Author is older; her tales, wiser

Follies

New Stories

Ann Beattie

Scribner: 320 pp., $25

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Age takes a toll on all of us. In some cases, it’s a punishing toll, and in others -- as with the short stories of Ann Beattie -- a mellowing occurs that only enhances beauty. Like a society matron with good bones, the stories of her newest collection, “Follies,” shine with the insights of time, having become even more distilled versions of themselves.

Long known as one of the American masters of the short story, Beattie gained a stellar reputation in the mid-1970s when she was in her 20s. As the voice of the disillusioned upper-middle-class youth of her generation, she created inscrutable tales of social dissolution -- stories in which drugs, parental divorce and ennui undo characters, and readers are offered little, if any, hint of redemption. This is just the way it is, her stories suggest.

With the passing of decades, her characters have matured, but her story lines remain enigmatic and incisive. The opening piece, “Flechette Follies,” is a meandering, complicated novella focusing on George Wissone, a CIA operative who constantly changes his identity and residence. New to Charlottesville, Va., he gets into a fender bender with Nancy Gregerson, a convalescent-care nurse whose adult son has disappeared amid the drug and street life of London.

What starts out as a casual encounter -- exchanging insurance information -- becomes a life-altering event. Nancy asks George to help locate her son, a task far removed from the high-adrenaline covert work he normally does. George agrees, not so much to help Nancy but to “see if he could still be a responsive human being who’d do a person a favor when he wasn’t motivated by money, or sex, or -- in this case -- danger. He was trying to do something he thought a more normal person, with a more normal life, would do.”

Nancy and George are resolute loners, fiercely protective of their privacy, yet they’re tied to an assemblage of supporting figures. When George, on the hunt for the lost son, goes missing, these figures push and pull against each other, trying to find coherence.

Though the characters know each other, Beattie asks us to consider how well we really know the people in our lives. To care about others carries a price; sometimes it’s just too high. And even when we pay that price, we often miss the point. Worse yet, her story suggests, we may never realize we missed the point. In this novella, for instance, readers learn what happens to George, but the folks back home -- his friends, his lover, the woman who hired him -- will never know.

“Find and Replace” will appeal to readers familiar with the Microsoft Word feature of the same name. At its heart is Ann, a young woman who goes back to her childhood home in Fort Myers, Fla., to help her mother grieve after the death of her father six months earlier, only to learn that her mother has decided, with utter pragmatism, to marry a neighbor.

Ann is appalled at her mother’s readiness to plug this other man into the spaces previously occupied by her father, to replace him with the ease of a novelist blithely changing the names of her characters. As her mother explains it, though, soul-bearing romance is beside the point: “[A]t my age you don’t necessarily want to know someone extremely well. You want to be compatible, but you can’t let yourself get all involved in the dramas that have already played out.”

The most heartwarming story is “The Garden Game,” in which a woman reflects on the childhood summers she spent with her Aunt Leticia and Uncle Beaumont in Maine and the uncle’s game of hiding things in the garden for her to uncover the following year when she returned. As a teen, she loses interest in the game and wonders years later about the treasures she never bothered to look for.

In Beattie’s fiction, the love of family and friends is central to the plot, but when all is taken in, that love is not always enough to compensate for the pains of living. Her stories, as with her tales of earlier years, remain inscrutable. Readers may be left wondering what, exactly, a particular narrative adds up to. But if we sit with the work long enough, we glimpse the truth at its core.

We may not be able to extrapolate that truth or phrase it cleanly, but we sense its presence and genuineness. Thirty years later, Beattie continues to tell us what she did years ago: This is just the way it is.

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Bernadette Murphy is a regular contributor to Book Review and the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” a work of narrative nonfiction.