I gravitate toward pairs in these blog postings, but this is my first time discussing two artists who are already a pair, a married couple—Ann Beattie, the writer of all those short stories for The New Yorker and all those novels and essays, and Lincoln Perry, the painter and sculptor perhaps most famous for his murals. Both have written new books. Beattie’s isn’t scheduled for publication until summer and came to me in the form of galley proofs. Perry’s I found in an art gallery in Lynchburg, and now that I’ve read both, I’m eager to advertise their virtues. Full disclosure: I was Ann Beattie’s student at the University of Virginia in the 1970’s and have kept in touch with her ever since. I met Lincoln through Ann and have known him for years. But don’t read this posting as a puff piece for friends. If I didn’t see the need to highlight the books, I wouldn’t mention them.
Let’s start with Perry’s Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others. Reading this book is akin to auditing the most interesting art class you’ve ever taken. Prepare to go slowly. I had my iPad on my lap as I read so that I could study the paintings that Perry uses to exemplify his various lessons, and he wastes no time in showing us how to see planes, air, design, and color in paintings. If this book ever gets reprinted as a standard textbook like Janson’s History of Art, then maybe the publishers will be willing to spring for the expensive glossy full-color reproductions that the book demands. Perry does well at including his own sketches of black-and-white renderings of many of the paintings he discusses, but his greatest gift to readers arrives on his website, where he provides fifty different images of the works he’s examining. Because he mentions so many other artists and pieces, however, I found myself constantly pausing in my reading to go to the appropriate internet images. Frescoes by Tiepolo, etchings by Rembrandt, buildings in Venice—the tour is capacious, and I finished this book genuinely enlarged by the experience. I also fought the urges to get on a plane to St. Louis when Perry was discussing particularly his murals there.
And now for Ann Beattie. In his trilogy known as The Norman Conquests, the playwright Alan Ayckbourn presents three full-length plays set during the same weekend at the same country house populated by the same characters. One play takes place in the dining room, one in the living room, and one in the garden. Each show stands alone, and audiences may choose to watch one, two, or all three, but only those who opt to see the full trio can appreciate all the subtleties of what has transpired. Ann Beattie, in Onlookers, gives us a similar experience in six substantial short stories, all set in present-day Charlottesville, all standing alone, all readable in any order. Characters step in and out of each other’s tales, and in the final one, “The Bubble,” the characters converge. As a habitué of Charlottesville, I recognized and loved all the local references, but the stories work whether a reader knows the city or not. These stories are very much of our time; Beattie seems to have written some of them fifteen minutes ago with her references to the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. The “onlookers” of the title are survivors of trauma. In Charlottesville the community still reels in the aftermath of the Unite the Right Rally of 2017 that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer and the lingering tension over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. (Traveller, Lee’s horse, even gets some attention.) As we would expect, Charlottesville also endures the trauma of covid-19. But Beattie’s characters cope with other shattering events as well: the deaths of mothers, the effects of the Trump presidency on political discourse, the gathering of obscure protesters in darkness, the loss of a lover or a house, the birth of a child in a public restroom, the arrival of a medical helicopter for an unidentified neighbor. Yet one of the central locations of these stories is an assisted-living facility called Solace House, and solace is what these characters eventually find.
For me Beattie’s most astonishing accomplishment is to create such a vast cast to populate her narratives. Her mind teems with characters. Legend has it that William Faulkner, when asked by students at the University of Virginia about the people in his novels, would talk about events that never appeared in print. Beattie is both Dickensian and Faulknerian in her ability to generate characters by the dozen and to plug each one into a fully realized context. I know that I’m not supposed to quote from galleys, but the example I’m about to offer is harmless. Even if, in the least likely outcome, this passage doesn’t make it into the final version of the book, it demonstrates how one Beattie character’s background can reticulate into infinite associated histories. The narrator of “Alice Ott” mentions a faraway friend who never figures into any of the stories and lives in New York, but Beattie can’t help giving her a history and then exploring another branch of the family tree: “I’d have much preferred being in Brooklyn with Sophie, who had an entry-level job in publishing and was supported by her father, forever guilty for leaving her and her brother when they were only three and five.” I have no doubt that if Beattie were in the Louvre in front of one of her husband’s favorite paintings, Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana, she would be able to tell us the personal history of every figure in that vast canvas.