Ann Beattie

Ann Beattie
File:Ann Beattie headshot.jpg in April 2006
Born	(1947-09-08) September 8, 1947 Washington, D.C.
Occupation	Short story writer, Novelist, Professor
Nationality	American
Genre	Literary

Ann Beattie (born September 8, 1947) is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and John Updike. She holds an undergraduate degree from American University and a master's degree from the University of Connecticut.

Career

Born in Washington, D.C., Beattie grew up in Chevy Chase, Washington, D.C., and attended Woodrow Wilson High School.

She gained attention in the early 1970s with short stories published in The Western Humanities Review, Ninth Letter, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. Critics have praised her writing for its keen observations and dry, matter-of-fact irony which chronicle disillusionments of the upper-middle-class generation that grew up in the 1960s. In 1976, she published her first book of short stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, later made into a film.

Beattie's style has evolved over the years. In 1998, she published Park City, a collection of old and new short stories, about which Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote in the New York Times:

[The stories] are arranged chronologically, which allows the reader to trace the development of the author's technique. It also lets one see the contrast between the latest stories and the earliest, an experience of sufficient subtlety and complexity to reduce one in this limited space to the following gross generalizations: Gone is the deadpan style of the early and middle stories, in which Ms. Beattie lays out on a dissecting table the behavior of her disaffected post-counterculture yuppies and then leaves it up to the reader to do the anatomizing. Gone, too, are the stabs of lyricism of the middle period, particularly the endings that try poetically to recapitulate the story's action but feel tacked on and artificial. .. In the best of these stories, Ms. Beattie's ability both to commit herself and to knit her commitment into the finest needlework of her artistry contrasts sharply with the irritating moral passivity of her earlier work.

Beattie has taught at Harvard College and the University of Connecticut and presently teaches at the University of Virginia, where she is the Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing. In 2005 she was selected as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, in recognition of her outstanding achievement in that genre.

Her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976), was adapted as a film alternatively titled Chilly Scenes of Winter or Head Over Heels in 1979 by Joan Micklin Silver, starring John Heard, Mary Beth Hurt, and Peter Riegert. The first version was not well received by audiences, though upon its re-release in 1982, with a new title and ending, to match that in book, the movie was successful, and is now considered a cult classic. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

Recent works

Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called her latest novel Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (2011) "preposterous," "narcissistic," and "self-indulgent"—the "sort of pretentious volume that makes people hate academics." In The Washington Post, Maria Arana characterized it as "a bill of goods" devoid of "anything resembling a story line" that is "less about the eponymous Mrs. than about an endless parade of wordsmiths trotted out for show." The book "is not, except in the most perfunctory way, about Mrs. Nixon," Arana determined. "It's about Beattie." “[T]he book does not succeed,” wrote William Deresiewicz in The Nation. “Its bric-a-brac approach is ultimately wearying: nothing ever quite gets under way. One ends up feeling as if Beattie has spent the whole performance clearing her throat. . . . Her subject often seems a pretext, something just to get the conversation started.” By contrast, Dawn Raffel, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called the book "splendidly tricky", "at times... movingly lyrical", and said "Nothing in Mrs. Nixon is perfectly clear, and that is the source of its power."

The State We're In, Beattie's most recent collection of short stories, is set in Maine and was described by Mary Pols in The New York Times Book Review as "slippery" and "peculiar." Pols wrote, "I read this collection twice trying to unravel the mystery of what else, beyond Maine, ties these unfinished-feeling stories together."

Beattie's papers are held by the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

Personal

Beattie is married to painter Lincoln Perry. In 2005 the two collaborated on a published retrospective of Perry's paintings. Entitled Lincoln Perry's Charlottesville, the book contains an introductory essay and artist's interview by Beattie. She was previously married to writer David Gates. While she was at the University of Connecticut, she developed a close friendship with Elaine Scarry.

Bibliography

Short story collections

• Distortions (1976); ISBN 0-679-73235-7
• Secrets and Surprises (1978); ISBN 0-679-73193-8
• The Burning House (1982); ISBN 0-679-76500-X
• What Was Mine (1991); ISBN 0-517-10541-1
• Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories (1986); ISBN 0-7432-2678-X
• Park City (1998); ISBN 0-679-78133-1
• Perfect Recall (2000); ISBN 0-7432-1170-7
• Follies: New Stories (2005); ISBN 0-7432-6962-4
• The New Yorker Stories (2011); ISBN 1-4391-6875-X
• The State We're In: Maine Stories (2015) ISBN 978-1501107818

Novels

• Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976)
• Falling In Place (1981); ISBN 0-679-73192-X
• Love Always (1986); ISBN 0-394-74418-7
• Picturing Will (1989); ISBN 0-517-08094-X
• Another You (1995); ISBN 0-517-17386-7
• My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997); ISBN 0-517-28919-9
• The Doctor's House (2002); ISBN 0-7432-3501-0
• Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines A Life (2011)

Novellas

• Walks With Men (2010); ISBN 1-4391-6869-5

External links

• Audio: Ann Beattie reads an essay on ambient sound in the works of Joyce, Yates, and Carver. (Key West Literary Seminar 2008)
• Beattie's page at the University of Virginia
• Online New Yorker story Coping Stones
• Online New Yorker story The Rabbit Hole As Likely Explanation
• Ann Beatie discusses her writing process on Bookworm in October, 1998