Picturing Will by Ann Beattie

First published: 1989

Type of plot: Family

Time of work: 1989

Locale: Charlottesville, Virginia; New York City; Florida

Principal Characters:

• Will, a five-year-old boy around whom the story revolves
• Jody, his mother, a talented and promising photographer
• Wayne, Will’s unstable father, divorced from Jody
• Mel Anthis, Jody’s lover, devoted to Will
• Mary Vickers, Jody’s friend
• Wagoner, Mary’s son and Will’s best friend
• D. B. Haverford (Haveabud), a New York City art-gallery owner
• Spencer, the seven-year-old son of Haverford’s former client
• Corky, Wayne’s current wife
• Kate, Wayne’s lover

The Novel

In Picturing Will, the author presents the lives of three family members—mother, father, and son—in the late twentieth century. The first major section of the novel, “Mother,” introduces Jody, who has managed to bring her life back to normal after her husband, Wayne, walked out and left her with their infant son, Will. Jody lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and supports herself as a photographer specializing in weddings. She is an attractive and energetic woman for whose work the demand is increasing, but she is also an artist with an eye for the out-of-the-ordinary. She is on the verge of success, an obvious candidate for the attention of an art capital such as New York. Jody’s devotion to Will is genuine. As she herself admits, he has been her salvation during the difficult days after Wayne’s departure.

Enjoying the success of her photography business, Jody considers the proposal of Mel, her lover, to marry him and move to New York City. She hesitates to jeopardize the security of her present life and her independence as a single woman, but Mel is a good man who has developed an exceptionally close relationship with Will, and a move to New York would rescue her from routine photographic work. In many ways, Mel is even more understanding of Will than is Jody, while his sympathy for her work keeps prodding her to the challenge of New York. Jody’s friend Mary Vickers, in a bad marriage herself, admires Mel and urges Jody to accept his offer. While Jody and Mary share the experiences of young motherhood, Mary poses for a photograph destined to show Jody’s genius beyond doubt, and their sons Will and Wagoner become best friends.

With the intention of persuading Jody to move to New York, Mel arranges to show her work to art-gallery proprietor D. B. Haverford, who immediately sees the appeal of her photographs and agrees to a public show in his gallery. When they meet, he is as fascinated by her as by her pictures. She sees him as a mere businessman whose name she cannot bother to remember, so he is always “Haveabud” to her and to the reader, but she perceives that he could be the key to her professional future.

The second major section of the novel, “Father,” centers on Will’s father Wayne, now living in Florida with his third wife, Corky. It was the birth of Will, after he had unsuccessfully urged an abortion, that made life with Jody intolerable for Wayne, but as Will’s father he of course retains visiting rights.

While Jody is absorbed in furthering her career in New York, Mel has willingly assumed the responsibility of driving Will to visit his father. This time, however, they are accompanied by Haveabud (whom Will is told he must tolerate because he is important for his mother’s work) and Haveabud’s young friend Spencer. Haveabud, once the promoter of Spencer’s father, is sexually exploiting the seven-year-old boy. Will’s only interest in the trip is the opportunity to visit Wagoner, now living in Florida with his mother, Jody and Mel having arranged for their reunion.

Wayne anticipates Will’s visit with apprehension and dread, while Corky, trying to persuade Wayne that they should have a child, welcomes the opportunity to show him what a good mother she will be. She greets Will enthusiastically, amuses him with shopping, and carefully prepares his clothes and meals. Wayne makes the effort to please Will by taking him and Corky to the pool of a wealthy client whose garden he maintains, but he becomes more interested in having an affair with the wealthy owner. Wayne’s most intense though brief affair during Will’s visit, however, is with Kate, a mysterious woman who suggests that they conceal their last names from each other. It is this liaison that is his downfall. The police discover a pillbox with Corky’s name that Wayne had accidentally let fall from his pocket into Kate’s car; at the same time, they find a sizable amount of heroin in the abandoned car. From a window, Will sees his father being led away in handcuffs. As soon as his father is taken, he leaves for New York at once, without achieving the promised visit with “Wag” that was so important to him.

