[In the following excerpt, Pritchard praises Beattie for the way she presents “the common stuff of life” in Another You.]

… Ann Beattie has always seemed to me essentially a writer of short fiction, although from the beginning of her career, with Chilly Scenes of Winter, and Distortion, both published in 1976, her long fiction has kept pace with her volumes of stories. The new novel [Another You] is her fifth and longest, surely her most ambitious.¹Another You eschews （as did Picturing Will, her last） the minimalist style of her earlier work and moves a good deal closer to realism, indeed—if it does not sound too demeaning—to conventional novelese. In Picturing Will things got terribly out of control in a rash of digressive, sentimental writing about a child who was scarcely there on the page. Another You, like all Beattie's work, is more than occasionally trying of a reader's patience, but cumulatively makes a kind of aesthetic and human sense. Its main character, Marshall Lockard, is a college English teacher in New Hampshire who becomes mildly involved with a female student; meanwhile his wife is currently having an affair, his stepmother is dying, and his family past is a complicated one indeed. Just how complicated we don't find out until later, when the at first mysterious and annoying italicized letters that cap many of the early chapters are finally explained.

I've always resisted complaining that a novelist's characters aren't worthy subjects for fiction because they don't measure up as interesting human beings we can take seriously. But that complaint, in reading Ann Beattie, sometimes quivers on the horizon. When her mode is strongly satiric, as in Secrets and Surprises and the earlier stories, one doesn't ask for “serious” three-dimensional actors. But in Another You she is mainly unsatiric, asking us to care about the lives she presents. So as an English teacher I had trouble with Marshall Lockard, whose relation to literature surfaces only occasionally, in less than convincing gulps: “He thought of the concluding lines of Yeats's brilliant poem ‘The Circus Animals' Desertion'”; “the beautiful closing line of Yeats's ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ passed quickly through his mind”; “He wondered, idly, if there was any poem that contained the word ‘banana'” （I could have quoted him Wallace Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction—“And là-bas, là-bas, the cool bananas grew, / Hung heavily on the great banana tree”） which, as a teacher of modern poetry, Marshall should know about.

What really does convince is Beattie's marvelous way with the common stuff of life, like preparing to take a shower in a motel you've rolled into dead tired and that turns out to be just what the doctor ordered:

A thick white terrycloth robe hung from a hanger suspended from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. He removed the robe and draped it over the top of the shower door, spent a few seconds figuring out how the faucet worked while admiring the heaviness of the brass. The bath mat was rolled and placed in a deep-chrome-plated basket attached to the tile at the back wall of the shower, along with a back scrubber enclosed in plastic. Standing under the strong force of the shower, he unwrapped the soap, tossing the wrapper sideways, over his head. … He washed his hair with the soap—something Sonja strongly disapproved of, saying it made his hair look like it had been struck by lightning—then massaged each shoulder as he dialed the showerhead clockwise, increasing the force of the water.

This is the sort of thing I read Beattie for, rather than any moral or even dramatic content—although the surprise final section of this novel, “Coconut Grove,” is impressive, both historically and humanly. Whatever doubt one has about Another You overall, there's no question about the writer's commitment to form in the novel, nor any doubt, at least in my mind, that this is the best full-length fiction she's produced. …

Note

1. Another You, by Ann Beattie. Alfred A. Knopf.