[Ann Beattie] describes a wayward human landscape that is bereft of meaning, in which everyone is chronically vagrant and capricious, and unmoored….

[The] chaotic world of post-everything dropouts has come to seem her private literary fiefdom, populated by men and women well over thirty, educated to no purpose, living on family handouts, unattached and uncommitted. Terrified by silence, they fend it off continually with rock, dope, and the insatiable pursuit of whimsy and new kicks. They all turn up again in Falling in Place, but by now it is drearily clear that Ann Beattie has nothing fresh to reveal about these disaffected drifters…. Confronted once again with these hollow and disordered spirits, whose habits and gestures and speech Miss Beattie knows with flawless intimacy, we are unable to feel anything but boredom and distaste for the muddled weirdness she records with such disingenuous objectivity.

As though she realizes...