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PARTISAN REVIEW
Beattie has always crafted metaphors that precisely reflect
such off-balance lives slipping out of control. One of her latest
novels is titled
Falling in Place;
stories in this collection are
called "Learning to Fall," "Gravity," "Waiting," "Afloat," and
"Like Glass." They are preoccupied with weightlessness and
drifting, with water and air. Characters do not sink or swim; they
float, or-as the modish phrase has it-they go with the flow.
It
is the unspoken irony of the title story that nothing seems to be
"burning"; on the contrary, Beattie marked out the frosty and
fragmented terrain that has become her own with the title of her
first
novel-Chilly Scenes of Winter.
Her stories are archetypally
set in winter, when snow eradicates color, contour, and contrast,
when fingers and lives seem numb, when people, shuddering,
can claim to be cool. Hers is not, to be sure, the anorexic pallor
of Joan Didion's cardiograms of stunned or shattered nerves. Nor
is it the overheated whiteness of Emily Dickinson, staring so in–
tensely at a single spot that she grows dizzy. Beattie's is the white
of hospital sheets and muffled December fields; not neurosis, but
paralysis.
Her parched, exhausted stories themselves seem numb. She
reads them herself in a plain, flat, utterly toneless voice that sug–
gests deadened feelings or, on occasion, a determined effort to
fight back tears. Her wan sentences and neutral cadences follow
one upon another with sharp, chill clarity. Wandering like their
characters'days, her anodyne stories have no resolution-in part
because their people can't make sense of life, in part because
nothing ends in any case. As if to invert the eventful frenzy and
clamorous manic swings of the world according to television, a
Beattie story is naked of explosions or emphases. It has neither
strain, nor looseness; neither lyricism, nor radiance, nor rhythm,
nor hope. Reading it is like driving for mile after mile down a
straight road through a snow-covered desert.
One of Beatie's deftest narrative tricks is to catch the blur of
personal relations in today's America by plunging her reader,
without introduction or reference, into a chaos of first names (un–
interested in the public world, she rarely mentions surnames).
Upon beginning one of her stories, it always takes a while to de–
termine the relations between the floating soap bubbles; a child
can easily
be
mistaken for a boy friend, a gay lover for a brother
or a son. For the family circle of middle-class America has appar-
