The Doctor’s House
By Ann Beattie
Scribner, 279 pages, $24
It’s a scene from one of Ann Beattie’s earlier stories, published in the 1970s, when Beattie’s work was heralded as a message from the front, the inside scoop on a youthful generation fast becoming disaffected. Some young people, stopped by the police, are pulled out of their school bus, or is it a van, and submitted to a drug search, in the process of which some lovingly crafted wooden puppets, handiwork of one of the story’s characters, are smashed apart. There’s nothing stashed in the puppets, but their raw, damaged insides have probably haunted any number of readers, whose own most hopeful instincts have splintered a little, or irreparably, in the years since then.
And since then, in Beattie’s novels and stories, real loss continues to overtake amorphous disappointment. The departure of loved ones, the ends of jobs and marriages–all chase down that vaguer disillusionment that seems to have been hoping to be caught, and undone. Eventually, as the middle-age Nina observes of her parents’ disastrous marriage in Beattie’s newest novel, “The Doctor’s House,” life might begin to seem “not so much like a battle as the day of defeat after the battle was lost.”
As if to emphasize such stasis, Beattie situates Nina in a Cambridge, Mass., that, aside from the proliferation of coffee shops, has changed not a whit in 20-odd years. The same long-haired students wearing the same Birkenstocks with the same thick socks straggle past on their way to the same vintage movies.
In the first few pages, we learn enough about Nina to watch with sympathetic curiosity as she makes her own daily rounds, rounds so circumscribed that she refers to the family of her friend Mary Catherine as “[t]he people in the big house that hides my house from the street.” Recently widowed, Nina works at home as a copy editor, toiling over the inadequacies of other people’s stories while no longer enjoying, as much as she used to, “the dullness interrupted by sudden crisis.”
Mostly, she expects the dullness and the crises to come from her brother Andrew’s womanizing. If it’s not Andrew himself who appears at her door in order to show off the latest black eye, it’s the woman who gave it to him who makes an appeal to Nina. Invariably, such appeals both elicit and try Nina’s loyalty to Andrew, but not until Mary Catherine suffers a crisis all her own does Nina contemplate real change. As Nina’s reclusive habits continue to be interrupted by visitors, phone calls, lunch dates and dinner dates, it seems she might finally break through. Maybe she’ll trade her protracted widowhood for the job she’s been offered in New York City, and make good, finally, on her refusal to be Andrew’s “touchstone,” his “retreat” from the messes he makes in other women’s lives.
As with many Beattie characters, Nina’s self-deprecating humor and verbal alacrity deliver her from, and allow her to hang onto, sanity. Even as she can’t help looking at practically any other woman without thinking, “Good . . . you got away from Andrew,” she sees herself as the girl “still spreading her papers out on the kitchen table like she was doing her homework.” She refers to her violent, now-dead father as “Dr. X,” and is never averse to parodying “Jeopardy” answers and wryly recounting her dreams. We read the first third of “The Doctor’s House” in that state of astonished suspension that only the most skillful writers can bestow on us, as convinced of Nina’s sadness as we are of her optimism, and as persuaded by the limitations of her world as we are by its endless, antic energy.
Nina’s mixture of ever-dashed hopefulness and ever-brave hopelessness provides far more than just that welcome Beattie window on some of our states of affairs, but the rest of the novel takes us past the point where most of us are fortunate enough to say, “Sorry, don’t want to go there.” It’s as if a deeply satisfying and, in its way, riveting sequel to “The Big Chill” has been suddenly replaced by “Leaving Las Vegas.” In fact, the last two-thirds of the novel borrow from a certain cinematic artsiness, coming across like those moments in films and TV shows when the action gives way to one or another character’s monologues delivered against a background of air.
First comes Nina’s alcoholic mother’s attempt to absolve herself of any role in her family’s dysfunction. Recalling that her young children liked to sleep in one bed, she as much as blames the “convoluted” Nina’s self-victimization for Andrew’s womanizing. Irrationally, she regards their devotion to each other as their way of resisting her efforts to protect them from her brutal husband.
Dr. X figures heavily in Andrew’s apology, too, though neither the doctor’s philandering nor his rage are really meant to revise the picture we already have of Andrew. Does Andrew mean well? He thinks so, but all he succeeds in doing is indulging the despair of the down-and-out women, most of them ex-high school girlfriends, who fall prey to his childish attentions. Dazed by his own self-centeredness, Andrew says of a blond stranger who takes no notice of him in a restaurant that she is “deliberately” not looking his way, and he imagines that if Nina’s husband, Mac, had only lived, it would be to understand Andrew more fully.
Although there’s truth in Andrew’s and his mother’s assertion that Nina relishes Andrew’s misbehavior, and though both their accounts are absorbing, it seems to be Beattie’s intent to fix, rather than to advance, our appreciation for any of these characters. Despite their separate takes on some of the novel’s dramatic episodes, we’re not expected to take sides or solve any puzzles, for Beattie carefully instills as much doubt as certainty.
Readers already weary of novels that sacrifice ongoing narrative to the juxtaposition of alternative points of view will be all the more disappointed by the way these two final, grim portraits, though perceptive and wise, deprive us of bearing fascinated witness to Nina. Recluse that she is, Nina, after all, is the only one of these characters capable of giving a little good to the world, and she’s just on the verge of recollecting the challenging beauty of this prospect when she, abruptly, and the novel, digressively, turn their backs on it.
Beattie’s ear for dialogue, her eye for the telling description, her way of embellishing dead-on realism with zany detail, are at the top of their form. Whatever might have become of Nina, she should have been the beneficiary of this enormous talent. We should have been permitted to watch her, enjoy her, push for her and be frustrated by her for longer than we are. Instead, her mother and brother simply put her travails in context, and “The Doctor’s House” reads like two long prologues closing the book of which they might have been just a beginning.
