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 of a Lost Cause, in her case the counterculture….

Beattie's politics remain her secret, oddly missing in print, certainly neither economic nor sexual—perhaps inferentially anarchistic: "It's a rotten world. No wonder people want answers. No wonder they want to have parties and get distracted." Beattie might allow Cheever to caress her and Updike to possess her, but then she'd drive all night to get stoned in Vermont with the dissolute….

[Falling In Place...