"Save a Horse Ride a Cowgirl" by Ann Beattie

This story can be found in the November 23, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.

This review can also be read on The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "Heidi and Bree were rear-ended on Route 1 by Sterne Clough, driving his brother's Ford pickup."

Last Line: "She had no doubt nodded in agreement."

Bradley Clough is coming to terms with what his life has become after the death of his wife, Donna.

That's it.

Well, also his time in Vietnam...

Yet Ann Beattie takes us on a rambling, fabricated journey of "telling" (not "showing"), marking the path with senseless brand name-dropping - Puma, Newman's Own, Coke.  It seems as if she is cataloging evidences of the characters' lives to convince us of their reality.  Instead, this story feels like a meandering gossip reel.  Characters and their connections to each other are dropped in so quick and hard in the beginning that I thought: who cares?  Who was there to connect to and follow?  

About a third of the way in, Beattie focuses solely on her main guy.  And it makes sense that she is taking an artistic route, and fleshing out his existence for us...  I can almost see what she is intending to do for us as readers.  There is a lot of potential here, but...  Is she trying to sound like the younger writers of the day?  I don't even like when they do this kicking realities around and making them squeal for the reader.

The dialogue is heavy and unnatural.  Beattie's "telling" flows better than what we overhear the characters say.  There are attempts at wry humor, but it feels forced - for show.  Not only am I lacking any concern for Bradley (I cared more about his brother Sterne!), but the participants of this tale seem made up - static, except for well-placed details in order to create spontaneous life on the page.  A lot of attributes or quirks, or even life events, seem random.  Sudden.  Oh!  I need to tell them this part, too!

Readers are pretty brilliant.  "He finished his seltzer, peed, and undressed, draping his clothes on the bedpost.  The next day was Saturday, so he'd wear them a second day."  One, readers understand that the clothes on the bedpost assumes a second wear, otherwise they would have gone to the laundry basket or even the floor.  And two, how many times can one use the word "day" in a sentence?

The concept of starting with one character and bumping around until we get to the protagonist and how they connect to the first is fascinating.  There were just too many loose ends here.  This story felt like the kitchen "junk drawer" - many great pieces taken out on their own, but put together, they create a mess not to be dealt with.

Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Ann_Beattie_headshot.jpg

"Major Maybe" by Ann Beattie

The story can be found here in The New Yorker.

First Line: "The red-haired homeless lady was arrested after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her."

Last Line: "Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor."

"Major Maybe" is a story of a memory - nostalgia.  It is about an image that pops up and takes the narrator back to a time that is rich with thoughts, choices, feelings.  A time when she was free to not choose and a time when she was able to observe and live without judgment. 

Remembering the red-haired woman's "mad dash into traffic" brought up recollections of a neighbor's dog, accused by the woman to be a devil.  The narrator's memories are further pressed into the building she lived in, the neighbors, her roommate, their affection that had its brief moment.  We dance along with Beattie in and around these images.  Up one tangent, and down another.  We follow her from an abrupt passionate moment with her roommate to her current state: married and remembering those days gone by.  All of this brought about by a picture she sees in a magazine of her old apartment.  

With my first reading, I felt like I was the tail-end in a game of Crack-the-Whip.  Beattie took me one direction, and then yet another.  The tone was both conversational and poetic. I was excited to follow where it would go.

But then it ended.  Sharply.  Beattie took a turn that left me stunned, fallen on the grass, gasping for fresh air.

Even so, I love the last line.  It echoes.  It lingers.  It made me ponder and made me go back into the story to find it's importance - to find why it hovered in my mind.

But it also made me question what a story is.  

At first, it seemed a poetic vignette - a lyric.  A snapshot-memory and then, life goes on.  How is this a shorty story?  What is the purpose in sharing this bit of nostalgia?

The purpose of the short story is to elicit a response from the reader.  Someone has insisted that they entertain. And Chekhov has said that writers are to ask the readers questions, not to answer them.  But each story must have a beginning, middle, and end.  That's what separates it from vignettes. 

I read again "Major Maybe" looking for the plot, the questions, looking for my answer to them.  And it was the ending line that kept haunting me.  "Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor."

In an interview with The Paris Review, Ann Beattie said:

Certain things that I like about endings—endings that hint at the whole story, that let you know there is an arc, but that offer some related image or emotion, instead of decoding the initial image, or pattern, or symbol, endings that alter the tone and the mood just a bit. I realize that some people criticize me for being arbitrary with my endings. I think my stories are very determined. I can tell you the reverberation I have in mind for each element in the story. I can’t make you read it that way, but it’s been contrived, and then revised. What is there is intentional.

I can see it. There is an "intentional" arc in this story.  Both the plot and the characters shift from where they were in the beginning.  There is a beginning, middle, and end.  The narrator shifts.  And her life has shifted with her.  

I can see it, but I had to look really hard, with eyes squinted, to see it.

The thing that remains?  Something "indelible".  Memories.


My "response" to this story?  "And?  So?"

Did I find questions here to examine?  Yep: "What is the author trying to do here?"

Was I entertained?  For a bit. 

Do I still think this is really more like a photograph despite the beginning, middle, and end and the narrator's shift?  Does this feel like a vignette forced to dress-up like a short story?

Yes.