Description

When Ann Beattie started submitting stories in The Brand New Yorker in the mid-seventies, she surfaced with a voice so unique, and so uncannily exact and prescient in its evaluation of her characters’ float and arrogance, that she was immediately recognized like a voice of her era. Her name turned an adjective: Beattiesque. Unnerving, and delicate, wry, she's a master observer of the unraveling of the National household, and likewise of the variety little situations and affinities that unite us. Her figures, over almost four years, have relocated from lifestyles of unpredictable need to the problems and inhibitions of maturity and onto unsuccessful goals, careless divorces, and occasionally enlightenment, also elegance.