The people in Ann Beattie's second book of stories, Secrets and Surprises … have gone beyond anger into numbness. As were the protagonists of her first collection, Distortions, they are generally in their mid-'30s; some of them are parents; all of them share disquietingly sophomoric tastes and desires. They listen to Bob Dylan or Keith Jarrett, display vaguely artistic interests and get stoned a lot. They are by and large unlikable, albeit not uninteresting, and even, on occasion, touching. The predominant mood, dire enervation, is oddly contagious.
Beattie has been polishing her style of mannered naturalism for some time now, and it is beginning to show signs of wear. One can discern in her work traces of the repressed poignancy of J. D. Salinger, to whom she has been compared. But Beattie's method—her painstakingly accurate rendition of the commonplace, her reliance upon the artifacts of popular culture (Perry Mason, Newsweek, Notorious)—reminds me not so much of other writers as of the sculptor Duane Hanson, who uses wax to capture grubby likenesses—waitresses, construction workers and museum guards. While seldom grubby, her characters are fixed by a similar eye for homely detail, and the deliberate flatness of her prose imparts an almost tactile quality to the narrative.
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