Follies: New Stories - Hardcover

Beattie, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743269616 ISBN 13: 9780743269612

Publisher: Scribner, 2005

Synopsis

Ann Beattie's Follies is a superb novella and collection of stories about adult children, aging parents, and the chance encounters that irrevocably alter lives. Beattie, winner of four O. Henry prizes, has been called "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form" (The Washington Post Book World). She is a masterful observer of domestic relations and the idiosyncratic logic that governs human lives.
In Follies, her most resonant collection, she looks at baby boomers in their maturity, sorting out their own lives and struggling with parents who are eccentric, unpredictable, and increasingly dependent. In "Fléchette Follies," a man rear-ends a woman at a stoplight, and the ripple effect of that encounter is vast and catastrophic. In "Apology for a Journey Not Taken," a woman's road trip is perpetually postponed by the UPS deliveryman who wants to watch TV in her house, by the girl next door who has lost her dog, and by the death of her friend in a freak accident. Impatient in his old age, the protagonist of "That Last Odd Day in L.A." can hardly manage a pleasant word to his own daughter, but he finds a chance for redemption on the last day of a vacation he spends with his niece and nephew.
Ann Beattie is at the top of her form in this superb collection, writing with the vividness, compassion, and sometimes morbid wit that have made her one of the most influential writers of her generation.

About this title

About the Author

Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Award Collections, in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and in Jennifer Egan’s The Best American Short Stories 2014. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She was the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. She is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine and Key West, Florida.

Reviews

What happens to the voice of a generation when a new generation takes over?

Ann Beattie is famous for inventing, sometime during the 1970s, a fiction-writing technique that captured the relationships among her characters. To tell their stories, she perfected a spare, unsentimental prose style that emphasized the unbridgeable schisms among people who were, for the most part, aimless, passive, weary and depressed. Although she inspired legions of imitators, very few managed to match Beattie's facility, particularly with the stutter-starts and elisions of dialogue. Her fictional conversations more accurately echo the way certain Americans speak than most authors' efforts before or since.

To her credit, Beattie continues to craft a career, having just published her eighth book of stories. (There are also seven novels, but the stories are better.) Her method remains distinctive and surprisingly fresh. It has even evolved, poking a bit into her characters' personalities where it used to glide across their polished surfaces. If her style has not gone out of style, though, her characters have. Where her bewildered sad sacks -- once young, now mostly middle-aged -- used to seem thoroughly familiar and fashionable, both they and the bland world they inhabited have now been kicked to the curb.

Consider, for instance, the protagonists in "Fléchette Follies," the novella that takes up more than a third of Beattie's new book. George Wissone is a longtime CIA agent who changes cities and identities regularly. Soon after relocating to Charlottesville, Va., he absentmindedly rear-ends a car whose driver, a divorced nurse in her fifties named Nancy, insists on getting acquainted. George resists: "He did not know how to make small talk. He seemed to alternate between complete silence and screaming instructions into someone's ear. He realized that gave him an odd demeanor when he tried to exchange pleasantries."

Yet for some reason George allows himself to be drawn in by Nancy. Eventually she asks him to help find her son, a drug addict in his late twenties who has disappeared somewhere in England. George acquiesces, mildly curious to learn whether, after years of following orders, "he could still be a responsive human being who'd do a person a favor. . . . He was trying to do something he thought a more normal person, with a more normal life, would do." One could not exactly call this a purpose-driven life, and Nancy, for her part, has even less conviction: "Most days she sat by the water in the morning and again in the evening and hoped that her son was not dead."

In the end, George's mission fails, and Nancy never hears from him again, shrugging off any responsibility when his CIA colleague tries to track him down. Despite the collision that sparked their encounter, these unhappy people are never going to connect, and Beattie, maintaining an arm's-length politeness, prevents the reader from connecting with them either. She devotes more than 100 pages to characters so remote they seem to fade off the page.

At least George, a Vietnam veteran, has solid post-traumatic reasons for his lack of engagement. The same can't be said of the twentysomething New Yorkers in "Tending Something," who skitter around during a surprise party with vacuous self-absorption. The middle-aged daughters in "Find and Replace" and "The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation" struggle ineffectually with recalcitrant mothers, and the memories of various defenseless youths in "Duchais," "The Garden Game" and "Just Going Out" range from wistful to disturbing, all tinged with melancholy.

