"Falling in Place" is stronger, more accomplished, larger in every way than anything [Beattie's] done…. (p. 1) Her fiction has none of the usual gimmicks and attractions that create a cult: it's not conspicuously witty or bizarre or sexy or politically defiant or eventful; in fact, it offers so colorless and cool a surface, so quiet a voice, that it's sometimes hard to imagine readers staying with it. Her subject matter, too, is deliberately banal: she chronicles th...

[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 ...

In this new book of stories, Secrets and Surprises, Beattie imagines a very real world of people trapped in relationships that don't work. Resignation is everybody's modus operandi, a spiritual routine that gets them from one day to the next…. Secrets and Surprises represents a great leap forward for Beattie. This new collection recognizes that the more interesting distortions are those which blend inconspicuously into our lives so as to be almost invisible. But nonetheless powerful. (p...

Not surprisingly, and not without justice, Ann Beattie has been praised on sociological grounds as the chronicler of this generation. (p. 34) My own view is that Ann Beattie's sociological realism is superficial, a reflective realism of accurate detail—what songs are in, what clothes, what expressions—rather than the kind of critical realism whose exemplar is Buddenbrooks. As for her artistry, I think she has yet to adapt her laid-back sensibility to the large-scale dynamics of the nove...

Readers of [Beattie's] earlier books will not be disappointed in Falling in Place…. Neither will they be particularly amazed. It's similar territory, seen, if possible, with an even sharper vision, a more mordant sense of humor. To say that Ann Beattie is a good writer would be an understatement. Her ear for the banalities and petty verbal cruelties of the late '70s middle-American domestic idiom is faultless, her eye for the telling detail ruthless as a hawk's. She knows ...

Beattie writes about suburbia because that seems her experience, first in Virginia, now in Connecticut. Her characters have little in common with Cheever's feverish Ray Millands or Updike's pious whiners. Beattie is neither as bitter and cruel as Cheever nor as self-condemnatory and high-minded as Updike. She writes insularly, on a small, drab, qualifiedly romantic canvas, without climaxes, with less energy than her supposed mentors, and with a Southerner's shameless need for the myth o...

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, touch...

The characters who populate [Secrets and Surprises] came of age during the 1960's. They are, on the whole, a nice-looking bunch of people who have never suffered from any of the basic wants. Most of them, for reasons often unexplained, share a mistrust of passion and conversation. If a man and woman get together, it is because of a shared car or animal, or because each has a famous parent, or maybe simply because one of them has run out of other people to live with; and, even when they live together,...

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...

[Ann Beattie] has become perhaps our most authoritative translator-transcriber of the speech-patterns, nonverbal communications, rituals, and tribal customs of those members (white, largely middle-class) of a generation who came of age around 1970—who attended or dropped out of college, smoked dope, missed connections, lived communally, and drifted in and out of relationships with a minimum of self-recognized affect or commitment…. [Throughout] the novel purposeful action and even consistent d...

[What] matters most in Ann Beattie's short stories and novels is her absolute ear and her masterly deadpan humor. When the two work together, the results are dazzling…. Ann Beattie's characters have an autonomous quality, as if they had stepped whole into her novel from somewhere else. She pores over them, then tells us how they work. (p. 148)

Beginning to read [Secrets and Surprises] is like going out alone into the night in the country: it's very dark, and the flashlight doesn't seem to illuminate much. Single objects—a car, a dog—loom up with uncanny significance. Familiar things look strange, one-dimensional. There are barely audible rustlings in the undergrowth which could mean anything, or nothing. It is very quiet. But gradually one becomes accustomed to the faint light and realizes that there is more going on i...

[Falling in Place] begins with a mesmerizing portrait of a family coming undone. Unfortunately it takes a turn from which it never recovers, into melodramatic violence. The event—a boy's half-accidental shooting of his hated sister—is perfectly plausible and yet seems perfectly unnecessary as a revelation of the hatreds that animate this grisly world…. The fundamental problem with the book, though, has to do with its author's sensibility, which is reticent to the point of ...