Ann Beattie

A new Ann Beattie book is no longer the event it once was, which is something of a shame. She’s been kicking out such consistently accomplished fiction for so long now that it’s become easy to take her for granted. When she first made her name with a series of New Yorker stories in the seventies, Beattie was most often compared to older writers of frigid urban realism like the Johns Cheever and Updike, or her contemporary, Raymond Carver. Nearly thirty years later those comparisons are still in the ballpark; Beattie’s mastered an economy of style and a terse, emotional shorthand that often masks her versatility. She has an uncanny feel for the way real people talk, and her subtle descriptions of the idiosyncrasies, neuroses, and frequent sense of disconnection that bedevil her characters are as timely as ever.