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ently imploded, and its domestic structure has been distorted and
distended. People change spouses, disguises, even sexual prefer–
ences at random: thus children do not know their uncles, girls are
older than their stepmothers, fathers are in love with other men,
and many need calculators to count their siblings. Everybody
cares about "relating" to everybody else, in part, perhaps, because
relatives are unknown. Nothing is quite as it seems or as it should
be: in one Beattie story, a woman shares roller coaster rides, con–
fidences , and a joint with her husband's gay brother; in another,
the narrator must try to win over her lover's teenage daughter;
and in a third, a woman commiserates with her husband's live-in
male lover as all three try to cope with separation.
Elsewhere, again and again, we see men boyishly wooing
their children. For it is the dark and perverse paradox of this
country's broken families that adults and children have effective–
ly changed places (a phenomenon touchingly noted in the recent
film
Shoot the Moon).
While all too many adults still lust after
adolescence, all too many kids are thrust into a precocious matur–
ity. Forced to fend for themselves, to walk a tightrope between the
sins of their fa thers and the vices of their peers, more and more
children are hustled by privilege and negligence into a hard wis–
dom they must reluctantly assume. (The ubiquitous figure of the
sage ten-year old in current movies is, alas, no exaggeration: one
need only contrast the recent Scottish film
Gregory's Girl,
in
which a gangly and good natured fifteen-year old, wry ly mocking
his own growing pains, spends the entire film in unarticulated
adoration of a girl whose hand he longs to hold, with
Fast Times
at Ridgemont High,
in which a group of Californians of the same
age languidly deal with abortions, hard drugs, and jaded sexual
appetites.) In Beattie's stories, children are knowing before they
are discriminating: a six year-old refuses stories with morals, dis–
missing them as "kid's stuff"; a parent reads her child R.D. Laing
instead of fairy tales; one nine-year old carries around a copy of
Samuel Beckett. Even as these children are turning into tough lit–
tle realists, their parents are tumbling into stolen romances and
irresponsible rites, belatedly courting an innocence they had earli–
er squandered. We see them dressing up as bears, playing with
Frisbees, devising quirky surprises for their lovers, and running
with dogs. And we come to see that their prankish charm is only
another face of their affliction, a refuge and a mask.
"If
the birds
