Walks With Men: Fiction
By Ann Beattie
3/5
()
About this ebook
It is 1980 in New York City, and Jane, a valedictorian fresh out of Harvard, strikes a deal with Neil, an intoxicating writer twenty years her senior. The two quickly become lovers, living together in a Chelsea brownstone, and Neil reveals the rules for a life well lived: If you take food home from a restaurant, don’t say it’s because you want leftovers for "the dog." Say that you want the bones for "a friend who does autopsies." If you can’t stand on your head (which is best), learn to do cartwheels. Have sex in airplane bathrooms. Wear only raincoats made in England. Neil’s certainties, Jane discovers, mask his deceptions. Her true education begins.
"One of our era’s most vital masters of the short form" (The Washington Post), Beattie brilliantly captures a time, a place and a style of engagement. Her voice is original and iconic.
Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie has been included in five O. Henry Award Collections, in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The former Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, she is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine, Virginia, and Florida.
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Reviews for Walks With Men
102 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I found this 102 page novelette very insightful and the personality traits of the characters a good study of intellectual minded people. Writing style so full of irony is like a fresh breeze but slightly in the stream of consciousness mode that otherwise become tiresome to read but not in her case though. Maybe the dialogues save it. The end seemed disjointed. The walk with two old men seems irrelevant to the storyline. seems like a short skit has been inserted just for the sake of the title.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5good book
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5VERY LAME-DO NOT PAY UP Instead, shoot yourself with a worm cannon and then smile at what you did! COMMENT!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I was hoping this book would've been better than it was, but still a smart, quick read. Finished it in one sitting.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm surprised that this novella has been getting bad reviews. I thought the writing was beautiful. If there is something readers aren't liking, I'm sure it's the characters. It's true, they aren't likable. But they also seem very real, and that's why I liked them.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)As regular readers know, although I don't make a habit of it, I do occasionally enjoy a well-crafted piece of short "literary" fiction, the kind of $20 novella-sized book that I'm usually railing against here; for example, check out the latest from lit veteran Ann Beattie, the '80s character drama Walks With Men, a literal novella which redeems itself by never pretending to be more than it is, an insightful and darkly comic look at manipulative male intellectuals and the smart yet stupid women who are both on to their tricks and fall for them anyway. And in fact, the best compliment I can pay this slim volume is that it feels an awful lot like an autobiographical tale, a case of Beattie perhaps shedding an old ghost from her own youth, although upon reflection I wonder now whether maybe the entire thing was instead made up out of whole cloth; and that's because Beattie (a multiple recipient of the O. Henry citation for short fiction) has a way of getting under the skin of all the characters seen here, delivering an ultra-realistic, ultra-subtle story of a young hipster in early-'80s lower Manhattan and the platitude-spouting writer twenty years her senior who she quickly ends up with, then breaks up with, then ends up with again. Along the way, then, no one is really spared, with Beattie giving us deeply complex look at both these people plus the various friends and other lovers in their lives, showing us nakedly both the strengths and weaknesses of them all, and positing that a big reason this flawed yet otherwise good woman puts up with the shenanigans of this sorta dicklike poseur is that she realizes she's not exactly a prize catch either. It's a charming if not world-weary book that I really kinda fell in love with by the end, the rare case of a quick read that is well worth its full cover price.Out of 10: 9.2
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Didn't read. A novella, which seemed disjointed, so I didn't read it.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A lot was said, but the story really didn't bring me along.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I once pretended to be a stringer for a local paper and wheedled my way into an interview with Ann Beattie an hour or so before a reading. I have always loved her short stories, and this short novel marks my return to her work after another of those inexplicable absences I mention from time to time.I must say this novella – barely over 100 pages – is quite a disappointment. It is a strange story, with odd characters, moving through life as if in a daze. The narrator, Jane, is an especially egregious violator. She never explains most of her decisions -- even her introspection at the end of the novel left this reader wholly dissatisfied.Jane lives on a farm with a musician/hippie after graduating from Harvard. She travels to New York City to receive an award and meets Neil, a Svengali of sorts. Neil wants to “teach” Jane to live in the big city and move about in his upper class circle. I will only add to this that Jane learns, and so does Neil. But a lot of unusual things happen along the way. I am going to have to put this one aside for a while. Let it percolate a bit, and come back later. The prose is vintage Beattie, so it is worth the read. 3 stars--Jim, 7/25/10
Book preview
Walks With Men - Ann Beattie
Also by Ann Beattie
Distortions
Chilly Scenes of Winter
Secrets and Surprises
Falling in Place
The Burning House
Love Always
Where You’ll Find Me
Picturing Will
What Was Mine
Another You
My Life, Starring Dara Falcon
Park City
Perfect Recall
The Doctor’s House
Follies
WALKS
WITH
MEN
Ann Beattie
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
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Copyright © 2010 by Ann Beattie
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009052240
ISBN 978-1-4391-7576-7
ISBN 978-1-4391-6869-1 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4391-6870-7 (ebook)
WALKS
WITH
MEN
In 1980, in New York, I met a man who promised me he’d change my life, if only I’d let him. The deal was this: he’d tell me anything, anything, as long as the information went unattributed, as long as no one knew he and I had any real relationship. At first it didn’t seem like much of a deal, but my intuition told me he knew something I didn’t yet know about the way men thought—and back then, I thought understanding men would give me information about the way I could make a life for myself. I liked his idea that nobody would know we meant anything to each other: not the college where he taught, or the magazine where he was on staff. Not my boyfriend in Vermont.
