Volume 37, Number 9 · May 31, 1990
Only Disconnect
By Ann Hulbert
Picturing Will
by Ann Beattie
Random House, 230 pp., $18.95
Ann Beattie's reputation as the cool portraitist of an affluent, disaffected group of baby boomers is by now so well established that barely anyone challenges it, except Ann Beattie. A decade ago Joyce Maynard asked her whether she 'agreed that her writing chronicled, perhaps for the first time, a particular countercultural world.' Beattie replied, 'I've gotten very hostile to that response to my work.'[*] Yet the stories and novels she has steadily produced since then have continued to invite such readings. In her characteristically deadpan prose crowded with up-to-date details, she has kept up with her familiar cast of laid-back characters who came of age in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Just that talent for disjointed documentary has obscured Beattie's aspiration to do more than mirror the malaise of a generation of Americans distinguished by their inability to connect—with themselves, with each other, with work, even with pleasure. With characters so convincingly lacking in spirit, it has been natural to assume that her real subject is the spirit of the time: she has been our expert at taking the weak pulse of the anticlimactic Seventies and the soulless Eighties.
Review, 3022 words
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