Novelist Focuses on Childhood Isolation

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. —  As an only child, Ann Beattie spent hours observing adults at work and play, usually with her parents and often apart from other children. It proved to be excellent training for a woman who has become one of America’s premier short story writers and novelists.

“I probably saw a lot of things that other kids didn’t see because I was alone,” she says. “Being integrated into an adult world happened very early on in my life, and it made me a watcher. I saw things as being wrought with significance, in one situation after another.”

Now, that experience has become the focal point of Beattie’s latest novel, “Picturing Will,” a haunting study of a young boy and the adults who make up his world. Unlike her earlier works, in which thirtysomething refugees from the 1960s drift through an emotionally desolate landscape, this book features a more lyrical and psychologically direct style by the 42-year-old author.

Beattie, who has chosen not to have children, says her book is an “extended meditation on childhood” and represents a bold new direction in her writing. More important, the author of such well-received short story collections as “Where You’ll Find Me,” and novels such as “Chilly Scenes of Winter,” hopes her new book will put an end to the notion that she is somehow the voice of her generation, as more than one critic has suggested.

It is a sore spot with Beattie, whose unsettling stories offer glimpses of moody, egocentric young adults stumbling through the ‘70s and ‘80s. Her brief, darkly written pieces are filled with middle-class people who tune in the Beatles on their car radios and are tormented by failing marriages, divorce, unhappy affairs and separations. Like the suburban characters in John Cheever’s stories, they are prisoners of ennui.

“What a lot of writers ignore is that I’m not a sociologist,” says Beattie, relaxing on a sofa in her two-story brick home. “My test in writing these stories was not, did I get it right about the ‘60s, but, is it literature? What I care about is whether my writing succeeds.”

To her colleagues, that is no longer in doubt. Novelist Margaret Atwood, commenting on Beattie’s distinctive writing style, wrote that, “if Ann Beattie were a ballerina, you could sell tickets to the warm-ups.” Critic John Leonard praised the brooding tone of her stories, noting that “she seems to have jumped out of the head of an autumnal Samuel Beckett.”

Thin, composed and cerebral, Beattie comes across in person like the prose that has won her such a wide audience. Initially reluctant to talk much about herself, the author gradually reveals more personal nuggets until, by the end of an interview, something of a portrait emerges. Dressed in a black sweater, black pants and black cowboy boots, she looks younger than her years and periodically brushes a shock of long auburn hair out of her eyes.

“For me, ‘Picturing Will’ was something of a mystery, because I had no idea how it would turn out until the very end,” Beattie says. “I’ve spent a lot of time hanging around with kids, but all I knew is that I wanted to write a book about children, about childhood.

“The rest, how it turned out, how it developed, is something as mysterious to me today as it was when I first started writing more than 20 years ago.”

Looking back, Beattie says there were no early clues that she would become a writer. Born to a middle-class family in Washington, she was an indifferent student in high school and attended American University chiefly to satisfy her parents.

At first, Beattie flirted with journalism but then switched to an English major. About 1965, she began writing her first short stories, usually three-page vignettes about eccentric characters drawn from her own generation.

Friends praised the work, but it was strictly a hobby. When Beattie later entered graduate school at the University of Connecticut, she dismissed the idea of writing for a living--or doing anything for a living.

“I’ve never had a job in my life,” Beattie says with a laugh. “I never wanted one then, and I don’t want one now. I stayed in school not because of a love of the academic life or even because I wanted to buy time as a writer. I stayed in school because I didn’t want to work.”

The turning point came when Beattie’s short stories were noticed by J. D. O’Hara, a professor and writer at the university. Without meeting her in person, O’Hara began suggesting editorial revisions in her works, leaving revised copies of the stories in the author’s mailbox.

It was all very flattering, but when O’Hara managed to sell several of her pieces to small college magazines in Utah and Texas, Beattie had a change of heart. Especially when the first checks arrived.

“Well, I said, it’s time to pursue that hobby!” she recalls. “I thought, you know, this might not be so bad after all.”

During the next several years, Beattie sold stories to the New Yorker and Esquire and began attracting attention in literary circles. Her reputation soared when “Chilly Scenes of Winter” was published in 1976.

The story of an obsessive love affair, the novel focused on a group of young adults in their 20s and became something of a cult classic. Many readers saw themselves in Beattie’s post-college characters and her re-creation of the mid-’70s cultural scene. The book was eventually made into a movie, and Beattie had a cameo role as a harried coffee shop waitress.

“It was great, great experience,” she says. “I got to wear the largest falsies of my life. It’s true. They didn’t have anything big enough in the costume department, so they put socks in.”

