We tend to think of Ann Beattie's stories as populated by young, well-educated, witty, somewhat eccentric, quirky, observant, introverted characters, people much like many of her readers! - but in fact Beattie has been typed, become a victim of and defined by her best-known work, when in fact her range was wider than most of us remember - looking back at the 70s stories in "The New Yorker Stories," I see that some of the people she writes about are close cousins to Flannery O'Connor's gothics and weirdos: drug-addled divorces, serial marital perpetrators, judgmental fundamentalist parents - a much wilder and more ragged set than I recall. And yet - right from the first story there is a distinct Beattie voice and style that emerges and that over the years has become ever more crystalline and precise, but it's there from the onset. How do we know an Ann Beattie story? Let's count (some of) the ways: first of all the voice, the dialogue. Her characters speak by indirection, as if they're not entirely listening to each other, but their phrases play off each other like jazz riffs. Many others have imitated this style since then to differing effects: broad comedy in George Saunders, stark minimalism and isolation in Raymond Carver, to cite two examples. With Beattie, the dialogue establishes a world in which nothing quite seems to fit together. She's been described as a realist, a chronicler of our/her time, but that's not quite accurate - her dialogue makes her stories seem a bit like a dreamscape, language that on the surface seems real and plausible but as you read through it feels slightly off, a world knocked slightly off balance, making us feel a little disoriented.