The Burning House by Ann Beattie
"The Burning House" by Ann Beattie is a notable collection of short stories that captures the complexities of disintegrating relationships amid the social changes of the 1960s. Through her minimalist writing style, Beattie explores themes of alienation and emotional paralysis, portraying characters who are predominantly white, middle-class individuals from the East Coast grappling with the transition from youth to adulthood. The stories reveal a sense of emptiness as characters drift through life, struggling with the impact of loss and the challenge of redefining their identities.
In particular, narratives like "Winter: 1978" and "Jacklighting" illustrate how the characters confront the realities of aging and the onset of existential crises. The motif of abandonment echoes throughout the collection, revealing a struggle to connect emotionally in various relationships. Beattie's characters often experience a disconnect between their youthful aspirations and their current lives, leading to a poignant examination of loneliness and unfulfilled desires. Overall, "The Burning House" offers a reflective look at the human condition, inviting readers to consider the complexities of personal and relational identity in a changing world.
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The Burning House by Ann Beattie
First published: 1979 (collected in The Burning House, 1982)
The Work
This collection of stories established Ann Beattie as one of the foremost voices of her generation and earned for her a reputation as a literary stylist. Her spare style suggests a sense of emptiness or absence that is also the subject of these stories, which deal with disintegrating relationships set within the context of the social changes and shifts in identity that came out of the 1960’s. All her characters are white, middle-class people from the East Coast who are past their youth. They are rudderless, drifting in and out of relationships, marriages, families, and jobs with an alienation that holds little promise.
Many of her characters are having tremendous difficulty in giving up their youthful, counterculture selves for a more adult identity. In the story “Winter: 1978,” for example, two successful baby boomers are overwhelmed when death and loss enter their lives for the first time. The story “Jacklighting” also features a group of friends who are beginning to lose their youth without gaining much in the way of wisdom or maturity. In many of Beattie’s stories, in fact, the principle of generation is subverted, with children assuming adult identities while their parents attempt to prolong their childhoods. In “Greenwich Time,” a too-adult child reads existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing and eats French food while his disoriented father looks for mothering from the child’s housekeeper. The title story concerns a weekend houseparty in which the all-male guests are portrayed as lost boys. The charmingly boyish husband in “The Cinderella Waltz” abandons his wife and his homosexual lover, and will eventually abandon his daughter. Abandonment is a strong theme in many of these stories. A story like “Playback” is typical in its portrayal of loneliness and loss. Often, high hopes for romance end in disillusionment, or, as in “Learning to Fall” and “Desire,” a woman continues to live with a man she no longer loves. Sometimes, as in “Sunshine and Shadow,” it is the man who can neither love nor leave. This theme of an emotional paralysis that freezes action and feeling is revisited in several other stories, such as “Waiting,” in which a detached approach to sadness and loss blunts the pain but drains life of any vitality. This “minimal self” has sometimes been linked to the contemporary personality disorder known as narcissism, in which a cool, poised, detached persona cannot cope with love or intimacy.
Bibliography
Beattie, Ann. “A Conversation with Ann Beattie.” Interview by Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory. The Literary Review 27, no. 2 (Winter, 1984): 165-177. Taking on the claims of her detractors, Beattie explains much of her stylistic practice and worldview. She comments interestingly on the connection between cultural chaos, especially in relationships, and her methods of detailing and plotting her narratives.
Epstein, Joseph. “Ann Beattie and the Hippoisie.” Commentary 75, no. 3 (March, 1983): 54-58. A severe attack on Beattie for being only a “generation writer” and one who thoroughly denies life’s significance. Epstein goes so far as to call Beattie “the chief purveyor of her own generation’s leading cliches.”
Library Journal. CVII, September 15, 1982, p. 1767.
McKinstry, Susan Jaret. “The Speaking Silence of Ann Beattie’s Voice.” Studies in Short Fiction 24, no. 2 (Spring, 1987): 111-117. An especially important essay in arguing (against the grain of Beattie criticism) that her stories are marked by “closure.” McKinstry sees Beattie’s female speakers as telling simultaneously an open, objective story of the present and a closed, subjective story of the past; this latter story the speaker tries not to tell. A space between the two narratives constitutes the story’s point or “closure.” Explains how this narrative tactic relates to gender. McKinstry admires Beattie’s sense of value and self-assertion.
Montresor, Jaye Berman. The Critical Response to Ann Beattie. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Murphy, Christine. Ann Beattie. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.
Nation. CCXXXV, October 30, 1982, p. 441.
The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, September 26, 1982, p. 1.
Porter, Carolyn. “Ann Beattie: The Art of the Missing.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Sees Beattie’s endings in The Burning House as less arbitrary than in the earlier collections and her characters as more likable and somewhat more sure of what they are learning. Presents some apt focus on the role of gender in the stories.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXII, July 23, 1982, p. 128.
Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.