What we think of as the contemporary New Yorker story owes a lot to Ann Beattie. Beattie, like John Updike before her, has spent her whole career publishing in, and being defined by, the magazine. Her short stories are characterized not only by an absence of melodrama but by an absence of drama. In an Ann Beattie story there is rarely an agon, a central conflict between several characters, as much as a great deal of passive aggressive behavior, especially between divorced spouses and parents and children. Even the epiphany, that small concluding revelation that has been the stock-in-trade of the short form since Dubliners, is uncommon. What Beattie’s attenuated craft supplies is a great deal of very close observation of minute details — she will spend a few paragraphs describing the toes of everybody in a room — and very precisely rendered contemporary speech. And occasionally, just to remind us she can do it, Beattie will bring out an old-fashioned story of great power.
In “The State We’re In: Maine Stories,” her latest collection, Beattie gives us an interlinking series of stories, most of them set in southern coastal Maine, and involving or filtered through the consciousness of Jocelyn, a troubled teen who has been parked with her uncle and aunt while her feckless mother is hospitalized.
Most of the stories here don’t really succeed, but they don’t quite fail, either. They don’t fail because Beattie has an eye and ear for the way people look and sound that’s, as they would say in New England, wicked sharp. And most of the stories don’t succeed because they don’t do enough, or risk enough.
There is one unforgettable exception, “Yancey,” which might be the finest story Beattie has ever published. The unnamed protagonist is a poet, a widow in her late 70s who lives alone in a crumbling house, nagged by her lesbian daughter and her daughter’s wife. Yancey is her old and fading dog. She is visited by a straight-arrow-seeming IRS agent who inspects her workroom, which she has tax-deducted. The taxman turns out to be curious about poetry and troubled in his home life. He asks the woman to recommend a book of poetry, and instead she sits down on her stairs and recites James Wright’s haunting, Rilke-echoing, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” a poem that the story reproduces in its entirety.
The woman takes a shine to the agent and, impulsively, offers him a place to live. He demurs and leaves. This is how the story ends:
“No day failed to contain the unexpected. Which I suspect Yancey thought, too, especially because she didn’t quite understand why she couldn’t make a wild dash like a thunderbolt from door to field, why she panted, why she failed to catch anything, why she’d been skunked, in fact.
“Startled starlings flew up out of the high grass, their black whorl a little tornado that did not touch down and therefore did not damage. They disappeared like a momentary perception above Yancey’s head, fanning out and flying west. Or like the clotted words crammed into a cartoon bubble. Like one of Ginger’s finger-paintings from so, so long ago, brought home for inspection and praise.”
This is more than fine writing: the bright cascade of similes is perfectly in character for a poet. And there has been the briefest and most delicate of suggestions that Ginger, the daughter, has all her life longed for praise from her mother and received only inspection, and that her interference in her mother’s life is based on thwarted love and on resentment for the radiant love Yancey so undeservedly receives. There is also the hint that the poet has not been a good wife — her alcoholic husband died when he drove his car into a tree — and that like most artists, she only has energy for the uncomplicated and unconditional love of animals. The quirkiness and eccentricity, the constant brand-naming (the dog plays with an Ed Grimley doll) that are a feature of all of Beattie’s stories, work here because they are all in the service of giving the story its impact.
But there’s not enough of this in “The State We’re In” and too much of characters saying things like “And didn’t you Henry went on a little too long about the failure of the human pyramid?” which could almost be a caption for a New Yorker cartoon.
