Anne Beattie is one of that school of '70s and '80s writers who painted ordinary America with miniature-level detail, and who marked American realism's last bright point before its long, steady decline into mawkish middle-class self-obsession. Beattie's stories are, above all else, cold and sad and floaty-- a style that was taken to extremes of shittiness by people like Tao Lin. If Anne Beattie was writing about me reading Anne Beattie, she'd sound like this:"Andrew spent a lot of time at home in his apartment alone reading books by authors who always talked about being lonely. He thought that being lonely was made more tolerable if you could be lonely with a lonely writer.He read Anne Beattie, because Anne Beattie stories felt good when you were sitting on your sofa alone with a bottle of Carlsberg Lager.He woke up in Ellie's bed. They'd been at Elizabeth's birthday party the night before. It was too cold in Ellie's room, he thought. She was still asleep from having had eight rum-and-Cokes the night before. He was less hung over than he thought he should be. He sat over in a shaft of light and looked at Ellie. He stopped looking at Ellie and looked at the book of Anne Beattie stories.'Are you reading?' Ellie asked.And Andrew thought that he was OK, at least for a little bit."
