There’s a particular challenge to writing about a book like Ann Beattie’s “More to Say.” It’s a challenge that stems from the structure of this particular book, and from Beattie’s own reputation as a writer. As Beattie acknowledges in her introduction to the collection, this book is a break from the norm for her: “I’ve had fun sneaking around, moonlighting as a nonfiction writer. My friends hardly ever commented, I assume because they never even saw my nonfiction.”

As for Beattie’s fiction, to call her critically acclaimed would understate matters. She has received both the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the Rea Award for Short Fiction, among a host of other honors. In early 2023, the 1979 film adaptation of her novel “Chilly Scenes of Winter” was reissued as part of the Criterion Collection. All of which is to say that writing about a book in which Beattie shares her thoughts on the writers and artists that she’s found compelling over the years is no easy task. Beattie, who lives in Maine, has set the bar very high with her own writings collected in “More to Say.” And yet to not write about this book would do it a disservice.

“More to Say” is divided into two parts of roughly equal length, one focusing on writers, the other on visual artists – with a little  overlap between the two. To cite one example, Beattie’s essay “My Life in Bingo,” situated in the first part of the book, contains a reference to a photograph that John Loengard took of Philip Roth in 1991; when readers encounter a longer exploration of Loengard’s work in the book’s second half, it creates a sense of unity and reinforces some of the broader arguments that Beattie makes throughout about art and narrative.

It feels notable that the writers included in the book’s first half represent a disparate array of styles. Elmore Leonard’s terse crime fiction, Alice Munro’s precise emotional shifts and David Markson’s experiments in form are all subject to Beattie’s analysis, and the effect is pleasurable for multiple reasons. One is, simply, that Beattie is excellent at finding revelatory ways to read other authors, noting (for example) that “Munro orients the reader toward realizing that a story is composed of pieces and shows us that shards, as well as neat slices, are necessary to complete the puzzle.” More broadly, this feels like Beattie guiding the reader through a carefully curated library, and expounding at length about precisely what is extraordinary about the writers represented within.

“More to Say” also abounds with a precise attention to details that a less-skilled writer might not have acknowledged or recognized. In an appreciation of Andre Dubus, she recounts being on a book tour with him when the two were separated due to car trouble. What she recounts next is a kind of writer’s anxiety dream made real: sitting in a Portland coffee shop, “(overhearing) a young guy trying to convince a pretty woman he’d just met to go to the library reading.”  The young man in question had never heard of Beattie – much less realized that she was standing right there.

Then there’s this memorable detail from her essay on photographer Jayne Hinds Bidaut: “There’s a spiritual element. A symbiotic relationship between photographer and subject that is palpable – to such extent that Jayne once kept an almost infinitesimal mouse that fell out of its nest prematurely warm inside her brassiere.”

These essays have a candor, which in several cases stems in part from the fact that sometimes she is writing about peers and friends and – in the case of the painter Lincoln Perry – her husband. This can be done to bittersweet effect: the essay on Harry Mathews featured here was published in the year after he died in 2017. Beattie opens the essay matter-of-factly mentioning his recent death; it’s clear that she is among the friends of Mathews that she mentions in the essay’s second sentence. And the details she can supply of Mathews’ life – including details about his bicycle riding and an image of him pausing a conversation with merely a raised finger – is a kind of gift to the reader, giving them a sense of what Mathews was like not as a writer, but simply as a person. It makes this work that much more affecting.

It’s “My Life in Bingo” that stands as the book’s highlight. Originally delivered as the Kapnick Lecture at the University of Virginia in 2019, it finds Beattie looking at writing and, more broadly, creativity through the prisms of spontaneity, seduction and inspiration. She does so by including one of the most resonant metaphors for writing that you’re likely to encounter. (Spoiler: it involves bingo.) Its placement at roughly the midpoint of this book also acts as a prism for all that’s come before and all that’s still to come. Alternatively: it’s a lesson in writing, looking, listening and thinking from someone prodigiously talented at all of the above. This is a book to savor.

New York City resident Tobias Carroll is the author of three books: “Political Sign,” “Reel” and “Transitory.” He has reviewed books for the New York Times, Bookforum, the Star Tribune and elsewhere.

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

What Mainers read in 2023

Next »

Bestsellers: ‘The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,’ ‘Maine: A Love Story’