Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie (born September 8, 1947) is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form.
Ann Beattie
September 8, 1947
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Literary
Recent works[edit]
Appraisal of Beattie's recent work has been mixed. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called her novel Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (2011) "preposterous," "narcissistic," and "self-indulgent"—the "sort of pretentious volume that makes people hate academics."[8] In The Washington Post, Book World Editor Marie Arana characterized it as "a bill of goods" devoid of "anything resembling a story line" that is "less about the eponymous Mrs. than about an endless parade of wordsmiths trotted out for show." The book "is not, except in the most perfunctory way, about Mrs. Nixon," Arana determined. "It's about Beattie."[9] "[T]he book does not succeed," wrote William Deresiewicz in The Nation. "Its bric-a-brac approach is ultimately wearying: nothing ever quite gets under way. One ends up feeling as if Beattie has spent the whole performance clearing her throat. . . . Her subject often seems a pretext, something just to get the conversation started."[10] By contrast, Dawn Raffel, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called the book "splendidly tricky", "at times... movingly lyrical", and said "Nothing in Mrs. Nixon is perfectly clear, and that is the source of its power."[11]
Mary Pols described her short-story collection The State We're In (2015), which is set in Maine, in The New York Times Book Review as "slippery" and "peculiar." Pols wrote, "I read this collection twice trying to unravel the mystery of what else, beyond Maine, ties these unfinished-feeling stories together."[12]
In a review of Beattie's collection The Accomplished Guest (2017) for The Washington Post, Howard Norman admired Beattie for her "beguiling originality" and determined that "she is one of our few contemporary masters of storytelling." He also wrote, "When I read Beattie's stories, I think of Chekhov's; when I read Chekhov's stories, I think of Beattie's. Both are writers for the ages."[13]
Of Beattie's recent novel A Wonderful Stroke of Luck (2019), Publishers Weekly wrote, "Beattie offers sharp psychological insights and well-crafted prose, but the novel lacks the power and emotional depth of her best work."[14] In The New York Times Book Review, Martha Southgate wrote, "Ultimately, this is a novel in which nothing seems to matter much." She also called the book "shapeless." Southgate nonetheless praised A Wonderful Stroke of Luck for "some elegant sentences and cutting observations that remind a reader of Beattie at her strongest."[15]
Beattie's papers are held by the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
Personal[edit]
Beattie was married to the writer David Gates. The couple divorced in 1980. In 1985, she met the painter Lincoln Perry, and they married in 1998.
She and Perry both taught at the University of Virginia until 2013. From there they moved together to Key West, Florida, where she continues to write.
In 2005, the two collaborated on a published retrospective of Perry's paintings. Entitled Lincoln Perry's Charlottesville, the book contains an introductory essay and artist's interview by Beattie.