In the guise of an ordinary person, superstar author Ann Beattie-the publishing world`s Meryl Streep-alit momentarily in Southern California to promote her new book, ”Picturing Will.”
Beattie writes paradoxical books that confuse, involve, dazzle and routinely seduce the critics.
In her room at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, she settles in to dispassionately discuss her new book`s characters, as though they were people she knew slightly from another time.
They include the woman who becomes a photographer; the man who becomes a gardener; the man who is a pedophile; a concerned neurotic; and a little boy named Will, who will grow up well in spite of the selfishness, skewed sensibilities and emotional neglect of these other people.
Maybe he will.
On the other hand, maybe he will grow up to assume the characteristics of the adults he had as role models; the author cannot say.
Beattie says she worked for three years to get the characters to explain themselves to her properly and adds she never had a preconceived notion of where this particular set of people was going or what would happen to them.
”I kept giving the manuscript to my friends and asking them for feedback,” she said. ”I have friends who are very good readers. They helped me to see where I needed to explain more.”
More what? She does not explain.
In fact, she does not explain at all.
”I certainly don`t feel that it`s the obligation of any artist to supply answers,” she once told the Washington Post, effectively gagging questions by people too lazy to think, she said.
She is opposed to intellectual sloth.
She is opposed, she said, to people who do not know how to read.
How, she is asked, should one read?
”With care.”
It is an emphatically definitive statement.
Beattie, 42, chats cheerfully about being an only child in Washington, D.C.
Her father was in the government, and her mother was a mother, and she was a reader and a good, quiet child.
She went to American University to study journalism, but switched her major to English because a boyfriend said journalism was not cool. He said she should read literature.
”You know, it was the usual. I switched majors, that person went his way and then Watergate came along and journalism was, well . . .”
Beattie said she does not mind not becoming a deadline junkie. She went on to get her master`s degree, a doctorate, teach at Harvard, get married, divorce, remarry and become Ann Beattie, acclaimed author. Her four novels and four books of stories have been lovingly received. ”What might have been”
seems to affect her only in the abstract.
”Fiction isn`t terribly different from some kinds of reporting, is it,” she asked rhetorically. ”Two ways of telling a story.”
Beattie, who said she backed into writing ”because I wasn`t really good at anything else,” is very good at storytelling, but indifferent to the adulation, or modest, or neither, it`s hard to tell.
The biography on the flyleaf of ”Picturing Will,” reads:
”Ann Beattie lives in Charlottesville, Va., with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry.”
That is it.
It is a spare, clean, opaque biography.
It does not announce to the uninitiated Beattie`s starring role in the literary firmament, her place as the essential voice of her generation (the
`60s).
No hint that a country full of critics has reviewed her books with the elation of a child investigating the creative possibilities of his first kaleidoscope.
No recollection that John Updike said she did for the `70s what Salinger did for the `50s.
Just the barest facts.
You may react to the stylish stinginess in any way you choose, just as you are under no obligation to read her characters as she, or anyone else, does.
Beattie is unconcerned with uniformity or even continuity of thought, nor is she, herself, likely to hold the same view from moment to moment.
”I am not the same person in the evening that I am in the morning,” she once told an interviewer.
Does that mean people with clearly crystalized perceptions lack imagination?
”Maybe,” she said vaguely.
If she does not hold the same views or opinions from moment to moment, neither does she seem to be the same author from book to book.
New York critic Dan Cryer said Beattie was once labeled a minimalist for her spare, almost Spartan wordage, so her next book was expansive, though certainly not florid.
Questioned about her preoccupation with people trapped into `60s-think and -speak, she promptly wrote a book satirizing it.
When her characters were called emotionally bare, she dressed them and flushed them out.
She has moves like the most elusive running back.
Though personally open and conversational, as an author she is the paradigm of the story spinner as a literary tease, designing characters who are at once available and elusive, seductive and innocent, wildly complicated and elegantly, sometimes wickedly, simple.
Her books are an experience in the roller-coaster emotionalism and paralizing numbness that are uncomfortable reminders of first love.
Beattie is a gifted intellectual pyrotechnic who lights emotional fires all over the landscape and then stands back to see what will happen.
”I had a general framework, a philosophy for this book, but I was working with expectations, not absolutes,” she said.
When asked if the photographer, or one of the men, or Will is her alter ego in this book, she responds, typically, ”No. Yes. Not really, but I know them; I know their feelings.”
Beattie has trouble with absolutes, so much so that she seems to consider herself as a work in progress.
The photograph of Beattie, smiling at you from the back of ”Picturing Will,” is a true picture.
A mixed message.
”Aren`t I the typical all-American girl?” the dimpled grin seems to ask.
”You don`t know anything about me,” the gleam in the eyes adds.
