Picturing Will
Cooper, Rand Richards
BOOKS Ann Beattie: less than minimal Last November, Harper's Magazine published a lengthy essay by Tom Wolfe, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," in the which the New Journalist-cum-Newer...
...we know a lot about him (he likes won ton soup and GI Joes, makes ash trays in pottery, etc...
...Here is a good example of minimalist sentences in action on a random page of Chilly Scenes: "She's very nice, Charles thinks...
...The novel ends...
...Buried in all the mess is a sometimes pained, sometimes rapturous account of the state of being a parent...
...Jody marries Mel...
...There is a nightmarish quality to Picturing Will...
...Jody, Will's mother, lives with him in Virginia...
...That cheeseburger was awful...
...but we don't know much about him from the inside...
...not the novel's emotions, but its form...
...He gets up and picks up the pen, goes back to the desk and sits down...
...And yet all the other characters are set into action by their relation to him...
...with the emotions anesthetized, given a shot of novocaine...
...Who are these much-celebrated, much-maligned minimalists...
...Part of the importance of photography to Jody is its simple promise to freeze the child in time...
...That must have been delicious...
...Beattie still presents an array of standard minimalist props...
...Inquiring into every conceivable "story," leaping about among multiple points of view, burdening characters with their pasts as if with several layers of clothing, the narrative has trouble performing the simplest motions...
...One way out of this is to look past the sociology of K-Marts and rural settings, into the lives of words and sentences...
...It's like watching people watch a show we can't ourselves see...
...The novel sets forth a network of relationships centering on a young boy named Will...
...Ultimately, however, such small revelations get lost in a flood of sentimental longing...
...Tom Wolfe says that Robert Coover is one...
...Above all, the novel's manner was beguilingly plain...
...Why, in an overheard conversation between two anonymous women in a park, are we given to learn that the former surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, used to roam his neighborhood as a child with his mother, looking for stray cats he could capture and bring home to operate on...
...He has the eerie feeling that when he looks up Laura and Jim and Rebecca will be there...
...It succeeds, and Jody launches a new career...
...He reaches down and puts the plug into the socket again, and as he does that, you look at his quick concentration and know that you have lost him for all time...
...The problem with "movements" of writing, of course, is knowing just who belongs...
...Curiously, the object of everyone's affection, the actual Will, is not persuasively present in the novel...
...It is a virtue of Picturing Will to understand that a child can be lost to something as undramatic as competence...
...And yet the sentences are radically different...
...Mel, Jody's New York boyfriend, wants her to marry him, bring Will to the city, and take up a life as a real photographer- that is, as an artist...
...Because the child's presence and desires are so constant, it becomes the course of least possible pain to persuade yourself that being subsumed is synonymous with parenthood...
...The narrative is constructed in part of short, italicized reflections on parenting...
...He gets arrested...
...Its events are desultory in the extreme...
...He looks down at the piece of paper again and makes a notation on the pad...
...He takes a trip to Florida to see his father...
...He is seen...
...The digressive mode weakens the larger elements of the novel as well...
...These things pile up...
...The effect was like reading "Big Two-Hearted River" rewritten as a script for, say, Robert Altman...
...Can we take his word for it...
...Joy Williams reads like one-sometimes...
...The TV is always on...
...to keep him forever young, protected, and thus protecting...
...One longs for a touch of the novelist's benign authoritarianism...
...Beattie understands and evokes the significance, to an observing parent, of something as small as a child's tripping over a light cord and then figuring out what has happened...
...Peter Cameron most of the time...
...BOOKS Ann Beattie: less than minimal Last November, Harper's Magazine published a lengthy essay by Tom Wolfe, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," in the which the New Journalist-cum-Newer Novelist lamented the state of contemporary American fiction...
...ng and cheering about...
...Picturing Will is a novel of pointless, annoying digressions...
...Again and again, minor characters-a cop, a waitress-wander into the edge of the action where, instead of performing their function and quietly disappearing, they seize the narrative by force, and we find ourselves wrenched from an important conversation between Jody and a gallery owner, and set down in a long passage about their waitress's strange dreams, her acting class, her psychoanalyst...
...Wayne, Jody's first husband and Will's father, is a philanderer who is living with his current (and third) wife, Corky, in Florida, where his job as a delivery man provides ample opportunity to pursue his favorite hobby...
...In a certain sense, Picturing Will is the ultimate democratic narrative-it continually hands the microphone over to the audience...
...He throws his pen down...
...You have created the child, but you could not have anticipated the child's power...
...Its language complicates itself accordingly...
...Without knowing much about him, without even knowing, until they applied for a marriage license, that he had been married before, without ever pausing to consider how strange it was that he had no friends and that his own brother was mystified that he had been asked to attend the wedding, without any knowledge beyond what she saw in his eyes and what she felt when she touched his body-she was willing to leave behind worried friends, argue with and finally stop speaking to her parents, and view her own ambition with skepticism...
...Wayne has a torrid affair with a woman who turns out to be involved in cocaine deals...
...Chilly Scenes of Winter took up the lives of young people just out of school, unattached and on the move...
...it lets every person's story be told...
...Seven books and almost fifteen years later, Ms...
...Well, why not...
...In the mosaic of perspectives the novel attempts to paint, his is the least vividly done...
...But that story, unfortunately, is both fragmentary and tedious...
...Rand Richards Cooper Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976), read like a minimalist manifesto, and established her as one of the movement's Founding Mothers...
...Consoling her son after a nightmare, Jody knows the strength to be found in another's need: held in her arms, Will becomes "her buffer against the world...
...Will goes back to New York...
...she's a wedding photographer who keeps wishing she could be marrying the men whose weddings she photographs...
...The effect for a reader is weird...
...Her pages are laden with brand names...
...A German friend has commented that it's a perfect book for students learning English as a second language...
...Is this a "foreshadowing" of the boy's fascination with dinosaurs, hundreds of pages later...
...One aesthetic mistake singled out for special dismay was the movement often called minimalism-those "K-Mart Realists," as Wolfe put it, who write about "lonely Rustic Septic Tank Rural settings, in a deadpan prose...
...What about the Barthelme brothers-do they belong...
...When Ann Beattie, whose new novel, Picturing Will, has recently been published by Random House, burst onto the scene in 1976, one felt oneself in the presence of a writer who used language in a new way...
...What's everybody sighing and cheering about...
...Her first novel, PICTURING WILL Ann Beattie Random House, $18.95, 221 pp...
...Patsy Cline sings "You Belong to Me" as they take Will's father away...
...Ironic, exceedingly simple in plot and diction, the novel joined a Hemingwayesque syntax to a hip, me-decade vision of pop culture...
...story opens into story opens into story, and we forget where we started...
...These portentous observations form a kind of text of which the story itself seems to have been intended as an illustration...
...Mel arranges a show for Jody in a New York gallery...
...Picturing Will, on the other hand, is a meditation upon that most mysterious and profound of all human attachments-that of parent to child...
...Why, for instance, do we need to know, following a recollection of Jody's first, chance encounter with Wayne-she was passing him on a crowded street when the heel of one of her shoes snapped off-that "the thin little leather heel she held was the shed tail of a captured lizard...
...Will plays with his best friend, Wagoner...
...Popular tunes float in the background...
...Why couldn't you like her...
...Lobster Newburg...
...What has been minimized here is not prose but architecture...
...One would surely point to the late Raymond Carver...
...What about Tobias Wolff...
...Its sentences-even its pages, so full of white space-suggested the atomistic nature of its characters and their lives...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 10
