Chilly Scenes of Winter

Before Christmas, my writing group did a book exchange, choosing favorite books from our own collections and gifting them to each other. I was lucky to receive Ripening, which is the selected work of feminist author and journalist Meridel Le Suer  and Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie. Synchronicity struck, as I had only a week before, marked the Beattie title on a scrap of paper as a book to search for, after hearing about it for the first time in an interview on Tao Lin interview on Bookworm. 

Set in the mid-1970’s in an unnamed town somewhere on the east coast, the book focuses on the life of government worker Charles. Beset by depression and ennui over the end of an affair with a married woman, the steady decline of a mother who likes to lie naked in the bathtub surrounded by movie star magazines, and the general purposelessness of life, Charles trudges through the book in a state of disrepair. He buys beers and dinners for his unemployed, over-sexed best (and only) friend Sam, and rescues an ex-girlfriend, who discovered her lesbianism while they were still together, from a truck stop post robbery. He purchases fruit from a grocery store and leaves it on the doorstep of a women that he has acted rudely towards. He fields calls from a desperate and manic step-father, one that sees buying a white Honda Civic as the solution to all of his problems, and who mourns the difficulty of finding Turtle Wax at his local hardware store.

This is the type of story that sometimes drives me crazy. One in which nothing much seems to happen, with unmotivated, self-absorbed characters at its center. Sam’s biggest problem seems to be waiting for the newest Dylan album to come out. Charles spends the entire novel obsessing over Laura, the married woman, driving by her house late at night, debating whether he should call her or not. But in a way, this aimlessless captures a certain state of mind that might have a been a direct result of the burst of energy that was the sixties. It is like one long hangover, a glum yet manic exploration of the gray, headachy day after a fabulous party.

The novel is minimalist and bare-boned. Beattie refuses to give us much, just sentences like this:

“She laughs. She has big front teeth. He loves her.”

And they work. Beattie’s writing is all meat, with no side dishes. She isn’t going to tell us what to think of the characters. It is up to the reader to give the story meaning, to traverse the vicissitudes of Charles’ daily life without out ever experiencing any grand revelations or ephiphanies. But often times, life is exactly like this. A series of steps that often lead to nothing. Going to the grocery store, doing laundry, cooking dinner, drinks with friends, girded sometimes by a quiet desperation and sometimes not. Expectations that are sometimes met, but not always, and not usually.  Beattie does not provide transformation, but she does capture yearning and the futility of finding  permanent happiness, marked with the deprecating humor that can help us survive that sad reality.