Development of a writer's style over a lifetime : Ann Beattie

The dark and menacing strain continues to run through Ann Beattie's most recent stories in her collection "The New Yorker Stories," as the last two, from about 2005, evince: in one (Coping Stones), a widowed man discovers that his tenant is a wanted child molester; in another, a man hires movers to help him clear out a summer house and they prove to be strangely menacing characters. These recent stories also mark a real change in Beattie's narrative structure, focusing very closely n one character rather than the complex network of characters that populate and motivate her earlier stories. Naturally, Beattie's characters are older, later in her career, and confronting late-life issues: aging, and aging parents/relations. Two of her best recent stories concern dealing with an elderly mother - one clearly her most directly autobiographical story (begins with the words "True story"), as narrator, Ann, learns her widowed mom about to move in with neighbor guy. In another, a daughter helps her mom through transition to a nursing home. Beattie is really great with elderly characters and dialogue; their quirky and eccentric use of language and incapacity to follow the strand of a conversation weirdly echos and recreates the off-kilter style of Beattie's earliest pieces. Finally, the late stories seem to be pushing the edge a bit and threatening to break out into novels - something her early stories never did, each seeming complete in itself. For example, the Last Odd Days in LA includes a scene in which the narrator sees a fox (?) watching him at an LA swimming pool - this image would definitely have concluded an early Beattie story, but in the later stories she moves the narration on to a new stage, developing from that image, letting it unfold and giving us just a little more access to the character's interior life. Collecting all her New Yorker stories was a great idea, and reading them as a collection gives us an unique vision of the development of a writer's style over the course of a lifetime in literature.