Beattie, Ann (Vol. 18) | Introduction
Beattie, Ann 1947–
An American novelist and short story writer, Beattie is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. Her fiction is concerned primarily with the fortunes of the Woodstock generation in the spiritless seventies. (See also CLC, Vols. 8, 13.)
Each story [of Secrets and Surprises: Short Stories] begins with a different young couple. They are living together. Sometimes they are married. Exhausted (by the sixties?), these people seem waiting, just as Chekhov's and Turgenev's people waited, in lonely houses in the country; but these, it seems, have no neighbors. The skill with which their gifted author renders their passing days tends to convince the reader, as the stories pile up in his mind, that this eventlessness is in fact the rhythm of life itself…. Impressive reporting of curiously Russian, technology-age lives….
"Notes on Current Books: 'Secrets and Surprises: Short Stories'," in Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1979, by the Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia), Vol. 55, No. 2 (Spring, 1979), p. 56.
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