Distortions

by Ann Beattie

Haunting and disturbingly powerful, these stories established Ann Beattie as the most celebrated new voice in American fiction and an absolute master of the short-story form. Beattie captures perfectly the profound longings that came to define an entire generation with insight, compassion, and humor.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, The United States Of America, American Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1983

About the author

Ann Beattie (born September 8, 1947) is an American short story writer and novelist. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a PEN/Bernard Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and John Updike. She holds an undergraduate degree from American University and a masters degree from the University of Connecticut.

Reviews

[Andrew]

Anne Beattie is one of that school of '70s and '80s writers who painted ordinary America with miniature-level detail, and who marked American realism's last bright point before its long, steady decline into mawkish middle-class self-obsession. Beattie's stories are, above all else, cold and sad and floaty-- a style that was taken to extremes of shittiness by people like Tao Lin. If Anne Beattie was writing about me reading Anne Beattie, she'd sound like this:

"Andrew spent a lot of time at home in his apartment alone reading books by authors who always talked about being lonely. He thought that being lonely was made more tolerable if you could be lonely with a lonely writer.

He read Anne Beattie, because Anne Beattie stories felt good when you were sitting on your sofa alone with a bottle of Carlsberg Lager.

He woke up in Ellie's bed. They'd been at Elizabeth's birthday party the night before. It was too cold in Ellie's room, he thought. She was still asleep from having had eight rum-and-Cokes the night before. He was less hung over than he thought he should be. He sat over in a shaft of light and looked at Ellie. He stopped looking at Ellie and looked at the book of Anne Beattie stories.

'Are you reading?' Ellie asked.

And Andrew thought that he was OK, at least for a little bit."

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this book. These stories are not like her other stories. Some of them a little. These stories are funny, sarcastic, and about depressed and lonely people. I enjoyed it.

[Till Raether · Rating 4 out of 5]

These 1970's short stories are funny and original in a way that made me exhausted, I regularly got tired of the zany characters and their surreal banter. The lesser stories are a bit shticky, but just when I felt I'd figured out her little tricks and the big ones, Beattie comes up with something new, a kind of gonzo compassion, an infinite darkness described in extremely mundane terms.

TW: ableism and some racist language from the characters' pov

[Gideonleek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ann is my hero. Some of these are second-rate.

[Simon A. Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one eeked out a 4-star review from me at the end. I liked the first 2 stories a lot and then I read about 3 or 4 in a row that I just couldn't seem to follow or understand (unnecessarily confusing and capricious). Her style - her plots - ricochet all over the place, and it's hard to remain focused, BUT the meat of what's there at the heart, the ambition of her ideas, is worth the work. The collection ends with a bunch of strong stories mostly about women who have lost their moorings and are drifting, looking for some sort of warm, sandy shore, but floating off course... And she seems particularly qualified to describe that territory.

[Valerie Kamen]

Has a story near the end that is very very funny . I read it at 4 am when I was having insomnia and almost woke up my boyfriend to show him a sentence

[Jeff Hoiland · Rating 5 out of 5]

i like this so much. have been feeling maybe 'unexcited' or something by reading recently. read some of these stories and feel very 'excited' about reading and other things. 'excited/unexcited' doesnt seem like quite the right word.

[Dev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny and absurd and full of truth. Stories about people and their routines being distorted by life.

Something I love about Beattie is the way her stories work to set up this false sense of logical procession before turning in ways I never expect. Mostly, I come away from her stories feeling seen and understood. Little glimpses into the unpredictability of all of our lives and individual searches for happiness and meaning.

Couple of just ok ones in here, but pretty incredible average for a debut collection.

Fave stories:
Vermont
The Parking Lot
Imagined Scenes

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good!

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highlights include “Fancy Flights,” “Wolf Dreams,” “Vermont,” “Victor Blue,” and “The Lifeguard.”

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 sometimes four, occasionally 2 and 5....split the difference I'd say 3.48

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked about a third of these short stories—the ones that were funny and had enjoyable characters. The more serious ones fell flat for me, but maybe I missed the larger significance

[Puneet Kaur · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Franco Romero · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a first edition copy of this book that I love. On the back of the jacket, there's a photo of Ann Beattie from the time the book was written. In the background is a quaint little house. I like to imagine her writing these stories there, on a typewriter and enjoying the crafting process because these stories are so well crafted.

I love the way some of them end without a resolution, as life goes on after the story ends. And I love the way they turn, unexpectedly down corridors I didn't expect. Some standout stories I really loved were "wolf dreams," "imagined scenes," "a platonic relationship" and "the parking lot."

I have to leave in a minute, I'm going on a hike today and I'm bringing a friend some donuts first because it's her birthday and we're in the middle of a pandemic so she at least deserves some donuts but one more thing, these stories aren't what I expected. A lot of reviews I read describe them as dark or disturbing and sure, I guess they are but there's plenty of moments of... I dunno, enlightenment is too heavy of a word to use but something soft, something moving, something more than darkness. I think this is my new favorite story collection.

