BEATTIE, Ann

Born 8 September 1947, Washington, D.C.

Daughter of James A. and Charlotte Crosby Beattie; married David Gates, 1973 (divorced); Lincoln Perry, 1988

Novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie has earned her critical reputation as a storyteller of the 1960s generation. While her work includes both a children's book, Spectacles (1985), and a collection of essays in art criticism, Alex Katz (1987), her primary preoccupation is with fictional characters who came of age during the turbulent 1960s and are struggling with that legacy. Beattie's spare and direct prose style, which has been linked to the social realism tradition of Hemingway and John Updike, is marked by pop culture references, quotidian details, spiritually lost characters, and deliberately open endings. Although generally praised as a skillful writer, she has been faulted for the apparent lack of purpose in her characters' lives. Beattie notes that "If I knew what it was that was missing [in her characters' lives], I'd certainly write about it. I'd write for Hallmark cards."

A self-described "artsy little thing" and only child of a housewife and a federal government administrator, Beattie grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. In 1968, while a student at American University (B.A., 1969), she was invited to serve as one of several student guest editors for Mademoiselle magazine. Beattie completed an M.A. in English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs (1970) and remained there until 1972 to do further study in English literature. In 1973 she married musician and fellow graduate student David Gates. From 1975-77 Beattie was visiting writer and lecturer at the University of Virginia, and in 1977-78 she was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University.

While still a graduate student, Beattie began submitting her short stories for publication. In April 1974 the New Yorker accepted "A Platonic Relationship," her 20th submission. Her first collection of 19 stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, both appeared in 1976. The novel, which she claims to have written in three weeks, is perhaps her best known work. Its main characters float through the book, incapable of decisive action that would change their unrewarding lives. Charles, mired in a dull job, longs to reestablish his broken relationship with Laura who left him to marry someone else. He is surrounded by his mentally unbalanced mother, by Sam, his best friend and Phi Beta Kappa graduate who cannot afford law school and so must settle for selling men's jackets, and by Pete, his well-meaning but tactless stepfather. The novel became a film entitled Head Over Heels (1979), with Beattie playing a minor role as a waitress. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977, Beattie moved to Redding, Connecticut, and became a full-time writer. She published Secrets and Surprises, a collection of 15 stories in 1979. The idea for her next novel, Falling in Place (1980), came to her while she was contemplating a peach tree outside her Redding home. It chronicles a disconnected and disintegrating suburban Connecticut family. At the end of the novel, the family faces a crisis when John Joel, their ten-year-old son, accidentally shoots his sister with a gun belonging to his only friend. The novel received a literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980.

Beattie's marriage to Gates ended in May 1982. She later told Kim Hubbard of People magazine, that "Getting divorced affected everything, my writing included. It affected the way I walked the dog. I did not recover from it quickly." The Burning House,, 16 short stories published in 1982, was seen as evidence of Beattie's growing artistic maturity and confirmation of the fact that the short story seemed the form that best suited her talents. After her divorce, Beattie lived in New York City until 1984 when she moved to Vermont for the summer and wrote her second novel, Love Always (1985), which chronicles the life of Lucy Spenser, editor of the humorous magazine Country Daze. It was followed in 1986 by Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories.

Beattie met her second husband, painter Lincoln Perry, in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had moved following her brief sojourn in Vermont. He provided her with the title to her fourth novel, Picturing Will (1989), the story of five-year-old Will and his mother who moves him from Charlottesville to New York City to pursue her photography career, her boyfriend Mel, and Will's ne'er-do-well father. Unlike many of her previous works, this novel took Beattie three years to complete and was "the single hardest thing I've ever worked on." What Was Mine, another collection of short stories, appeared in 1991. It received praise for its "honest introspection" and "greater sympathy and tenderness." While she continues to remain reticent about offering answers in her fiction to life's most puzzling questions, in these stories Beattie again demonstrates her remarkable ability to recreate the anxiety and angst inherent in white, middle class 20th-century America.

Another You (1995) features an emotionally distant, middle-aged New England professor in a humdrum marriage. The book received largely negative notices, with critics pointing out that the main character's boredom permeated the book and that the labeling and naming of pop culture icons, for which Beattie is known, was not enough to drive the story or characterization. The novel features a secondary narrative involving the revelation, through letters, of a story from the past. It was embraced by Publishers Weekly, however, which wrote, "Successfully avoiding the one-note, affectless deadpan to which her work was in danger of succumbing, Beattie provides plenty of dramatic tension in this absorbing narrative of a man emotionally distanced from his life."

The novel My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) departed from earlier Beattie works in structure and tone. Yale Review's Lorin Stein wrote, "Not only is it her most difficult novel, it is her most intriguing: a tissue of autobiography spun by a woman whose life eludes her." With Park City: New and Selected Stories (1998) Beattie returned to her preferred medium. The title contained 36 short stories, eight of which were new. The new pieces returned to many of the themes of her earlier writing, with the addition of the comic sensibility on view in her last two novels. "All of what Beattie does well is here on brilliant display," wrote Lorrie Moore in the New York Times Book Review. "The theatrical ensemble act of her characters; the cultural paraphernalia as historical record; the not quite grown up grown-ups playing house; the charming, boyish men with their knifelike utterances."