published Beattie when she was 27, and for many years enjoyed a first-right-of-refusal contract with the writer - isn't calling her cordless, but everybody else seems to be. "Off the hook," she says. "Lots of calls. The whole week. All day."
This is not a comeback, exactly. Since her first success, "Chilly Scenes of Winter," was published in 1976, Beattie has been effortlessly pumping out her lovely prose, for a total of four short story collections and four novels. She has attracted a loyal, low-key readership, but the word of mouth on her newest novel, "Picturing Will" has created a certain stirring among the hip - they check in every so often to see what Beattie has to say - and the media, of course. Vogue, Vanity Fair, that sort of thing.
The New York Times ran a mushy-gushy review, along with - to people's surprise and stupid delight - a big, full-length picture of Beattie sitting on a sea-swept rock in Key West, in what can only be described as the Circean Mermaid Position, and that will probably just amplify the notion of her as some sort of Goddess. The Goddess of the Big Chill Generation.
The house is crammed full of junk, kitschy oddments abound, like little unexplained jokes kept on a shelf - reminders, here and there, that things aren't so serious. A plastic goat's head mask rests against a wall. A thousand snapshots are vying for position on her refrigerator. In the living room, there's a pink satin garter belt tacked up on the bookshelves. In the bathroom, there's a "Perry Mason" board game and a pair of pink porcelain breasts (salt and pepper shakers?) with "Bermuda" written happily across them.
Crammed full, this house, but oddly spare. Things are in their places and the rooms are empty in the center. There are paintings up, some old ones by her husband, the artist Lincoln Perry, but plenty of bare wall.
She laughs in the kitchen. When she talks, she sounds like an English teacher - perfectly chosen words come out like Uzi bullets - but when she laughs a flock of Tweety Birds seems to circle her head. She's the sort men fall for, women admire. She's the sort Esquire would want for its Women We Love page. And she seems like a character, not out of one of her own books so much, but maybe one Tom Robbins would invent.
"That's the last call," she says, clomping again. "If it rings again, I don't have to answer."
The right slang
In 1968, The Washington Post ran a story about an American University senior, Ann Beattie, who had been selected by Mademoiselle magazine as one of its guest editors.
Two months later, she was interviewed about her experiences - her trip to Mexico City, going to the premiere of "Rosemary's Baby" and her interview with Truman Capote, which took place on the day Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles.
Six years later, after a stint at the University of Connecticut studying for a doctorate in English literature, after writing a dozen stories that had been rejected, she'd be selling them to the New Yorker.
By 28, she'd have a contract with the magazine and two books published - "Chilly Scenes" (later turned into a movie) and a successful collection of short stories called "Distortions." She was living in Cobham, Va. - 20 miles outside of Charlottesville - with her first husband, David Gates. During an interview at that time, she put honey in her tea, looked like Joni Mitchell, wore socks and sandals, and said she spent her spare time sleeping 10 hours a day, raising plants and playing with her dog. She said that she liked dogs, but she couldn't "envision" having children.
"There was some fanfare," she says now, "but we're not talking Tama Janowitz."
Still. For her peers, Beattie was someone young who'd made it. She was a voice in print that went with their times, the way John Cheever had been. She used the right slang, mentioned the trendy brand names of clothes and cars, popular drugs and music. Her characters had live-in lovers. They listened to Dylan, drank Heineken and chablis, smoked Colombian.
And Beattie wrote for a generation that didn't want to read about all the feelings they weren't having. "Minimalist," her emotionally detached tone was called. "Days of white wine and Valium," one critic summed up her work. "Social chronicler" and "spokesperson for her generation" often stood beside her name. In the Martin Luther King Library here in Washington, the word "POP" has been ink-stamped on the title pages of her books, for - the final indignity - "popular fiction."
"I don't consider myself to be the spokesperson for anything," she says - with an edge in her voice. She's sick of this label. And in "Picturing Will" there are no brand names, no trendiness but for the circumstances: a baby boomer raising her baby. "I certainly don't want to analyze the culture, and that seems to be a disservice to my work."
Being described as a minimalist is another sore point. "I've never personally, in my entire life, and we're talking about years of being on the road, giving readings, being interviewed, have I found anyone who is sincerely interested in me because of - or in spite of - my `minimalism.' I've never heard the word except from somebody who's a journalist."
Being understood, and misunderstood, is an artist's lot. Through the years, critics who marveled at her beautiful prose whined that her characters are spoiled, too white and too contemporary (like the complaining one hears about the TV show "thirtysomething"), that Beattie is only interested in detailing the lives of the '60s generation drifting through and surviving the '70s and '80s.
"It's the emotion of the work that I'm interested in," she says. "I don't think details are just randomly interchangeable, but they weren't put there as billboards on the highway, saying: Here's what's going on in the culture. I was surprised when some people paid such close attention to them as they did. . . . Smart readers won't. Others will. But again, what the writer always hopes is that it will go beyond that. When you go about analyzing how something works as a piece of fiction, if it's only a bunch of jumbled details that show you are incredibly hip about life in the South of France, so what? . . .
Writing comes easily
It just comes. Her good eye. Her good ears. A short story can get written in a day. A rough draft for a novel in a few weeks. She's written on the floor, with a three-cornered pillow pushed up against a radiator to keep warm. ("Pretty heavenly," as she remembers.) For a year, she wrote on a rolling cart set up in the kitchen, facing the black glass of the oven door. ("I can't explain that," she says.) Now she writes on two typewriters in the dining room of her Charlottesville house where she's lived since 1984, after leaving New York City.
Anyway, anyhow, it just comes.
"A line or phrase or an image," is all Beattie has in her head when she starts a short story. "That's it," she says. "Beyond that, nothing that resembles plot."
She makes it sound like channeling voices from The Other Side, or speaking in tongues. She mostly doesn't talk to friends about her writing ("It almost seems as though there's nothing to say"), she just does it. "On some gut level - or some subconscious level, you do, or at least you should - unless you are a rotten writer - have a very strong sense of what seems to be fitting."
If people gripe that writing comes too easily to her, then they'd be happy to know that for the past few years Beattie has finally suffered for her art.
"This novel was an exception," she says of her latest, "in that it did pretty much keep me at home - or if not at home, then working - even though my husband was off sailing or something like that, because it did take the better part of three years to write."
Missed sailing trips, three years, five drafts and the help of many people. This is what it took to pull "Picturing Will" together.
"Picturing Will" is a story about childhood, about parenting, about kids growing up in houses of crazy adults with their own agendas. It's about a photographer named Jody who doesn't know she'll be famous someday, but has the guts to move to a town like Charlottesville alone with her young son, Will, after her lousy husband, Wayne, dumps her. She makes her way there, until the New York gallery shows come, by photographing weddings.
Jody doesn't win many hearts, especially by the book's end. She's too ambitious and narcissistic - maybe too '80s - to make a good mother to Will.
Jody leaves her son to be loved the most by Mel, her sensitive and uncharismatic boyfriend. Her ex, Wayne, is no prize. If he weren't attached to his caring third wife, you get the feeling he'd be a drifter. When Will is dropped off for a visit with Dad in Florida, Wayne suddenly becomes preoccupied with having sex with some sleazy types, while the sad thought that his wife, Corky, wants to have a baby soon keeps playing in his head.
As with Beattie's other novels, nice people are married to creeps, there's a cast of familiar supporting characters - too human to be all that likable - such as Jody's best friend Mary Vickers and her husband, and there are fabulous inventions, total strangers, such as Haveabud the art dealer.
And as always, like in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, the truly awful things happen in safe places, on hotel room floors and right at home.
by CNB