This book is a collection of 55 stories that were published in the New Yorker, stating in 1974. I am not a huge fan of the short story, and these are the kind that I find the most frustrating. I am just getting into the story, I am interested in the characters, and bam, the story ends. That said, these are all incredibly well written, populated by people and archetypes that we all know and recognize, and they fall into the pitfalls that people we know fall into. It is all very familiar, even if the stories are too short to allow us to really explore them.
One of Beattie’s great strengths is the party scene, whose supply of hilariously random remarks and anthropologically interesting actions she exploits to paint Bruegel-like group portraits of an apparently grotesque age. The stories in which she sustains a party scene for the duration are, I think, my favorites. In “The Lawn Party” (July 5, 1976), a man has lost his right arm in a car accident that occurred because his wife’s sister, with whom he was having an affair, drove their car off the road. She was killed — she may have meant to kill them both — and his wife has left him. Unrepentant, bitter, boorish, funny, he has installed himself in his childhood bedroom in Connecticut and refuses to come downstairs for a flag-waving Fourth of July party. Instead, he hosts a counterparty in which refugees from the celebration on the lawn come up and entertain him. One of these is his brother’s wife, a Frenchwoman. In what is unaccountably one of the sexiest back-room scenes I’ve ever read, she unstraps her sandals upon request and lets him kiss her “beautiful round feet.”
She would be a wonderful person to have coffee with, I think. Her writing is a keen eye to the world, fille dwith nuance and wisdom.
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