More to Say: Essays and Appreciations

by Ann Beattie

“Earnest, amusing, and contemplative....though Beattie is known for her fiction, her nonfiction has just as much to offer.”— Publishers Weekly

“Shimmering prose and critical acumen on display in an eclectic collection.”— Kirkus Reviews

As deeply rewarding as her fiction, a selection of Ann Beattie’s essays, chosen and introduced by the author. From appreciations of writers, photographers, and other artists, to notes on the craft of writing itself, this is a wide-ranging, and always penetrating collection of writing never before published in book form.

Ann Beattie, a master storyteller, has been delighting readers since the publication of her short stories in the 1970s and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter . But as her literary acclaim grew and she was hailed “the voice of her generation,” Ms. Beattie was also moonlighting as a nonfiction writer. As she writes in her introduction to this collection, “Nonfiction always gave me a thrill, even if it provided only an illusion of freedom. Freedom and flexibility—for me, those are the conditions under which imagination sparks.”

These penetrating essays are stories unto themselves, closely observed appreciations of life and art. The reader travels with Ms. Beattie to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to learn about the legacy of the painter, Grant Wood, and his iconic painting American Gothic ; to the famed University of Virginia campus with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry; to Key West, Florida for New Years with writer and translator, Harry Mathews; to a roadside near Boston in a broken-down car with the wheelchair-bound writer Andre Dubus.

There are explorations of novels, short stories, paintings, and photographs by artists ranging from Alice Munro to Elmore Leonard, from Sally Mann to John Loengard. Whatever the subject, Ms. Beattie brings penetrating insight into literature and art that’s both familiar and unfamiliar—as she writes, “This, I think, is what artists want to find a way to lure the reader or viewer into an alternate realm, to overcome the audience’s resistance to being taken away from their own lives and interests and priorities.”

Ann Beattie’s nonfiction (originally published in Life , The New Yorker , The New York Times , and The American Scholar , among others) is a new way to enjoy one of the great writers of her generation. Readers will find much to love in this journey with a curious and fascinating mind.

More to Say is part of Godine’s Nonpareil celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

Genres: Essays

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 2023

About the author

Ann Beattie (born September 8, 1947) is an American short story writer and novelist. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a PEN/Bernard Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and John Updike. She holds an undergraduate degree from American University and a masters degree from the University of Connecticut.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A writer has the ability to see something or someone and create a story from that vision. For example, a writer could observe a child's toys on the floor and say "Unbeknownst to Grandpapa, Billy left his rubber balls at the top of the stairs." Or a writer could say "One ball looked at the other and said "Race ya!'" And the story begins. Through these essays, Ann Beattie explains that painters and photographers also have the ability to see something or someone and create a story from that vision. More importantly to me, through these essays, Ann Beattie shared her vision, her intuition, and her thoughts about life, art, writing. Her thoughts and observations that she conveyed to us, the readers, have overwhelmed me. Magical thinking? Brilliant? Beyond talented? I can't quite find the words to capture my opinion of her writing.

This collection is divided into two sections - 13 essays about writing and 15 essays about painting, drawing, sculpting and photography. I don't know which section I like better. I do have favorite essays from the first section. The one about John Updike is amazing and the one about her own writing process made me put the book down and stop reading. But all the essays on the painters and other artists were the ones that made me realize that Ann doesn't think like most people.

While describing the painting of Tricia Orr, Ann quoted an essay from Barry Lopez. To me, this quote from Ann of Barry to describe Tricia Orr's painting captures how I feel about Ann Beattie's writing:

"He noticed that his traveling companions sometimes made an "insightful remark" that he would never have thought of, for which he envied them. He pinpoints that envy as 'a feeling related not so much to a desire to possess that same depth of knowledge but a desire to so obviously belong to a particular place. To so clearly be an integral part of the place one is standing in.' It is a human impulse..." "to want to belong to what she [Tricia Orr] sees."

In this case, I want to belong to what I have read of the world that is Ann Beattie's mind. I want to be able to make the connections between a painter's vision and the ability to write a short story. I want to make the connections between my childhood and Joan Didion's struggles to write. I want to live in that world where the you can look at a photographer's work about the places where Raymond Carver lived and be able to compare it to the writing of Flannery O'Connor.

I had to do some online research of the artists that Ann Beattie wrote about in order to see for myself the photographs of Curt Richter, John Loengard, and Jane Hinds Bidaut. In Ann's essay on Bidaut's tintypes of insects, I found my favorite line of the whole collection. "In demanding nothing of us, a water bug can be more like the stars than we might think."

This collection of essays may not be for everyone, but I know I will be thinking about it for a long time.