PICD IYER
549
dying, the other powerless
to
be born. Yes, they routinely-if not
religiously-smoke dope, crash on sofas, sing along to Dylan,
shack up, and hang out; but they also think of ardor, passion,
change itself as cobwebbed anachronisms. For there is resolu–
tion in revolution; and if the sixties were a time of decisiveness,
however reckless, or wayward, or violent, the seventies recoiled
into hedged bets and hesitations. In the world of Beattie's people,
conviction has followed convention into premature retirement;
commitment is a dirty word.
The natural element of these drop-out
manques
is therefore a
kind of limbo, a no man's land. Their scruffily-hip dwellings are
not in the city, but not entirely out of it. With it enough to know
what they can't stand, they are not steady enough to know where
they can stand. And so they are always moving, but
rar~ly
going
anywhere, in flight-from reality, responsibility, normality–
without a destination. Their secession from the world is more a
silence than a statement. And their lack of control-they less
make their lives than fall into them-is registered in the blank–
ness, the glassy blandness of their world. As one character admits,
''I'm exhausted from sitting all day, drinking, and doing noth–
ing." Beattie's people are single mothers, would-be artists,
veterans of one thousand-night stands; they are returning to
nature, enduring a mid-life crisis, sifting through the bric-a-brac
of past lives, unthreading the tangle of children, lovers, friends,
and above all, hoping not to dissolve. All of them are, in every
sense, between engagements, forever commuting between one
another's homes and lives, both of which they enter and leave
with casual frequency.
There is, in short, nothing holding them down or keeping
them in place. Unsituated, they are unstimulated, and driven to
seek not answers, but anaesthetics-therapy, TV, Valium, joints.
Their main activity is refining inactivity; they space out into a
druggy ether-world of thoughtless, self-enclosed oblivion. As one
nameless figure remarks, "Everybody who doesn't take hold of
something has something take hold of them." And Beattie evokes
this' atmosphere of dangling conversations between people deaf
to one another's griefs with characteristic compression: her char–
acters are constantly calling each other up, answered by ma–
chines, and left
to
whisper their secrets or endearments into thin
aIr.
