Ann Beattie yet again reveals herself as one of literature’s most liberating figures. Book after book, her writing affirms a beguiling originality ... With shrewd empathy and a Geiger counter ear for dialogue, Beattie sounds the grace notes — and the fall-from-grace notes — of her characters’ lives ... When I read Beattie’s stories, I think of Chekhov’s; when I read Chekhov’s stories, I think of Beattie’s. Both are writers for the ages. Chekhov suggested that every day imposes a precarious mood, and we either submit to the point of damage, or we struggle to transcend it, trying to gain some equilibrium, and even discover a little happiness. Beattie’s characters can be adept at both. She is one of our few contemporary masters of storytelling.
These gorgeously complicated, psychologically astute tales are catalyzed by holiday gatherings, weddings, birthday celebrations, and reunions, joyous occasions wildly derailed by divorce, sibling rivalry, generational clashes, financial disasters, violence, and medical emergencies. The directions in which these encounters veer are beyond unexpected, thanks to Beattie’s puckish imagination ... Beattie’s profoundly intriguing and unsettling stories abound in delectably witty and furious inner monologues, barbed dialogue, ludicrous predicaments, many-faceted heartaches, and abrupt upwellings of affection, even love.
...even Beattie's deflated endings are saved by her substantive, fraught middles. She follows her characters through the mundane and routine moments, tracking their thoughts with a degree of intimacy that's deceptively matter-of-fact. In each story, Beattie builds a psychological case that echoes beyond its final sentence, as if the outcome matters less than the events preceding it. Beattie is widely celebrated for good reason — she's a phenomenal writer. Her Achilles' heel, however, may be the same focus that helped her rise to prominence. Her stories possess a white, upper-class traditionalism that is, these days, less easy to embrace ... With this collection, Beattie reminds us, again, there's no clever way to evade experience. Or loneliness. Or death. And it's foolish to expect answers when life is mostly about fumbling around in vain to find them.
Recognizable cultural detritus of the way we live now — absurd, witty, sometimes disturbing — floats through these stories ... Beattie’s dialogue zings, deadpans, meanders and sizzles. If it’s sometimes exhausting to follow, it’s never dull ... I read these stories hoping that someone would make it to solid ground, or at least do a sustainable job of treading water. Not really. The most reassuring things on offer in this fictional world turn out to be a dog and a gorgeous pair of pricey leather ankle boots. But there can also be the exhilarating uplift of Beattie’s gorgeous prose.
These are busy, gregarious stories, more active and unbuttoned than the so-called Minimalist writing that defined Ms. Beattie’s heyday in the 1980s, but still possessed of her eye for quirky relationships and her sidelong sense of humor.
Her loopy similes can at times be distractingly venturesome...Beattie’s endings can also go astray, entering a pseudopoetic realm of facile epiphany...But they can also seem just right, especially when her aging central characters decide, on a whim, to do something unexpected and life-affirming ... What Beattie’s older characters strive for, in such decisive moments, is to remain open to experience despite their fears. This is one meaning of the line 'The soul should always stand ajar,' in the Emily Dickinson poem from which Beattie draws her title.
The John Cheever of her generation, Beattie has long chronicled the emotional foibles of upper-middle-class WASPs with sharply chiseled wit; in these 13 new stories, travel or a visit of some sort is the common thread, mortality the common theme ... Despite flickers of optimism, this is a somber collection pondering mortality, fate, and the unknowability of others.
One is tempted, when reading the sublime Ann Beattie, to do so in one fell swoop. Her stories are that delectable, that easy – at first pass. But it is best to slow down, to savor their cadence, their quirkiness (and trademark humor) before realizing that every single one of them opens onto a fathomless deep ... Beattie makes of us co-conspirators, taking us deep into the psyches of a whole panoply of characters via the smaller, and often hilarious, details of their lives before tipping story upon story over with a surprise event, or realization.
Beattie often seems over-friendly to the bigotry of her straight, white, affluent characters, playing it for laughs ... Surprisingly, Beattie also offers up some unvarnished truths about male depression. These pages are chockablock with depressed men: guys who’ve lost their wives or girlfriends; men ravaged by disease; men who drink too much or get desultory curbside oral sex; men who are mum about their heart medicine ... The women of The Accomplished Guest may be felled by inertia, whether self-imposed or a hazard of aging, but its men are losing control.
