Watch waterfalls of pity roar : Ann Beattie's stories

As noted earlier, Ann Beattie copyrights her stories under the whimsical company name of Irony & Pity, Inc. Readers of her stories have focused on the irony, in this it's more evident and actually more fun - and we tend to think of her as a witty, quirky, wryly observant writer, which she is - but as you read through an entire collection of her work, such as "The New Yorker Stories," especially those from the late '70s that were part of her collection Secrets and Surprises, the waterfalls of pity become more evident - her characters, whether they even know it or not, are incredibly sad, one after another from a series of broken marriages and infidelities and infertility, the children victims of abandonment and neglect, many of the women victims of emotional abuse if not physical abuse. In her earliest stories many of these characters were from a wider socioeconomic strata, and many were the descendants of O'Connor's loopy gargoyles, but the later (i.e., late-'70s) stories start to move higher up the economic ladder, they're well-off New Yorkers, primarily, many of them successful artists, photographers, lawyers - but no less grotesque or sorrowful for all their success. Because the wit, the irony is still there - among hundreds of examples think of the woman writing to her grandmother in large block print so grandma can read it, and thinking it feels like she's writing a note from a criminal, and she sort of is - the sadness, when we read the stories in sequence, is nearly overwhelming - much more so than we we (or I) read the stories one at a time, at monthly intervals or so, as they appeared in print. But much of this begins to change in her work in the 80s, about which more later.