Hey, another cool thing— it was released simultaneously with "Chilly Scenes of Winter" which is one of the best novels I've ever read. This early stuff from Ann Beattie is great. She's a great writer, kind of everything I imagine a writer to be. Reading her stories and novels lets that image of what a writer is hold up in my brain. I guess that's all.

Ok, actually, one more thing. These stories feel like stepping into the world that existed when I was born. I was born in the 90s and these stories take place when Nixon was president so definitely not the same decade. But they still feel that way. I could get into it more but it feels like that would burden the sentiment to death. So do with it what you will. And read an Ann Beattie book, it'll do you some good.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ann Beattie writes like a machine. I read that she can write for an 18-hour stretch. She can write a 30-page short story in a day. A novel in a week. Here is my favorite tidbit from the wonder who is Ann Beattie: as a writer from the seventies she found it difficult, the transition from writing on the typewriter to writing on the computer . In fact, at first she was so comfortable with typewriter keyboard, that she felt the need to connect it electronically to her computer.

But that was then. This is now. By the time she published her anthology Distortions, she learned that typing 60 words per minute on an IBM selectric wasn 19t fast enough to keep up with her thought process. The computer enables her to step up her writing to 80 words per minute. 1CSo, now I 19m keeping up with my thoughts, 1D she says. 1CBut they 19re the thoughts of a deranged, deeply unhappy person because of working on the computer for twenty years. 1D

No kidding. She writes quick like her battery is about to go. Right from the beginning of each story her hurried style allows her characters and setting create their own world. Immediately, she provides you intimate quirks of a character 19s disposition. Her settings are detailed and inviting. But just when you sense where things are going, things begin to slide. I think her meaning just may come from her speed. She 19s in and out of her sentence before you know it. That may be it. Because there is no time for much background or description, her characters have only a fragile grasp of themselves and/or their relationships. As Beattie types along, they are bound to unravel.

In 1CFour Stories about Lovers, 1D she probably writes with the most economy. Four 13 count them 13 lovers cheat on their spouses, and in doing so they break down into bits and pieces in the space of nine pages. There is no awful trysts in seedy hotel rooms. There is no emotional tirades. But there is plenty of awkward pauses and lonely images. Beattie is able to overlap layers of sad descriptions to deepen the despair for all.

My favorite story just may be 1CDownhill 1D. The sentences are clear and crisp, but the segments are fragmented. One scene after another we know a woman is losing both her man and her mind. 1CPlease don 19t leave me 1D she says to her dog in the first paragraph, but we are not sure if her words are not actually directed at her husband. He seems like a smart and compassionate man 13 he 19s a lawyer that can cook - but in Beattie 19s twisted world that is enough to suspect the worse.
Here I like this one because the woman is drawn to her dog for true companionship. The dog is a lover of small, cramped spaces, and likes to curl up in the space underneath a desk or under a bed. Beattie doesn 19t spend a lot of time delving in psychological analysis of this woman, but one day when the lights go off in the house, she crawls underneath the bed to be with her dog instead of to sit with her husband in the candlelight. When the lights come on, everyone knows it 19s over. We didn 19t need to hear her scream.

What can be better than that? In this case, Ann didn 19t need to get loud and crazy to show the breakdown of a young woman. She did it in six. And the silence is deafening.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny and poignant. That sums up this collection of short stories. Starting with Dwarf House, which just happens to be about Dwarfs. That definitely set a tone of humor weighted with sadness as a man acts as go-between between his mother and his dwarf brother. This sets a great tone for the rest of the book. Some stories have a compressed quality to them as well, such as Marshall's Dog. The story feels like more is going on than is actually on the page. I'd like to see how she handles a novel length story.

Ann Beattie is a New Yorker author as most of her stories were originally published in that fine magazine. I've always felt that most anything published in The New Yorker was great so I'm definitely recommending Distortions.

[Scott Adelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Profound, intense and often funny, yet submerged in a malaise that defined an era, Ann Beattie’s debut collection reads fresh in today’s fragmented and technologically fueled “here, but apart” world. The usual workaday aspects of characters’ lives are tinged with the strange, as simple worlds want to be. With the mundane functioning as petri dish, Beattie grows and exposes our odd attempts and failures at connection and meaning (divorce and adultery are themes here) in a middle-class world. Published when she was 29, Distortions (released the same year as her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter) immediately established the author as an unflinching whistleblower of that “Me” generation. http://ecosalon.com/short-stories/

[jeremiah]

"He has been feeling lately that something good is going to happen. There is a visual distortion that accompanies the feeling; he sees, imagines he sees, sunesets when there could not possibly be sunsets. He sees them at midnight, when the moon shines over the water, then burns sun-bright, and the birds sing. Even the seagulls are quiet at midnight, so he is not just imagining that one thing is another. He is just plain inventing. Why is he doing that?"

[Louis]

I love Beattie's stories. This is, I think, an early collection of hers.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this is my favorite work of Beattie...

[Ivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Fancy Flights" and "Downhill" are standouts.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

another 'must reread' sort of thing, especially since i don't think i absorbed quite as much from this as i could have, being, you know, fourteen at the time

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great collection. I liked the ones in the second half better than those in the first. Especially fine are “Wolf Dream” and “Wanda’s.” Very 1970s yet timeless and literary in quality.