See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  (3) Finally, there is the strange, not-to-be-thwarted character of Ken Starr, future Time Man of the Year. (And where is the stuff about the land deal, Mr. Starr?) That our ungentlemanly president’s gentlemanly failure to kiss and tell should be subjected to the legalisms of judiciary procedure is, of course, total madness, a torture and a regicide, which could only have been brought about by Starr, the crazed zealot the right wing didn’t even know it had. He is, of course, Victor Hugo’s Javert. But he has not pursued Jean Valjean. In fact, in a bit of publicly funded intertextual surrealism (and downsized literary ambition), he has leaped completely out of the book and pursued Terry Southern’s Candy.

  For this we pay taxes. Dear God, bring back the NEA.

  (1998)

  Ann Beattie’s New and Selected Stories

  There is always something a little nervous-making about a book of “new and selected” work. There is a whiff of the memorial about it, a funereal taking of stock, maybe an anxious seeking of a new audience, which can signal a slowing of forward movement in the oeuvre. There is always some new work, but it is never the point: the new work has somehow wandered in, arrived unbidden. It is unselected, like neighbors crashing a family reunion.

  Yet there is a kind of magnificence to Ann Beattie’s Park City: New and Selected Stories. The collection comprises three dozen stories written over a twenty-five-year period, and in reading them, one after another, one feels amazed at the confidence, steadiness, and quality of the output. Certainly such a book will highlight its author’s habits and predilections, and that is part of the fun and education of it for any reader. But Park City is also a book that should win the admiration of short-story writers and readers everywhere for its pointed reminder of Beattie’s unshakably intelligent, deep-hearted, long, and unsurpassed devotion to the genre.

  Ann Beattie’s first collection, Distortions, was published in 1976, and she quickly came to seem an avatar of that particular time—its historical aftermath and drift, its growing affluence and friendly, generational narcissism. Now, of course, she is writing at a time that seems to have no avatars and, the end of the millennium notwithstanding, may not even be a particular time, so it is interesting to see the ways in which her work has both changed and not changed through the decades.

  Distortions is represented here by four stories, all tales of marriage and divorce. In “Vermont,” a couple play host to the wife’s ex-husband, who brings with him not only some low-grade confusion but a very young new girlfriend. Everyone is nice. Everyone behaves. And the new girlfriend, appropriately enough, wonders aloud whether “every time we sleep we die; we come back another person, to another life.” In “Dwarf House,” Tammy Wynette sings “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” on a jukebox while a married man has a beer with his secretary. “Are you happy?” the story begins with him saying. “Because if you’re happy I’ll leave you alone.” In “Wolf Dreams,” a young woman on the eve of her third marriage becomes so agitated she writes an angry letter to the president. “She begins to think that it’s Nixon’s fault—all of it. Whatever that means.” In “Snakes’ Shoes,” as in “Vermont,” a remarried woman, here named Alice, is visited by her ex, with whom she has a daughter. The reason for the divorce, as stated by Alice at the time, reflects Beattie’s own penchant for the uninflected event: “He acts like a madman with that boat. He’s swamped her three times this year. I’ve been seeing someone else.” At the end of the story, the former family takes an evening walk, just the three of them, and Alice, insisting on her turn in a game, says, “Don’t forget me,” and her ex-husband kisses her on the neck.

  Here in “Distortions” we see the themes of almost all of Beattie’s stories to come: sexual infidelity as plot point, divorce as cultural landscape, the comic desire for the personal somehow to be political, and the civilized management of the past by means of a creative mix of remembering and forgetting. From these very first stories straight through to the new ones in the book’s “Park City” section, Beattie’s recoupled couples are afflicted with a nagging fear of erasure. (“She thought for a moment about people who had disappeared: Judge Crater; Amelia Earhart; Mrs. Ramsay.” Or: “He had wanted her to know that he had been there, a real person, someone she needed to factor into the landscape.”) Because their world is white, educated, upper-middle-class, and pharmaceutically calm—no one ever struggles convincingly at a job; inheritances are referred to in many of the stories—the thing that jeopardizes their safety most, the precipitating event for any possible story, is the prospect and actuality of uncoupling. Alice’s “Don’t forget me,” which in “Snakes’ Shoes” is uttered as a simple, now-it’s-my-turn request, is made, by Beattie’s subtle art, into a pained and plaintive cry.

