Where You'll Find Me by Ann Beattie

First published: 1986

Type of work: Short stories

Form and Content

Where You’ll Find Me is a collection of fifteen short stories that depict Ann Beattie’s chief concern: the alienated condition of modern women as reflected in their domestic relationships. Beattie has become famous because of her ability to describe the chronic loneliness, frustration, and hopelessness that many of her feminine readers know from personal experience. The women in these stories are often looking for love and marriage but finding that something about the modern condition makes these things hard to find and impossible to keep. Many stories deal with second or third marriages or live-in relationships doomed to self-destruction because neither party is willing to make a permanent commitment.

The men and women about whom Beattie writes are usually members of the upper middle class. They all seem depressed, anxious, confused, or self-destructive in spite of the fact that they enjoy an enviable standard of living. In fact, it often seems that their spiritual malaise is a result of their addiction to upward mobility and consumerism, along with their awareness of the failure of status and possessions to satisfy basic human needs.

The stories in Where You’ll Find Me are all very short and are written in the style that has come to be called minimalism. An examination of these stories reveals all the characteristics that have been damned and praised by critics since minimalism appeared on the American literary scene in the 1960’s.

The titles themselves are minimalistic. Many consist of a single word, such as “Snow,” “Skeletons,” “Lofty,” “Janus,” “Spiritus,” “Times,” and “Cards.” The stories are told in simple declarative sentences. This is one of the most striking characteristics of Beattie’s style. Here is an example from “Spiritus”: “The man’s grandson had visited. A boy seven or eight. A towhead.” Beattie takes few pains to inform the reader of the factual details that journalism students are told to consider crucial to any news story: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? She rarely gives her characters anything but first names. Her story “Coney Island” opens in a typically minimalistic fashion with the words “Drew is sitting at the kitchen table in his friend Chester’s apartment in Arlington.” In “Snow,” she even dispenses with first names and uses “I,” “me,” “you,” and “we.”

Beattie rarely bothers to describe her characters. She often fails to provide any information about where a story is taking place. In reading a story by Beattie, the reader is forced to make all sorts of guesses and assumptions based on minimal information. The reader is made to feel like an eavesdropper and a voyeur.

Because Beattie is a “taker-out,” rather than a “putter-in,” as one writer has characterized minimalists, her stories are all quite short. They are short mainly because they begin in medias res, as if both the beginning and the ending have been snipped off with scissors. Here is a fairly characteristic example of a Beattie ending from the story “Times”: “Slowly—while Peter and her mother stared—she lifted her hand, still smiling, and began to suck the chocolate off her finger.”

Unlike traditional short-story writers, Beattie does not build up a climax in order to end with a surprising or thrilling conclusion. A Beattie story is not intended to inform a reader but only to communicate a mood—often a mood that has been described as a suppressed scream.

The stories in Where You’ll Find Me do not offer answers to life’s important questions or interpretations of human behavior. There are no “epiphanies,” to use novelist James Joyce’s term for the flashes of insight that are so common in traditional short stories, such as those in his own Dubliners (1914). The fact that Beattie’s stories end so inconclusively leaves the reader with a feeling that human relationships are too complicated and too fragile to survive the stresses and strains of modern living.

Context

Ann Beattie has had a considerable impact on women’s literature and women’s issues in general. She has inspired many women to write about their own feelings of loneliness and alienation, and her stories have served as a model for them to follow. She has shown women writers that it is not necessary to present solutions to contemporary women’s problems if they do not believe that they possess solutions; women writers can render a service merely by portraying the problems themselves in their manifold aspects.

In her novel Orlando: A Biography (1928), Virginia Woolf proclaimed allegorically through the sex transformation of the protagonist that fiction was becoming feminized. This is even more true today. Fiction is read by far more women than men, and consequently there are more and more women authors as well as women editors and women literary agents. The field has come to be dominated by women.

The feminization of fiction has led to subtle changes in storytelling because women tend to be more interested in such matters as personal relationships than in arriving at pragmatic solutions to problems. Beattie is one of the leading women authors who is reshaping both long and short fiction to reflect the tastes and interests of the vast majority of fiction readers, who happen to be women.

Feminists see a political message in Beattie’s writings. They believe that her female characters are alienated, lonely, maladjusted, and confused because of the revolutionary changes taking place in women’s role in society. Modern women are torn between marriage and career, between motherhood and self-fulfillment, between monogamy and sexual freedom. They are no longer willing to play subservient roles in relation to the men in their lives, but they question whether marriage as an institution can survive if they insist on complete independence.

There are no easy answers to such problems, and Beattie steadfastly refuses to try to come up with easy answers. Instead, she continues to portray the problems themselves in all their infinite variations as they affect women, men, and children in upper-middle-class, Eastern-seaboard America and will eventually come to affect women, men, and children all over the world.

Bibliography

Aldridge, John W. Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992. An extremely hostile discussion of minimalist writers in general by a distinguished scholar. Focuses on Beattie’s stories and novels in chapter 2, “Less Is a Lot Less (Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme).” A good example of the strong critical reaction against writers such as Beattie, encapsulating all the arguments against minimalism.

Barth, John. “A Few Words About Minimalism.” The New York Times Book Review, December 28, 1986, 2. A famous American fiction writer defines minimalism in art and concludes that there is a place for both minimalism and maximalism in literature. This amusing writer quotes hostile critics who have denigrated minimalism as “K-Mart realism,” “hick chic,” “Diet Pepsi minimalism,” “post-Vietnam, and post-literary, postmodernist blue-collar neo-early Hemingwayism.”

Epstein, Joseph. “Ann Beattie and the Hippoisie.” Commentary 75 (March, 1983): 54-58. A distinguished literary critic attacks Beattie and her school of minimalists in an article that is nevertheless remarkably fair-minded and insightful. Epstein categorizes Beattie as “a generation writer” whose work chronicles the disenchantment of people who came of age during the turbulent 1960’s and subsequently came to realize that the world had not been significantly changed by all their idealistic activism.

Iyer, Pico. “The World According to Beattie.” Partisan Review 50, no. 4 (1983): 548-553. This incisive article, which dissects Beattie’s plots, characters, and themes, is highly critical but still gives Beattie credit for her intelligence, style, and keen observation.

Montresor, Jaye Berman, ed. The Critical Response to Ann Beattie. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. A collection of reviews and essays dealing with eight of Beattie’s books, including Where You’ll Find Me. The introduction contains a brief biography of Beattie as well as an overview of what has been written about her. Extensive bibliography and reference notes.

Murphy, Christina. Ann Beattie. Boston: Twayne, 1986. The first book-length study of Beattie. Murphy is a professor who writes in a formal but not overcomplex style. Views Beattie as an inheritor of the tradition of social realism extending from Ernest Hemingway through John Cheever to John Updike. Contains a chronology, a partially annotated bibliography, and endnotes.