Books: Beattieland

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PICTURING WILL

by Ann Beattie

Random House; 230 pages; $18.95

Ann Beattie first became celebrated 15 years ago as the young chronicler of what has been called the Woodstock generation, the Aquarius generation and even the Beattie generation. Vaguely disaffected and disconnected people drifted in and out of other people's cars and beds, looking for something but not sure what, then finding something else but not sure why. And all this was reported in a coolly detached and often witty style, which made bizarre events seem perfectly natural.

These unhappy people are now entering middle age, as is Beattie, 42, and they seem to have learned virtually nothing about anything. Wayne, who "had always been about to create a life for himself," earns a living of sorts by rewiring lamps. He leaves no note when he walks out on his wife Jody and their son Will. Jody drives "almost randomly" to some unnamed Southern town, gets a job as a clerk in a camera store, then becomes a successful wedding photographer. New characters keep appearing for a scene or two, then disappearing, as though this were not Beattie's fourth novel but her fifth book of short stories.

The only really likable characters are the son Will, his best friend Wag and another youth named Spencer, who is obsessed with the disappearance of the dinosaurs. "In the boy's bedroom were hundreds of dinosaur models . . . An inflated Rhamphorhynchus dangled from the ceiling fixture. ('It means "prow beak," ' Spencer said.)" Spencer is showing his dinosaurs to a hungry-eyed art-gallery owner named Haveabud, who, in a truly sinister scene watched by Will, seduces him during a trip to Florida. There is quite a bit of sex in Beattieland, most of it adulterous and joyless.

Like one of those ominously quiet sequences in a Hitchcock film, Beattie's low-key style tends to create the tension of expectation. For example: "Corky pushed the door open and turned and looked at Wayne, sitting on the step, holding a Schlitz. It was the last drink he would have before his life changed." But all that happens is that Wayne gets arrested on a false charge of possessing cocaine. We never do find out what became of him except, in an epilogue, that he is now living in Mexico City.

The disjointed and fragmentary quality of Beattie's novel seems to come not from any perception or philosophy but primarily from her work habits. She generally writes her short stories all in a day or two and simply throws away any that don't work. She seems to begin novels in much the same way, with just an isolated sentence and a sense of curiosity about what might happen next. Beattie once told an interviewer, "I've never written anything that I knew the ending of . . . I wonder if there are novelists who feel they know how to write novels. I wonder if this knowledge exists."

It is possible that she was just being disingenuous, but it is also possible that the drawbacks to improvisation are somewhat greater than she realizes.