  It is a cry that, along with the lyrics of Bob Dylan, echoes across the decades of Beattie’s work. Everywhere her characters—parents and children—have been confronted with their own insignificance, not through any cosmic perspective but simply through the rude spiritual lens of broken marriage. For the reader, it must be added, these are highly literary breakups. Beattie isn’t interested in any real anatomy of divorce. The usual stresses on relationships—issues of money, work, energy, and time—are not examined here. Divorce is effected swiftly—largely through mysterious, almost poetic acts of ego and infidelity. In Beattie’s fictional world divorce is emotional crisis made narrative tool, the monster in the tale; the trick for her characters is somehow to defang it, live with it in a comic fashion, which they do, if bittersweetly. They have good, merry friends—Beattie’s work is a tireless valentine to friendship—which helps.

  It was in the 1970s, when Beattie began writing and publishing, that divorce first became epidemic, and, in insistently fashioning narratives around that social fact, Beattie, more than any other American writer, registered the event. She did so by assuming it—its newfound ordinariness, its sad but essentially untragic nature, its ability to redefine in curious ways the shape and composition of families. One can hear even in the titles of her subsequent collections—Secrets and Surprises, The Burning House, Where You’ll Find Me, and What Was Mine—the songs and sighs of quiet and unavoidable domestic rupture.

  One says unavoidable rather than inevitable, for the action of these stories does not build from or lead to a particular destination. A boulder—usually a treacherously held secret involving a supplementary lover—is rolled out onto the road, and the narrative, as Beattie constructs it, may either stay where it is or proceed and crash. As a result, there is much wheel spinning, or water treading, in an Ann Beattie story, and the present tense, especially in the early collections, is often relied upon to convey that sense of trapped and suspended animation. Such a strategy may be less effective in a novel, such as Beattie’s own Chilly Scenes of Winter, where it can produce feelings of panic in a reader caught out on that glassy, shoreless narrative sea. But it is an effective device in Beattie’s short stories, where it serves as a kind of flypaper. It catches the casual thoughts and material detail that define people, places, and times and does so without frustrating a reader’s desire for completion, for aesthetic arrival of some sort.

  Nowhere are Beattie’s closings more beautiful than in the seven stories included from The Burning House, the collection most fully represented in Park City. “What will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for grace,” concludes “Learning to Fall.” All of what Beattie does well is here on brilliant display: the theatrical ensemble act of her characters; the cultural paraphernalia as historical record; the not-quite-grown-up grown-ups, playing house; the charming, boyish men with their knifelike utterances. In “The Cinderella Waltz,” a man who eventually leaves his wife and daughter for a gay relationship mocks his own domestic life by sifting through the Christmas presents for an oversize toaster, crooning, “Come out, my eight-slice beauty!” In “The Burning House,” when a wife says to her unfaithful husband, “I want to know if you’re staying or going,” he gives her a speech:

 
“Everything you’ve done is commendable….But your whole life you’ve made one mistake—you’ve surrounded yourself with men….Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars….I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

  Beattie’s gift for trenchant dialogue is surely the rival of some of our foremost living playwrights (one thinks especially of Terrence McNally and Wendy Wasserstein). Though much is usually made of Beattie’s eye—she has written a monograph on the work of the painter Alex Katz, which adds to the public sense of her as a “visual” writer—it is Beattie’s ear that gives her stories their sharp life, muscle, and surprise. The words and voices of her characters are the very fabric and organization of her work, and they give great pleasure, especially those of the antic, half-heartbroken boy-man she often puts center stage. Whether he is named Jake, Nick, Frank, Freddy, or Milo, he is invariably the spirit and force of a story that might otherwise remain inert. Beattie’s boy-man is like Alex Katz’s Ada (Katz’s wife and frequent subject): someone whose soulfulness cannot successfully be submerged into the flat illustration that would otherwise be his—and the canvas’s—fate. Beattie’s forgiving affection for her charming, neurotic men animates her work and suggests a largeness of authorial sympathy. Whether they are having their bee stings tended to, or dashing down the beach saying “Catch me,” or having their MOM tattoos at long last removed, these exasperating love objects are the unexpected intelligence of every story they are in. They are the thinking woman’s Punch to Beattie’s Judys—women narrators and protagonists who, in some purgatorial condition, are apt to be custodians of the story rather than actual actors within it.

