Ann Beattie's stories in the '80s : Why they're among her best

It's obvious to anyone reading through Ann Beattie's "The New Yorker Stories" that her work advances to a higher order of being in the early '80s with the stories collected in Where You'll Find Me - these stories are more compact and dramatic than her earlier work, still with a recognizable Beattie attributes of quick wit and wry observation, still with the prototypical Beattie characters whom I've described as generally lucky in friendship, unlucky in love - but these stories are more crystalline, often hinging or turning on a single event or observation or revelation (her earlier stories were more meandering and sometimes made needlessly complex with too many character and too many quirky incidents). Among the best are Coney Island, very simply about two guys sitting at a table drinking, as one prepares to go out and have a drink with his former girlfriend now recently married, leading the two to ruminate on the differences between friendship and love - and the gaps that inevitably and sadly open between friends over time; Times (I think that's the right title), about a young couple visiting her family over xmas and their naive agreement that they'd tell they'd tell each other about any infidelities and how this almost destroys them; an amazingly poignant story about a couple driving home in the snow after a party and the recollections of the death of their daughter - and so many others - these are definitely Beattie with a new level of maturity and and the height of her writing powers. Shortly after these stories, she shifted her focus more toward longer fiction, coming back to the short form about a decade later.