Contemporary Life, Cataloged in Detail

Usually they are written in the present tense and feature characters we are expected to identify with or, at least, recognize. Or perhaps it is not the people but the props that look familiar. All the paraphernalia of postmodern life seem to be here: VCRs, athletic shoes, ex-spouses, single parents, fast food. Generally, not much happens, but even when it does, it doesn’t seem to matter a great deal to the characters, let alone the reader.

These are the stories of Ann Beattie, who, since her debut in the 1970s, has won critical acclaim as an ironic chronicler of the been-there-done-that, post-1960s generation. “Park City” offers a hefty sampling from the author’s five earlier collections, plus eight new stories. Beattie has been praised as a portraitist of banality. But it is hard to write about boredom without becoming boring.

The author suffers from a compulsion, common among contemporary American writers, to provide exhaustive catalogs of everyday objects as if this were a scintillating form of social commentary. Ironically, the habit of larding fiction with references to pop culture can no longer claim even the paltry virtue of serving as documentation. In this age of film and videotape, there is little danger that Levi’s, Bob Dylan or Burger King will slip into oblivion.

How much do we really need to know about late 20th century condo decor? A lot, according to Beattie: “Now, in the too-bright transfusion room, it was hard for me to believe that only a few months ago I’d been sitting in Richard’s dining alcove, with the cluster of phones that rested on top of Variety landslides and formed the centerpiece of the long tavern table, sipping freshly ground Jamaica Blue Mountain [from]. . .a neon-colored coffee mug.” This syntactically challenged sentence is from a new story, “Second Question,” about a woman visiting a dying gay friend. Like much of Beattie’s fiction, it has its moments: accurate dialogue, neatly turned ironies and flashes of insight. But these moments are few, submerged in a welter of insignificant details.

The hero of another story is an idle fellow whose chief occupation is house-sitting. But Beattie is so intent on demonstrating his vacuity, she neglects to give him any qualities that might interest us. Instead, we hear about his dull breakfast, described in prose that is equally uninspired: “An English, with no-sugar-added grape jelly. Glass of Citrucel, big heaping tablespoon, fill the Flipper glass half full with water, stir madly, add a few ice cubes, a dollop of guava nectar, from the Cubano grocery.”

Beattie, however, writes well about children, who are seldom put first by the feckless grown-ups she chronicles. “Cosmos,” the opening story, is a charming comedy of errors about a junior high school teacher wondering whether to marry her current lover and become a permanent stepmom to his hyperactive son. “Park City” also deals with children, though it dissipates its forces in a meandering narrative.

Perhaps the most effective of the new stories is “The Four-Night Fight,” a scary yet very funny account of a marital war that blows up out of nowhere: “[T]he fight, in his mind, had already begun, but she had been slow to understand his sulking, mistaking it for simple fatigue. . . . Maybe he harbored a grudge that she had made him spray the trash can with Clorox.”

Before long, harsh words escalate into violence, rendered with Beattie’s trademark deadpan wit: “She had apparently thrown the phone book at him. . . . [C]ertainly the phone book had not just animated itself to join the fracas.”

This anthology offers some of the more memorable of Beattie’s earlier stories, as well as some of the more forgettable pieces. The kindest thing one might say is that “Park City” is, if nothing else, a representative collection that should please those readers who admire Beattie’s work, but won’t do much to change the minds of those who don’t.