The final, brief section of the novel, “Child,” presents Will twenty years later. The future of the family is revealed: Will has a self-absorbed, very successful mother and a devoted stepfather, Mel, Wayne having disappeared. Will himself now has a wife and son. As the novel ends, Will imagines that he is photographing himself and his son playing with the ball Mel has given them.

The Characters

This novel defines family members by their relationships to one another. All of their lives revolve around Will, both parents measuring themselves by their relation to, and responses to, their son. Because Will himself is too young to understand their motives, the reader sympathizes with him in his bewilderment, viewing the parents through Will’s eyes even as the author allows the reader to see how the boy has changed their lives. He is a likable five-year-old who remembers his mother’s counsel and tries to be a good son. He responds to Mel’s love, appreciates Corky’s kindness (they remain correspondents over the years), and ultimately becomes a loving husband and father. Throughout most of the novel, however, he is a child hoping to be reunited with his friend but unable to initiate the action.

Readers appreciate the difficulties of Jody’s predicament and admire her determination to forge a new career and yet remain a functioning mother to Will. Gradually, though, her manipulation of others becomes apparent: She accepts Mel’s love with reservations until the opportunity in New York persuades her to marry him, and she unhesitatingly photographs the private life of a real friend, Mary Vickers. Having made the mistake of marrying Wayne, she at first apprehensively and then more and more singlemindedly determines to realize her life as an artist. She sees only potential subjects for her camera. Even Will becomes mainly a subject for the cover of Vogue. Her selfishness transforms Mel from ardent lover to sacrificial husband. Haveabud she has shrewdly manipulated to forge a career. Like Mel and Will, the reader accepts her for the artist she is and the mother she has tried less successfully to be.

Wayne’s deficiencies as a parent of course exceed Jody’s coolness and self-serving calculation, for he is weak and despicable, a man totally unable to meet the responsibilities of fatherhood. Recognizing his own unsuitability as a father, he nevertheless blames Jody for insisting that Will be born. He reveals his inferiority when he accuses Jody of making it difficult for him to finish college, and he can only regard himself as victimized. Wayne’s preeminent weakness, however, is women; he himself suspects it of bordering on addiction. Not surprisingly, it is a woman, Kate, who is his undoing.

Mel is Wayne’s opposite. He has the decency and dependability that makes the family unit work. Will responds to him early, even before Jody is ready to make a commitment. Mel gives of himself, from the art show in New York that he initiated, to his protection of Will during his trip to Florida, and through the years that follow.

The character most like Mel is Corky. She tries to make Will’s visit a happy one, and she displays wifely virtues that Wayne can never appreciate, particularly a determination to make family life work. Mary and Wagoner Vickers are serviceable friends to Jody and Will. Mary helps Jody to further her career, while Will remains a true friend until Wagoner’s early death.

Haveabud is an opportunist ready to take advantage of anyone naïve enough to trust him, while Spencer is merely Haveabud’s victim. Abandoned by both parents, he is a vulnerable child with no strong Jody and loving Mel to save him.

Critical Context

Picturing Will was Ann Beattie’s eighth book of fiction and fourth novel. She and her typical protagonist belong to what is sometimes called the Woodstock Generation. Their detachment and characteristically unfocused rebellion against the society their elders bequeathed them do not so much mellow as atrophy in middle age. Twenty years beyond the point of not trusting anyone over thirty, they face the ordeal of trusting themselves to be forty. They often can accept neither the commitment and responsibilities of parenthood nor the other miscellaneous obligations that society—now the society that they had a substantial part in forming—imposes on them. Yet if Jody’s contemporaries in Picturing Will are the Woodstock Generation, the third section of the novel, in leaping to Will’s adulthood, projects a hypothetical future, as if the author cannot wait for enough “real” time to elapse to make Will an art historian at Columbia University.