  In the collections after The Burning House one can feel Beattie experimenting—in shape, pace, and subject—especially in What Was Mine, where she accomplishes a European setting, a metafiction, two narrations by men, and a moving novella, “Windy Day at the Reservoir.” The wonderful title story of her newest collection, “Park City,” shows off, too, not only old strengths but newer ones: a gift for the riotously comic set piece, plus a willingness to let central female characters struggle more against their own poses of vacancy and passivity (strengths evidenced also in Beattie’s underrated recent novels, Another You and My Life, Starring Dara Falcon). In “Park City,” a young woman, collecting other people’s secrets and preparing to act on them, looks after her sister’s boyfriend’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Lyric, while the sister attends a screenwriting conference. Lounging at the hotel pool, Lyric is the voice of bored clear-sightedness, an adolescent-girl version of a Beattie man, given to such pronouncements about Utah as “It’s against their religious beliefs to drink, but at the same time, they think stuff that people with the D.T.’s think.”

  This is what Beattie knows best: that when you put people in a room together they will always be funny. A typical Beattie story has as its controlling consciousness a muted, slightly shell-shocked young woman in company more lively than she; her sensibility, however, though one part bruised romantic, is three parts recording equipment. She is getting it all down.

  In the hands of another writer this could make a story chilly and unnatural. A sparseness of prose style that in other writers can glibly falsify and flatten human nature Beattie has always used to complicated effect. No other writer manages such warmth and coolness simultaneously. In her work there are no loud noises or bright colors; there is little overt grief, rage, gloom, or giddiness. Hers is a palette of compassionately wielded pastels, and her stories are watercolors of the highest order. Do her characters sometimes seem similar from story to story? The same can be said of every short-story writer who ever lived. Does the imaginative range seem limited? It is the same limited range Americans are so fond of calling Chekhovian. Is every new story here one for the ages?

  With a book this generous from a writer this gifted, we would be vulgar to ask.

  (1998)

  JonBenét Ramsey by Lawrence Schiller

  There is something about the killing of a pretty little rich girl that disorganizes everybody. In the murder case of JonBenét Ramsey, first it was the Ramsey family, clumsily staging the ransom note and 911 call. Then it was the Boulder, Colorado, police, failing to secure the crime scene. Then there was the Boulder County District Attorney’s office, inexplicably dithering and stalled. And now look: here comes the journalist Lawrence Schiller and his dizzyingly unnecessary Perfect Murder, Perfect Town. Typos, repetitions, contradictions, no intellectual gloss, no philosophical moment, no index, no pictures. What the heck kind of book is this?

  Essentially, it is a hastily assembled scrapbook of textual material that millions of amateur JonBenét sleuths have already read in the tabloids (and discussed on the Internet). It is a review session and souvenir for forensic trivia buffs. In putting together six hundred pages of largely undigested material, Schiller has, in his own words, attempted to “create the most accurate record available for others.” But all this serves as a reminder of what we have come to admire in other writing on various high-profile crimes: intelligent storytelling. Postmodern fiction aside, an exhaustive pasting together of notes, clippings, and recorded statements does not a narrative make, and it is only in narrative (with its elements of setting, theme, point of view, character; all the authorial work of stance and selection) that we feel close to the importance and truth of something. A complete and accurate record can obscure a subject’s essence: a narrative, on the other hand, reveals, supports, and contains it. The rush to judgment that Schiller is so critical of in others (90 percent of the American public is familiar with the case) is simply a rush to narrative—narrative that the Ramseys, the prosecutors, and now Schiller himself have failed publicly or effectively to provide (though the Ramseys, it should be said, did try).