"You give me information, and I give you what?" I said.
You give me a promise that nobody can trace anything back to me. I explain anything you want to know about men, but nobody can know I’m the source of your information.
You think men are that special?
A different species. One I understand very well, because I’ve sheltered myself there to stay out of the rain,
he said. You’re smart, but you’re missing basic knowledge that will eventually stop you dead in your tracks.
Nobody talks to anybody this way,
I said.
He said (thumb gently rubbing my wrist): You don’t think I know that?
Neil had been the writer assigned to provide a perspective on statements I’d made when I was interviewed by the New York Times, about why my generation was so disillusioned, but unlike most subjects and commentators, we met. Soon afterwards, he made his offer, and I didn’t say no. I was interested. I’d only had two long-term relationships, and I had never had an affair.
We walked in the rain. I wore a Barbour jacket Neil bought for me on Lexington Avenue, in a store on the same block as my hotel. He expressed shock that I, a person of such good taste, didn’t already have one. This was the second time we’d met, and it wasn’t exactly a romantic occasion. He’d rounded me up at Mount Sinai after I had a laparoscopy. It was a minor procedure: in in the morning, out by early afternoon; apparently, my wooziness and vomiting on the sidewalk had not been anticipated by the doctors because it was not part of the usual scenario. (A different species.
)
Neil and I had first met at lunch, when an editor of the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times suggested the three of us get together (there had been quite a few letters to the editor after my interview, and his perspective
piece). When he found out I had plans to return to New York later in the month, he insisted on meeting me at the hospital. Afterwards, we took a cab to my hotel and sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the love seat staring into an empty fireplace with a sign above it saying that under no circumstances should the fireplace be lit (did they imagine travelers might get into a snit and destroy old love letters, or that they packed logs?). I felt woozy and headache-y; Neil—who I would soon find out thought often about presents, as ways to cheer people up—started thinking aloud, saying that while I called my mother and stepfather to tell them I was okay, he would go out and get me a better scarf to go with my jacket. What was that nubbly wool thing around my neck? It should be used to buff a car. And wasn’t the hotel room drab? ("Never trust a hotel that’s been renovated until the second year.) Thus began my tutorial: a young woman who’d graduated from Harvard with honors, considering the advice of an older man. The medical procedure had gone well; I was okay, what about a glass of wine (he called it
a drink, and told me that announcing what drink you’d order wasn’t done: one always said, simply,
a drink") at the bar downstairs, and then he would tuck me in bed and get me a Burberry scarf—durable and stylishly understated; good enough for the Queen, it should be good enough for me—and then we could prop up in bed and begin our more serious talk. If I thought of the right questions, he promised to give honest answers, and . . . what? Everything would be known, between someone who was about to turn twenty-two, and the older man she was infatuated with, who was forty-four, all in the honorable cause of the young
woman’s enlightenment, so she would no longer make the mistakes she had made—might continue to make—if someone (Neil), the right person, didn’t intervene?
Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can’t help but consider irony.
I became something of an overnight sensation, when I was twenty-one, for an interview I gave the New York Times, in which I—one of that year’s summa cum laude Harvard graduates—disparaged my Ivy League education, at graduation, in the presence of President Jimmy Carter, and stated my intentions to drop out and move to a farm in Vermont. Neil, a Barnard professor, had been hired to elucidate the issue of my generation’s dissatisfaction with the Establishment, writing a piece for the Times in which he