The six-page excursion into Will’s future seems to suggest that if Will and his generation will not prevail, at least they will endure. Beattie’s critics argue inconclusively about whether her photographic techniques work as well in long fiction as in her short stories. Picturing Will is a kind of album, perhaps suffering somewhat from the typically unselective nature of albums, but some of the pictures are vivid and true. They are not all beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, and some, such as the homoerotic scene Will is compelled to witness on the trip to Florida, are disturbing, but some, such as Will’s discovery of Mel’s diary, are touching. It is to Beattie’s credit that she finds shards of hope among the wreckage of her generation, even as she avoids easy solutions to the problems arising from their improvisational lifestyles.

Bibliography

Beattie, Ann. “An Interview with Ann Beattie.” Interview by Steven R. Centola. Contemporary Literature 31 (Winter, 1990): 405-422. This discussion ranges over Beattie’s work up to and including Picturing Will. Her disclosures that the rough draft of this short novel required three years and that she discarded “at least fifteen chapters” provide an idea of the distillation involved. Centola’s questions generally solicit useful information about Beattie’s literary aims and techniques.

Gerlach, John. “Through ‘The Octascope’: A View of Ann Beattie.” Studies in Short Fiction 17, no. 4 (Fall, 1980): 489-494. This is a comprehensive analysis of Beattie’s short story “The Octascope.” Gerlach also views Beattie’s work as a whole as a kind of octascope that lets the reader see the reversals and distortions in human love.

Gilder, Joshua. “Down and Out: The Stories of Ann Beattie.” New Criterion 1, no. 2 (October, 1982): 51-56. This essay criticizes Beattie’s fiction for failing to offer viable moral solutions to the philosophical problems that her fiction raises.

Griffith, Thomas. “Rejoice If You Can.” Atlantic Monthly, September, 1980, 28-29. Griffith thinks that there is a “defiant purity” in Beattie’s refusal to give answers to complaints about modern life. He points out that it is important to Beattie to describe her world and get it “right.”

Hulbert, Ann. “Only Disconnect.” The New York Review of Books 37 (May 31, 1990): 33-35. Hulbert sees Beattie as striving for “greater certainty” and more “authorial control” in this novel than in her previous books. The principals are less inclined to float aimlessly but have acquired a sense of duty. To a considerable extent, however, their liberation from the trammels of an earlier generation leaves them lonely and uncertain.

Iyer, Pico. “The World According to Beattie.” Partisan Review 50, no. 4 (1983): 548-553. This essay compares Beattie’s work to the writings of J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, and John Updike, pointing out how she speaks for a displaced generation. While admiring Beattie’s style and photographic realism, Iyer sees her short stories as producing torpor.

Lee, Don. “About Ann Beattie.” Ploughshares 21 (Fall, 1995): 231-235. Although this article does not present a critical perspective of Picturing Will, it offers an interesting overview of Beattie’s life and career.

Montresor, Jaye B. The Critical Response to Ann Beattie. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. An illuminating collection of critical essays on the life and work of Ann Beattie. Includes an essay on the images of “good” mothers and fathers in Beattie’s Picturing Will.

Murphy, Christina. Ann Beattie. Boston: Twayne, 1986. This full-length study of Beattie’s work includes discussion of her works up to Love Always. It includes a short biography of Beattie as well as useful discussions of minimalism and the redefinition of the mimetic tradition. This work favorably assesses Beattie’s contribution to contemporary literature and contains a selected bibliography.

Schneiderman, Leo. “Ann Beattie: Emotional Loss and Strategies of Reparation.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 53 (December, 1993): 317-333. A psychoanalytic interpretation of Beattie’s work. Schneiderman offers illuminating insight into the way Beattie portrays depression.

Wyatt, David. “Ann Beattie.” The Southern Review 28 (Winter, 1992): 145-159. Wyatt assesses Beattie’s fiction from a more recent perspective than Murphy. His verdict is a largely complimentary one, though Picturing Will comes in for some negative criticism. Wyatt sees the novel as focusing on the cost of choosing art as the work of one’s life, but he finds Beattie’s presentation of art and life “too binary to satisfy.”