A darker strand emerges in Ann Beattie's early stories

The last two stories from the 1978 Secrets and Surprises in Ann Beattie's "The New Yorker Stories" continue with the dark turn that her fiction took at that period. Her very first stories were more whimsical and witty - albeit with some very dark and threatening strands, as in the story of an abandoned child, Wanda's, and some of the ones heavily influenced by O'Connor - but the stories The Vintage Thunderbird and Distant Music focus more deeply than any previous Beattie stories on infidelity and, especially, divorce, and midlife loneliness. Are her characters truly lucky in friendship? Doesn't seem so from these two at least - her characters start to seem at sea, abandoned adults. Around this time Beattie also published her first (I think) novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter - and the title says it very well. Her work at this time took a hibernal turn. Pausing to look back on her work, first of all I'm struck by her amazing run - first story in the New Yorker about 1974 and then a string of a story every two months or so (plus others not in TNY), enough for two collections (plus a novel?) by 1978 - each one with a distinct voice and style never seen before and easil recognized as Beattie's yet each exploring something or someone different - she was writing before the omnivorous trend of "linked stories," novels on the cheap - so each was a new creation of characters, setting, predicament. Two further observations to be developed: Beattie has said that travel helps her to write, but it's travel for her, not for her characters - they seem stuck in place. Also, collecting all the New Yorker stories is a great way to look back at a career and to learn something about the sensibility of the magazine as well, but why was Scribners so cheap in its production as to not put the name of the story on the right-hand header?