In the coming years, Beattie would publish several collections of short stories, such as “The Burning House” and “Secrets and Surprises,” and novels including “Falling in Place” and “Love Always.” After living in New York, New England and the South, she divorced her first husband and moved to Charlottesville, where she had once taught English at the University of Virginia. In 1988 she was married to Lincoln Perry, a painter.

Although her work has evolved, certain hallmarks of the Ann Beattie style are apparent. The openings tend to be abrupt and confused, there is little physical description and the setting is often irrelevant. Readers who begin one of her short stories may feel like they’ve walked into the middle of an enigmatic play that started hours before.

“These are not good movie beginnings,” Beattie explains. “But I think that, because of the way the characters speak, and because of the narrator’s tone of voice, you can pick up what kind of a world it is. I’m not trying to make it vivid visually, I’m trying to do it more through dialogue and through sentence cadence.”

When they work well together, these ingredients produce powerful results. In her masterful short story “In the White Night,” Beattie builds from an ambiguous party scene to a shattering human tragedy in less than seven pages. In “The Burning House,” she lays bare a crumbling marriage and concludes with a chilling, unforgettable farewell from a man to his wife.

On occasion, Beattie has been able to write short stories with amazing speed, and reportedly finished the first draft for the novel “Love Always” in less than six weeks. But she says “Picturing Will” took more than three years to write and was her most exhausting project.

“I don’t know why exactly, but I had to struggle with this novel. Maybe it’s because there was something very different about it, a story about childhood and a real departure for me.”

On the wall opposite the front door in Beattie’s home hangs a large oil painting of a little boy. An adult is holding him protectively, while he stares at an abstract black and white shape behind a wire fence.

The boy, whose name is Will, is the child of one of Beattie’s friends, and the painting was prompted by a family photograph that was never properly developed. It is a fitting symbol of the author’s latest book, which blends disturbing snapshots of childhood with meditations on parental responsibility.

“I think that (Will’s) character is somewhat similar to mine, as an only child, by saying that he’s something of a watcher,” she says. “But it also came out of the writing process--where you create characters that embody some hidden aspect of yourself that you’re not very often in touch with.” As the book begins, Jody, a single mother, is raising Will, her 6-year-old son, in Charlottesville. The book focuses primarily on the boy and his thoughts, but eventually offers portraits of his mother, his friends, his stepfather, Mel, and his father, Wayne, who abandoned him years ago.

Gradually the barest threads of a narrative emerge: Jody’s career as a photographer takes off and she moves with Will to New York to be with her lover. During a trip to Florida, Wayne makes it clear that he will not be a caring, nurturing person in his son’s life. Will, who is shunted off to the sidelines by one adult after another, remains lost in a world of toy dinosaurs and playground outings until the very end.

The element of surprise in “Picturing Will” is key, because characters who start out as sympathetic turn into selfish, distant adults. People who at first seem bumbling and ineffective become the real heroes in Will’s life.

“For me, the scheme of the book is that any character is going to be more complex than any initial assessment that can be made,” Beattie says. “At first, it’s exactly what you see, and then, as with any life, whether it’s a child or an adult, it’s more than what you say.”

As Will’s world gradually comes into focus, readers sense the impact that a 6-year-old boy has on adults, and their often-callous treatment of him. But the book’s real power emerges in a series of diary entries about parenthood that periodically interrupt the story. They feature some of Beattie’s most evocative writing.

In one passage, the narrator reflects on a young boy’s rapid growth and the bittersweet knowledge that childhood is fleeting:

“It becomes difficult to remember that he ever was (vulnerable). That the dog snapped at him, and he was afraid. That the cut got infected. That night after night, the same blue-bodied demon flicked its tail in his dreams. Sticky fingers. Wet sheets. A flood of tears. As you remember him, the child is always two.”

The author of these passages is not revealed until the end of the book, and it comes as a genuine surprise. But for Beattie, the real surprise was the way her characters took on a life of their own as the writing progressed.

Before completing her final draft, for example, she discarded 15 chapters and was uncertain where the book would begin. She had trouble developing the characters of Will’s father and stepmother until their names were changed from Duane and Cory to Wayne and Corky. Then, magically, the problem disappeared.

“Usually, at some subconscious level, I catch on a little bit earlier than I did here,” Beattie says. “But that’s the good thing. I think most writers will tell you that once someone runs away with the material, ultimately, the writer is very thankful.”

Asked about her upcoming projects, Beattie mentions several short stories in progress and a book about photography. But she sidesteps questions about how her work--and outlook--will change. Asked if she will once again draw on her own experience, Beattie finds that impossible to predict.

“It’s just so hard to know,” she says after a long pause. “I mean, all I can consistently say is that I write about what seems mysterious to me.”