Showing results by narrator "Ann Beattie" in All Categories

Ann Beattie's poignant novel Picturing Will is a complex look at adulthood through the eyes of one remarkable child. The desperate, troubled adult characters emerge, collapse, and reemerge again, as if in a kaleidoscope, around the central figure of young Will. The details of those intertwined lives form a luminous, intricate, and often disturbing picture of modern day life, rendered here with remarkable insight and power.

Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon's wife: "interchangeable with a Martian," she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon's point of view.

Five-year-old Will is the precocious child of Jody and Wayne. Jody is a woman who dreams of becoming a celebrity and is having an affair with a man named Mel, while Wayne is no stranger to infidelity, either. The details of their intertwined lives form an intricate and often disturbing picture of modern day life—a life in which Will is unable to achieve a sense of normalcy from either parent.

"He'd tell me anything, anything, as long as the information went unattributed, as long as no one knew he and I had even met." Such is the deal Jane, Harvard valedictorian fresh out of college, strikes with Neil, the intoxicating writer 20 years her senior. It is 1980 in New York City, and the two quickly become lovers, living together in a Chelsea brownstone. Jane is infatuated, but dark secrets lie beneath Neil's polished surface.