Ann Beattie. Few writers are exalted so young. When her stories were first published in the New Yorker in 1974, she was barely 26. The literati hailed her as the voice of a generation — a writer whose spare prose and emotionally stripped dialogue captured the ennui of the young upper-middle class. Numbed by privilege, bored by sex, glazed by drugs, her characters were antidotes to the fiery Beats of the ’50s or the hotheads of the ’60s. They were post-assassinations, post-Vietnam, post-rage.
In truth, Beattie’s stories never spoke for a generation. She knew it. Her contemporaries knew it. That didn’t stop her work from being ballyhooed by literary keepers of the gate— George Plimpton, William Shawn, John Updike — all of whom roundly proclaimed Beattie a generational prophet. She has worn the mantle uneasily, attempting to shuck it with every book in her remarkably productive four-decade career. She used her novels— from “Chilly Scenes of Winter” to “Love Always” to “Picturing Will” to “Another You”— as opportunities to cast a veritable trail of narrative voices behind her.
But her short stories have always been stamped with a tart, abbreviated style that is unmistakably Beattie. She has been feted for this by America’s most venerable literary institutions: PEN/Malamud, the Rea Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
But here comes Beattie to rattle it all and test our patience. “Mrs. Nixon” is ostensibly a novel about the first lady, and yet it hardly engages Pat Nixon at all.
The first hint we have that we’re in for a bill of goods is on the book’s jacket. Under the title, in a time-honored spot that should read “A Novel,” we’re given: “A Novelist Imagines a Life.” A novelist imagines a life? That’s like saying, “A Pianist Plinks Some Notes,” “A Historian Dredges Up History,” “A Hen Lays You an Egg.” Call it truth in packaging. “Mrs. Nixon”is anything but a novel; and it is not, except in the most perfunctory way, about Mrs. Nixon. It is about the pianist, the historian, the hen. It’s about Beattie.
The book is made up of more than 60 scenes, all told in different moods, at various times, by random people. In one told by Mrs. Nixon’s daughter Julie, our heroine is a young woman who works in a department store and pluckily drives an elderly couple cross country for a little extra cash.
In another, Pat gives the serious young man who is courting her a gift of two books: one by Karl Marx, the other by Guy de Maupassant. They marry. He talks. She listens. Suddenly, they are in the White House. There are fleeting, quirky moments with H.R. Haldeman, Elvis Presley, Mamie Eisenhower, Roger Ailes, the angry, spitting crowds in Caracas — even the family dogs — rendered like so many chips in a whirling kaleidoscope. Throughout, Mrs. Nixon is painfully robotic, a ’50s caricature who keeps her emotions carefully in check until her brain detonates in two killing strokes that Nixon blames on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The 37th president, in Beattie’s imagination, is a lumbering fool who loves to hear the sound of his own voice: a ghoul who opens the door to trick-or-treaters one Halloween night and sees a rubber mask of his own face staring back.
None of this, however fascinating as it might sound, inhabits “Mrs. Nixon” in anything resembling a storyline. Nor does it occupy center stage, since by page 4 the authorial “I” has elbowed in and completely dwarfed the heroine. “As far as I can tell,” our author says grandly, “she was born somewhere near midnight the day preceding St. Patrick’s Day.”
I? “As far as I”?
