Ann Beattie's characters : of an age or for all time?

Further thoughts about Ann Beattie's style in her early (1970s) stories - it's not only her use of slanted, slightly akimbo dialogue, in which each character is speaking but not really listening, that gives her stories their sense of displacement, makes us sense that they're a form of realism, but not about the real world that all of us inhabit: also striking is her use of the present tense, another Beattie trait that was original to her and has now become the default mode for a million graduate writing seminars. But when she burst on the scene with her stories and their sense of the immediacy, of bringing right into the action but telling it as it unfolds, it was quite an awakener for readers, especially readers of the staid New Yorker. Particularly disconcerting is that she brings you right into the action (John puts a can of beer into the fridge...he waits for it to cool...) but at the same time there isn't much action - her characters are victims of anomie, we're right with them as they lead their lives but they generally aren't leading much of a life, they're in torpor, and deep in self-absorption. Many saw this then, and still, as a portrait of a generation, and began to look to Beattie as a beacon of her time, a trendspotter - and I believe she hated this characterization or assumption. Like all writers, she saw (and sees) her characters not as representations of anything but as themselves, unique and complete. Looking back on her early stories, though, the characters do seem very much of their time and of their age (late adolescence/early adulthood) - whether she meant to do so or not, her characters have helped shape our image of the time in which they lived.