  In Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor, Diana Trilling was able to see a story worthy of the Great American Novel, a story as rich as The Great Gatsby in passion and social implication. And she did not jealously guard her opinions; she criticized even the cruel amount of grapefruit in the doctor’s famous diet. In The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm made of the Jeffrey MacDonald case a brilliant and culturally provocative discussion of trust and deception. Even Jonathan Harr, whose raw materials were corporate crime and tedious legal maneuvers, created in A Civil Action a gripping human drama—something he would never have accomplished if he had set about merely to amass an accurate and nonjudgmental (read “indiscriminate”) record.

  But perhaps the Ramsey case is a particularly unworkable vortex. It is replete with the ingredients of a grotesque joke or a gothic mystery. (The former Little Miss Christmas was found, December 26, 1996, bludgeoned and garroted in the “grotto” of her own house, a red heart painted on her hand.) But though a joke and a mystery are both composed of incongruities, a joke’s incongruities quickly release you; a mystery’s do not. A mystery, unsolved, may not release you at all but pull you forever and maniacally into the black hole of its contradictions. This would explain the astonishing number of JonBenét websites and chat rooms, the amount of general conjecture. One falls into the grip of it.

  Since Schiller refuses to participate in the barest hypothesizing, it is left to us—average readers, gentle citizens—to step into the breach. What can be said with some certainty is that at the mystery’s heart is Patsy Ramsey, naïve, ambitious, and theatrically ungifted. When Meryl Streep says, “A dingo took my baby” (a dingo?), we believe her. But there is little that Patsy Ramsey has uttered or declaimed that convinces anyone of anything. Even at the beauty pageants in which she placed JonBenét, her faulty aesthetic judgment was remarked. She “overdid it,” noted an observer, once sexily dressing her daughter completely in feathers, causing even that audience to gasp in disapproval. Patsy’s is a story of disoriented, miscalculating vanity. Her compulsion to display led not only to gi
ant parties with Christmas trees in every room, the bedroom closets open for perusal, but to the cosmetic alteration and exhibition of her little girl before a surely unsafe pageant world. A beauty queen herself and journalism major, Patsy Ramsey stoked her interest in media and show business, even when mourning her child. With the help of a press representative, and an unwitting congregation, she choreographed an on-camera family departure from her own church. She phoned Larry King on the air. In response to the death of the People’s Princess, Diana, she feverishly declared her own daughter America’s People’s Princess.

  Did she kill her daughter in some petty rage? Did she kill her by accident? Did she catch her husband molesting the girl? Or—most spookily—did she kill her as a religious offering she felt was required of her, a bound sacrifice to God (pursuant to Psalm 118, to which the Ramsey Bible was perpetually opened), because she had been miraculously cured of Stage IV ovarian cancer? It all seems doubtful. She had never been someone given to parental anger or violence. Her grief, if not her words, seems authentic. Whatever her mistakes, her reckless endangerment of her own children, they are a far cry from murder.

  Schiller points out (or, rather, repeats) that no one theory—intruder, father, mother, brother—accounts for all the evidence. But if one combines the theories, as in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, where all the suspects are finally guilty, one can work out a fairly satisfying hypothesis. That is, a known intruder, working in friendly conjunction with the brother, killed the girl in some sort of sadistic fun, and the parents—fresh from Ron Howard’s Ransom and remembering the play their neighbor had written in which a little girl was found murdered in her basement—were left to cover up. This explains the stun gun, the sexual staging, the parental alliance, the odd affect of the boy (with whom the little girl often slept), and other evidence, including the boy’s red pocketknife, fingerprints, pineapple, duct tape, and an enhanced 911 call. It also explains the counterfeit ransom note, which is the centerpiece of the case against the Ramseys. The note is mystifyingly fake, with its diction and point-of-view problem (“we are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction”), its Ramsey family pride (“We respect your bussiness [sic] but not the country that it serves”), and its screenwriter’s poetry (“if we catch you talking to a stray dog she dies”). The note rambles and searches for the kidnapping mot juste (there is a cross-out and a false start) and, with its length and inconsistent spellings, is such a compositional fraud and tactical blunder that it caused some detectives to believe it was the work of a professional trying to look like an amateur.