Pi
co
Iyer
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BEATTIE
The
New Yorker
has long seemed to be written for, by, and
about those who lead lives of quiet desperation.
In
its discreet,
fearfully subdued stories the usual milieu is peripheral suburbia,
the usual mood penumbral regret. Indeed, many of the maga–
zine's most celebrated contributors-Salinger, Cheever, and Up–
dike among them-are best known for coolly chronicling the sad
eccentricities, plaintive longings, and quiet frustrations of their
generation. The newest inheritor of this tradition, speaking for a
new and peculiarly displaced generation, is Ann Beattie.
The surface details of Beattie's stories so strikingly resemble
Cheever's that one might almost read them as a sequel ("Son of
Cheever" perhaps) . For although her characters swallow pills in–
stead of booze; although they flee to California instead of Europe;
although their hassles are those of cohabitation instead of mar–
riage-they might well be the progeny of Cheever's well-heeled
lonelyhearts, raised on expectations they frequently let down.
Like their literary forefathers, Beattie's well-educated vagrants
might be mistaken for the charmed and witty creatures who in–
habit television ads, save that their urbanity protects their lives,
like their words, from all the obvious cliches. They often reside
in Connecticut and pursue moderately successful careers. They
know how to drop the right names and dabble in chic tastes. And
most of them are haunted by a cool sorrow, a listless despair.
For Beattie is perhaps the first and the finest laureate of that
generation of Americans born to a society built on quicksand and
doomed to a life in the long, ambiguous shadow of the sixties.
The characters in her stories are left over from that abandoned de–
cade, hung over with its legacy, saddled with hand-me-down cus–
toms that have gone out of style. Usually in their early thirties,
they stand for all those who were neither incapacitated by Viet
Nam nor unhinged by drugs, but unsettled only by their inno–
cence of both extremes. Sprung loose from certainties without
be–
ing swept up by revolution, old enough to have witnessed tur–
moil, yet too young to have joined or beaten it, they find them–
selves stranded in that famous space between two worlds, one
