Hello to All That By JAY McINERNEY

Hello to All That

By JAY McINERNEY

Ann Beattie

WALKS WITH MEN

By Ann Beattie

102 pp. Scribner. Cloth, $17. Paper, $10

     When I arrived in New York in 1980, Ann Beattie  was, for many young aspiring fictionists, one of the two most influential writers in the country, the other one being Raymond Carver. Beattie’s influence, and her rumored proximity, seemed pervasive, a part of the cultural landscape. Her stories were appearing regularly in The New Yorker. Beattie’s feckless middle-class postgraduates, still mourning the demise of the ’60s, seemed like older versions of me and my friends, albeit with better taste. As clueless as her characters sometimes seemed, they were terribly clued-in, worldly and semiotically correct. Just as an earlier generation used to read Hemingway in part to learn what to drink and where to travel, we read Beattie in part to learn what to listen to and read and what to wear. It seems to me that it was a Beattie story that first alerted me to the existence of Billie Holiday.

     Set in the early ’80s, Beattie’s latest novel (or novella), I was fascinated to discover, is the story of an older man teaching a young literarily inclined woman how to be clued-in, teaching her the kind of inside dope we once read Ann Beattie in order to learn. “In 1980, in New York,” the book begins, “I met a man who promised me he would change my life, if only I’d let him. The deal was this: he’d tell me anything, anything, as long as the information went unattributed.” The very first thing this mentor-lover, Neil, does is to buy his young protégée a Barbour jacket. “He expressed shock that I, a person of such good taste, didn’t already have one.” This gift is quickly followed by a Burberry scarf. More than fashion advice, Neil promises to share his wisdom about men and the ways of the world with the narrator. And, reader, she buys it.

     One of the beguiling things about this setup is the way in which Beattie reminds us how unworldly we all feel in our early 20s, how we suspect there are codes in which we are unversed, keys to understanding the world around us that are unrelated to our Phi Beta Kappa keys. But this Harvard summa cum laude seems inordinately, even spectacularly gullible. The maddening thing about this story is that you want to tell the narrator that matters of taste should not be confused with laws of nature. No, actually, the maddening thing is, you want to say to her, Hey, can’t you see this guy is full of it.   No, wait, the maddening thing is that the narrator begins to see through her Henry Higgins early on, and is certainly wised-up to him as her narrating older self, and yet still allows herself to be Svengalied.

     It’s difficult to resist mining for fragments of an autobiography here, though in fact the narrator, who sometimes calls herself Jane, sounds more like Joyce Maynard than Ann Beattie. “I became something of an overnight sensation, when I was 21, for an interview I gave The New York Times, in which I — one of that year’s summa cum laude Harvard graduates — disparaged my Ivy League education, at graduation, in the presence of President Jimmy Carter, and stated my intentions to drop out and move to a farm in Vermont.”

     Neil interviews Jane and later seduces her when, after a year in Vermont with her goat-milking, bass-playing boyfriend, she comes down to the city for a medical procedure. One can easily imagine that Neil’s smug worldliness is a pleasant antidote to the boyfriend’s rural hippie meliorism, though the promised nuggets of wisdom for which Jane trades her body and her independence are pretty paltry and superficial, as opposed to life-changing. “Never trust a hotel that’s been renovated until the second year.” Or even inane: “Don’t use hair conditioner. Electricity is sexy. When your hair falls forward, it reaches out. It lets me know some part of you wants something.” He also advises her to avoid cocktail napkins because they stick to the bottom of the glass. And she never forgets it.

     Jane and Neil move into an apartment in not-yet-fashionable Chelsea; she does research at the New York Public Library about birds in the South to help Neil for a book he is supposedly writing. When she discovers he’s married she manages to summon enough will to get herself out the door and sleep on a friend’s floor for a couple of weeks, but one night after too much chardonnay she returns to him, wearing a raincoat — a Burberry, one presumes — over her nightgown and in the next sentence they’re married.

     Beattie has always been the queen of ellipsis, of the pregnant blank space and the vertiginous jump-cut, and in fact she does backtrack to explain the negotiations for a prenuptial agreement that will leave Jane very comfortable no matter what happens to their marriage. She doesn’t allow us to see beneath the surface, to show us the kinds of emotional calculation behind her decision. Ironically, perhaps, she is now wised-up to the man who wished to educate her, and hip to his manipulations, and yet she seems relatively happy. She even adopts his phony aphoristic bent, if only to mock it: “In the afterlife,” she tells him, “there are only pencils, no pens. And every pencil has an eraser.”

     Given Jane’s passivity and her reluctance to look deeply into her own heart, it is disappointing not to get more of the kind of surface topography in which Beattie specializes. Beattie’s short stories can be richly textured and studded with cultural detritus, but here, except a cameo by Rollerina, or a Champagne-drenched book party that Woody Allen almost attends and Harold Brodkey leaves after a brief appearance, we get a kind of generalized 1980s New York. “Carter was committing adultery in his heart and not getting the hostages freed from Iran, and everyone felt unsettled.”

     Beattie’s refusal to overdetermine her characters, her reluctance to explain their behavior, is a hallmark of her style, and one of the reasons she came to be identified as a minimalist in the early ’80s. It was part of what made her fiction seem so knowing and hip. Stuff happens. And it’s not always explicable. Let’s not make too big a deal about it. In “Walks With Men” (a title I am still scratching my head over), we are pretty much living in a universe of accidents and unexplained events; Beattie’s unwillingness to explain or connect seems almost perverse. Jane’s old hippie boyfriend from Vermont, now known as Goodness, comes to the city and visits her, only to be pushed under the wheels of a subway train. Jane learns of his grisly death when she’s watching the evening news. I will not divulge Neil’s fate, except to say that I suspect it will leave most readers as mystified and unsatisfied as I was.

     Ann Beattie is a national treasure, the author of short stories that will endure and continue to inspire. This slim novel will ultimately be reckoned as a minor part of her oeuvre.

Jay McInerney’s most recent book is “How It Ended: New and Collected Stories.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/McInerneyt.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print