A Big-Hearted Look At Small Town Life In Ann Beattie’s The State We’re In

In Ann Beattie’s newest book of linked short stories, The State We’re In, the state of Maine becomes this kind of well-worn familiar territory, like a favorite worried stone in a pocket. But scattered in the background of the ordinary elements of summer school, tax audits, retirement, and beachgoing are possible suicide attempts, illnesses, and family secrets, as well as all the uncertainties of growing older.
Jocelyn, an inland-dwelling teenager who has been shipped to the coast to live with her aunt and uncle while her mother recovers from an operation, becomes the pedal-point of the collection. While sometimes tending toward too much teen talk, Jocelyn, seen through the eyes of her mother and aunt, as well as her own own skeptical, inventive point of view, wins our love.
Her summer homework is mostly essays, and Beattie makes full use of this prop by letting even a mundane act of writing be a vehicle for Jocelyn’s attempts to make sense of her life and the people around her. In the opening story, while struggling to finish an essay on magical realism, or even understand what her teacher might mean by the term, Jocelyn thinks of “trying to write in a way that was credible about Earth being reversed with the sky; flowers sparkling instead of stars, the stars all fallen around everyone’s feet.”
Short story collections get short shrift in the literary universe, and it’s easy to think of the “linked” collection as being a kind of stitched-together novel that makes the short form more palatable for gobblers of Jennifer Egan. But The State We’re In feels more like going from house to house in a small town on a Sunday, sitting in kitchens and drinking coffee, listening to everybody talk about everybody else.
Whether dominated by dialogue (“Silent Prayer” and “The Stroke”), shifting among first-person narrators, or hovering closely at the side of Jocelyn’s mother or Aunt Bettina, the stories all buzz around the tension between nature and nurture, uncertainty and control, for parents, partners, and children alike. Jocelyn learns a boy she had a moment’s fling with may have tried to kill himself, then that her mother’s motives for sending her away may have had to do with more than her health.
In another story, a couple bickers about the husband’s travel for pages, until the dialogue quiets in the mind of the wife, who is afraid there will be a time when he won’t come back. These short, sometimes very short, stories gives Beattie room to let her characters live alone in a moment, as when Aunt Bettina, whom Jocelyn finds weird and suffocating, sees a bird at risk of dying in her yard and spends a whole story agonizing over whether her nurture is the factor that will give life: “What if she’d hurried on, thought the happy birds were just voicing their happy songs?” Or would she be responsible for taking it away? “You weren’t supposed to touch birds, because they wouldn’t be back in the nest, right?”
By the collection’s close, as in Jocelyn’s inverted magical-realism universe, the world familiar to Beattie’s characters, that of Maine, teenagers, jobs, and marriages, opens in dramatic ways onto the unknown. Sometimes, Beattie seems to say, just as we think we have control, life can snap right back to being a mystery. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying to influence it, or fretting that we already have. When Jocelyn looks up at the barn ceiling after a town auction where everything has seemed to converge, she sees that “prayers and worries lifted up to the rafters and got stuck there like a dust mote, or a bird feather.”