What Was Mine
Book | Ann Beattie
Love is a four-letter word in these stories of bourgeois heartache.
In the world of Ann Beattie, WASPs may not belong to the insect arthropod class, but they certainly do sting—particularly while trapped in their splintering marriages. The stories of What Was Mine are in this sense classic Beattie—blue-blood relationships turning cold-blooded. There is the woman who stages an elaborate fake party to announce to her husband that she is leaving him. There is the couple that can't stay together long enough even to satisfy the Welcome Wagon Lady. Besides the occasional clunker bit of heavy-handed irony—the Welcome Wagon Lady can't leave the town because her husband is a marriage counselor—Beattie portrays the Brooks Brothers and their estranged wives with disciplined minimalist prose, as careful to refrain from moral judgment as her characters are careless with their lovers. While these stories may question the traditional monogamous relationship, What Was Mine once again proves that Beattie is completely committed to exposing the failings of upper-middle-class America.
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