Secrets and surprises might seem like unexpected specialties for Ann Beattie. In the pages of The New Yorker and of her two previous books—Distortions … and Chilly Scenes of Winter …—she anatomizes the everyday lives of characters who are headed nowhere in particular and are unfamiliar with the usual literary kind of secrets and surprises—the kind associated with epiphanies. But as Beattie has hinted all along and emphasizes in [Secrets and Surprises], hidden knowledge and unexpected discoveries are also staples of ordinary, undramatic life. They don't just belong to rare moments, and they don't necessarily irradiate life with significance. Her characters are lonely and can't help having secrets; they are used to being taken aback by the unexpected because they foresee little and control less. Their lives don't really change after they acknowledge their secrets to themselves or partially reveal them to others. Instead, another disorderly day dawns. In the appropriately uninflected prose and loosely structured stories of Secrets and Surprises Beattie makes the days and characters come to life—almost paradoxically—more powerfully and poignantly than she has before. (p. 34)
Beattie's central theme is one that calls for variations; for the relationships she describes are distinguished by seeming—at least to those involved in them—not to follow any standard pattern. Commitments are unclear, expectations unformulated and communications faulty. Beattie imagines variations in all their minute particularity in her stories; and this collection of them conveys an often dispiriting sense of the common underlying muddle. (p. 35)
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