PARK CITY:
New and Selected Stories
By Ann Beattie
Knopf, 478 pages, $25
With all good writers you get certain things and not others. Another way to put that is to recall Isaac Bashevis Singer’s observation that it’s unfair to criticize writers for repeating themselves because their repetition of themes and character types is a demonstration of their genuineness and depth of vision. Ann Beattie’s extremely impressive, indeed virtuoso book “Park City: New and Selected Stories” is a confirmation of Singer’s adage. In eight new stories and 28 others selected from her five previously published collections (she has also published six novels), Beattie homes in on the angst of the Baby Boomers she became famous for chronicling in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s. Reading her stories, written over the last 25 years, one is struck by their consistency of subject matter, tone of voice and modus operandi. (Two notable exceptions are “The Bowl,” a fine story in which Beattie fuses an almost Kafkaesque extended metaphor with her characteristic psychological realism, and the less successful “The Working Girl,” a Barthelme-like spoof about writing stories.)
Writers, artists and academics abound in these pages. So, too, do single parents and people who commit or are victimized by adultery, Beattie’s most persistently explored topic. You will find an almost equal mix of mostly middle-class women and men, aged primarily twenty-to fortysomething, in “Park City,” as well as some vivid renderings of children, but you will find almost no old, poor or less-than-articulate people, or people who aren’t white. Beattie’s characters are typically intelligent, wounded to a degree and elusive in the sense that they don’t express much emotion. Beattie also tends to allude to or intimate their mental life rather than express it, and when we are privy to her characters’ thoughts, they are rarely about any metaphysical or political issues. Instead, her characters are chiefly concerned with pursuing pleasures they don’t have and protecting ones they do. This is not as simple as it sounds, as her characters often get involved in complicated situations. Rather than constructing a traditional plot, Beattie slowly reveals these situations until the full scope of their often-dangerous and/or tragic potential becomes clear.
The title story, “Park City,” one of the longest in the book, is representative of her method. The story’s anonymous narrator, having recently broken up with her boyfriend, for the last week or so has been “stringing along to Utah with my 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). . . .” They are all staying at Park City, a vacation resort managed by Nikki, a Vietnamese woman who is a part-time massage therapist. An aspiring screenwriter, Janet is enrolled in a one-week screenwriting course team-taught in part by her lover, Damon, a former college professor who quit teaching film theory full-time “to experience total immersion in The Industry.”
Shortly after introducing the cast, Beattie’s well-timed revelations begin. First we learn that Damon has had full custody of Lyric for two years, ever since she ran away from her parents in Amsterdam. Eventually a private detective located her, after which Damon’s wife decided to stay in Amsterdam and began living as a man while preparing for a sex-change operation. Next we discover that Nell was the result of a month-and-a-half relationship with a famous (and married) actor who agreed to provide a trust fund in exchange for never having to participate in his child’s upbringing.
But these early revelations primarily function to provide background material. The next one occurs in casual conversation when Lyric tells the narrator that her father has been abusive to women in the past, bullied and scared her mother, and gave one girlfriend a detached retina.
The crisis facing the narrator: To what extent should she intervene in her half-sister’s life to try to keep her from being hurt by Damon? She soon tells Janet all that she knows and discovers that Damon has already told her about his past, swearing that he hit only one woman once and will never do it again. But the character issue is revived when Nikki later tells the narrator that she slept with Damon during a massage session. It might seem that Damon is a classic villain, but Beattie never settles for simple soap opera characters. Signs of his love for Lyric and Nell emerge, and the narrator is left ambivalent, with a mix of hope and doubt about him.
In addition to her refined sensibility, Beattie has several other weapons that help keep her often-dark, dramatic material from becoming melodramatic and oppressive. Chief among these are her unadorned, icily precise language and her relatively flat tone of voice. She uses both to especially good advantage in “The Second Question,” one of the most poignant stories in “Park City,” which deals with a man’s death from AIDS. Beattie also has a (generally deadpan) sense of humor that serves her well in many of her stories.
Finally, Beattie is an unusually empathetic writer with no discernible ax to grind. This allows her to understand people other than herself; indeed the most memorable characters in her book are male, such as George, the aging, narcissistic professor in “Weekend,” or Noel, the perpetual loser in love who finally finds happiness in “Vermont.” One of the least Beattie-like characters, Cynthia, the naive, inarticulate overeater from “Wolf Dreams,” is also one of Beattie’s strongest.
The cumulative effect of “Park City: New and Selected Stories” is powerful. It seems impossible not to admire and to be moved by this book and not to read the best of these stories with something like a sense of awe.
