‘The State We’re In: Maine Stories,’ by Ann Beattie
Remember the epiphany — life changed irrevocably in a gorgeous zinger moment of pure consciousness (the last paragraph in James Joyce’s “The Dead” or the last paragraph in John Cheever’s “Goodbye My Brother”)? What her stories lack in intensity and self-conscious virtuosity they make up for in a fundamentally less moral approach to the short story than the one that prevailed in the Salinger-Cheever-Updike era. Like Wolfe’s, Beattie’s method favored intensive, immersive research into what felt like verbatim texts from somebody’s material life.