The shock of the new: What was it like to read Ann Beattie's first New Yorker story?

Just try to imagine the shock you would have felt back in 1974 had you come upon Ann Beattie's first story in the New Yorker, A Platonic Friend. Up till then, New Yorker stories were either the well-crafted classical models, novels in miniature, of the Johns (O'Hara, Updike, Cheever) or miniatures memorializing the angst of the well heeled (Salinger) or beautiful vignettes about life in Paris, London, or the Cote d'Azur (Gallant, to cite some examples) and then we suddenly get this fresh voice - about young marrieds, not well off, struggling to define themselves and to find a course for their lives, unhappy and lonely but still hopeful, slightly eccentric but not off the charts or unbalanced, gifted with the capacity for wry observation and subtle wit - but not acidic wit, nothing dangerous. Beattie's characters and her subtle style, stories that neither build to a powerful conclusion nor hinge on a crisis or turning point but just establish a mood or condition and then almost vanish at the end like smoke, were a revelation, and the fact that her style and her type of character have become a staple in American short fiction over the past 35 years is a tribute to her own originality. Looking back at this story - the first in her collection "The New Yorker Stories" - it's hard to comprehend or recall how original it was and how startling it must have seemed. She established her own voice right away - you can only imagine the arguments in the New Yorker offices as to whether they should have published her first piece. Was it too slight? Enigmatic? Inconsequential? They took a chance and set Beattie on her way and she hasn't looked back. It will be interesting moving forward through the collection to watch her talent evolve over a long time span.