In the volume's final story, "That Last Odd Day in L.A.," the peripheral status of Beattie's characters reaches absurd proportions. Keller, a retired professor whose early investment in Microsoft made him unexpectedly rich, is nearly a parody of Beattie-esque detachment and passivity: "His wife didn't care where he lived, as long as she lived in the opposite direction. His daughter might be relieved that he had moved away. He lived where he lived for no apparent reason -- at least, no reason apparent to him." Over a lonely Thanksgiving weekend, Keller is suddenly forced to defend himself when the unglued young son of a woman he's been dating threatens him with a gun.

It turns out that the boy's violence stems from his dismay over the behavior of his own father, a fanatical animal-rights activist who recently took him on an illegal spree to liberate turkeys. But Beattie keeps this father offstage, lavishing her attention on forlorn, moping Keller. Show of hands: Who wouldn't prefer to know more about the turkey-loving PETA extremist and less about Keller, a man so mired in solipsism that "he tended to think that people's unhappiness was rarely caused by anyone else, or alleviated by anyone else"? Keller and his ilk, once the pioneers of a directionless generation, are now at best supporting players in a drama whose mood has changed. The trademark passivity of Beattie's characters has given way to a new generation's urgency, passion, religious and political conviction, determination and certitude. Serving as a generation's voice has its limits: One day the action moves on.

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

No one can resist comparing Beattie’s grown baby boomers with their younger selves—the characters who appeared in her early short story collections. Those who were once young and aimless still lack direction—only in Follies, they’re much older. This time, the author has given them a past, which is refreshing, especially as they contemplate typical middle-age concerns (parents in nursing homes, children in trouble, failed relationships, etc.). Beattie’s careful language and dark wit is, as always, impressive and much appreciated. Overall, the shorter pieces received mixed reviews, although one story, "Apology for a Journey Not Taken," was universally panned.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Odd but subtle coincidences, missed connections, strained family relations—these are the major dynamics in Beattie's latest collection of nine stories and a novella. In the latter, "Flechette Follies," a random accident—George Wissone rear-ends Nancy Gregerson at a stoplight—in Charlottesville, Va., sparks a connection that affects far-flung people. Nancy's troubled son is MIA in London, and she hires George (whom she correctly guesses to be in the CIA) to track him down. When George himself disappears, it affects not only Nancy but also George's on-again, off-again girlfriend and others who join forces to learn his fate. Beattie's stories of adult children attempting to make sense of their aging parents and their own relationships are also compelling. In "Find and Replace," a woman tries to comprehend her mother's decision to suddenly move in with another man following the death of her husband; "The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation" spools out the strained relations between two siblings after their mother has a stroke. While a few stories read more like extended vignettes, Beattie's trademarks are here: the careful language, the deft humor and the sad, slow sweetness of life winding its way on. Fans should be happy to find that after all these years, this esteemed writer's characters can still be expected to muse over life's ironies and find no easy conclusions. Agent, Lynn Nesbit. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"Flechette Follies," the novella that opens Beattie's newest collection, is one of her most arresting and suspenseful tales. It begins with a fender bender in Charlottesville, and involves a special-ops agent, a nursing-home nurse, a missing-person quest in London, and a broken engagement in Southern California. As increasingly inexplicable and dismaying events unfold, Beattie's characters find themselves marooned on an island of misunderstandings as life crashes on, cruel and oblivious. In the nine masterfully crafted and unnerving stories that follow, Beattie displays her flair for dark comedy, her gift for writing dialogue as percussive as perfect tennis volleys, and her unwavering psychological acuity. Several searing yet cathartic stories portray exasperating and painful relationships between adults and their aging parents as Beattie, long the voice of the young, hip, and disaffected, proves herself also to be the bard of the resistant middle-aged and the addled elderly. Whatever the age of the character she invents, Beattie homes in on the perversity of emotion, the fallibility of instinct, and the relentless negotiations of the psyche. So in command is Beattie, she not only captures the absurdity of life but also brilliantly satirizes our effort to find coherence in its chaos. Simultaneously a shrewd observer of the particulars of the times and an oracle of the timeless nature of the human condition, Beattie is indispensable. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743269616
• ISBN 13: 9780743269612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320