Love Always

by Ann Beattie

Lucy Spenser, the Miss Lonely hearts of a chic counter-cultural magazine, finds her unflappable Vermont life completely upended by her teenaged soap-opera-star niece, Nicole, and her hangers-on.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, The United States Of America, American, Contemporary

247 pages, Hardcover

First published May 12, 1985

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

[Orsodimondo · Rating 3 out of 5]

L’AMORE QUALCHE VOLTA



Non mi pare sia mai stato tradotto in italiano.
E non è all’altezza dell’altro suo che ho letto, più celebre, Chilly Scenes of Winter – Gelide scene d’inverno.
Questa volta Ann Beattie cerca il sorriso con insistenza, e ancor più la risata, insegue il comico, si tiene leggera che in questo caso vuol dire superficiale.
Ma comunque si legge con piacere.

Gli hippie dell’altra volta nel frattempo sono diventati yuppie perché siamo arrivati agli arrembanti anni Ottanta, quelli durante i quali il debito pubblico dell’Italia saliva in maniera ben più che esponenziale, schizzava verso l’alto, e senza ritorno.



Dopo aver lasciato il mitico New Yorker, Hildon si trasferisce in una cittadina del Vermont dove diventa editor della rivista super chic per yuppie Country Daze.
Hildon è sposato con Maureen, ma ha una storia con Lucy che lavora alla rivista tenendo con lo pseudonimo di Cindi Coeur una rubrica di cuori solitari (e infranti) per la quale scrive lettere/domande e risposte.
Anche Lucy ha una sua storia, con Les, che però la trascura.
Sono quindici anni che la storia tra Lucy e Hildon va avanti, nonostante il matrimonio di lui: lei lo ha perfino seguito dalla Grande Mela alla provincia.
Però quando la moglie di Hildon chiede il divorzio, lui si rende conto che tutto sommato Lucy non è così importante.



Se non che arriva a trovare la zia, la nipote quattordicenne star di una soap opera, Nicole, accompagnata dal suo enorme cane e dalla sua agente: la madre di Nicole, e sorella di Lucy, l’ha spedita a trascorrere le vacanze dalla zia per poter sposare in pace, e in segreto, un insegnante di tennis che ha più o meno la metà dei suoi anni.

Hanno tutti superato i trent’anni, non hanno figli, guadagnano bene, e quando fanno una festa si divertono a riprendersi con la telecamera, più per narcisismo che per spirito di gruppo.
La soap opera non è solo quella nella quale recita l’adolescente Nicole: è un po’ la struttura del romanzo, nel quale i personaggi sono definiti più per ruolo e funzione che per psicologia e personalità, Hollywood è ben presente anche se siamo nel Vermont.
E quindi, al momento del dolore, Beattie strappa comunque un sorriso.



All over America, people were driving around hearing a song and remembering exactly where they were, who they loved, how they thought it would turn out. In traffic jams, women with babies and grocery bags were suddenly eighteen years old, in summer, on the beach, in the arms of somebody who hummed that song in their ear. They ironed to songs they had slow-danced to, shot through intersections on yellow lights the way they always had, keeping time with the Doors' drumbeat.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love Always did a lot of things well but it did a lot of things that annoyed me, too. And then sometimes it annoyed me because it did certain things too well, like perfectly capturing the zeitgeist of the 1980s. I bloody abhor the '80s, from its self-righteous excess to its synthesized music (which, blessedly, stayed far away from this novel) to its regrettable fashion choices to all of the other ways it was a reaction against the decade that preceded it, as is the nature of generational shifts, I suppose. But is it natural to feel such animosity toward the decade in which one was born but did not come of age? I've always felt that I was born way too late so I think the sense of having missed the things I most wanted to see feeds into the same grass-is-always-greener, contempt-breeding familiarity that I harbor toward my blandly homogenous adopted hometown: Perhaps being born in Wisconsin of the '80s but growing up in the Jersey of the '90s (while feeling like I should have been a transient child of the '60s) further warped the perspective of an individual who was probably already destined for some prodigious weirdness.

Anyway. I rescued this novel from the local library's sea of used books solely because it's set in Vermont. I had no idea that it was about a decade I have no desire to revisit (in hindsight, the cover's time-capulsey, stylized cover art should have been a clue), but I also didn't expect journalists and writers and magazine employees to be the vehicles moving the story along, which was a much more pleasant surprise. And I certainly wasn't familiar with Ann Beattie, who I now know to be a celebrated short-story writer. Having read one of her novels leads me to believe that I'd like her shorter works better, as her writing in novel form seemed a little too meandering and a little too bogged down by details, which I assume is an easy trap to fall into while looking for a way to beef up a text that would have been just fine at half the length.

This novel did feel more padded than fleshed-out; similarly, the myriad points of view offered by the voices comprising this yuppie Greek choir felt like several interconnected short stories with some of the connections being more intimate, more realized and more successfully rendered and resolved than others. The problem wasn't the dimensional, believable characters, nor was it the way that the overall weaving together of many stories felt like a bunch of short stories coalescing into one bigger picture. This deceptively carefree, quickly moving book even had a number of messages worth sending -- they just got lost in the frivolity of the times. Part of me feels that may have been a deliberate move on the writer's part, an attempt to convey that lives still shatter even in the most ebullient of eras, but it just didn't feel as well-executed as it could have been with just a little more restraint.

The characters themselves were, in fact, fully realized, with the least likable among them being at least sympathetic in their own self-pitying, desperately self-actualizing ways. An example: Maureen, the second-place-trophy wife of Hildon, one of the main characters and the founder of the magazine that ties so many characters together, is an odious little shrew serving only her own interests but the novel begins with her perspective (we see how she's planned a themed summer bash with meticulous dedication, an attentiveness that she feels her husband's employees do not deserve), which sets a tone that's immediately reversed as more characters are offered their chances at more flattering second impressions. Through her, we're offered a superficial introduction to many of the POV characters; she feels above them and we, too, feel a sense of sanctimonious superiority -- until the next chapter, when Maureen's self-declared arch nemesis (and, admittedly, nearly pitch-perfect foil), Lucy, Hildon's closest friend and presumed lover -- and the closest thing to a protagonist this novel has -- lets us take a peek into her head. Lucy is nursing a long-suffering sense of dejection over the lover who deserted her five years ago, more from a lack of closure than any real attachment to a guy we find out to be a pretty self-obsessed character in his own right, while trying to offer her teenage soap-opera star niece, Nicole, some of the normalcy, adult guidance and support she's not getting from her own mother, Lucy's sister Jane.

What ensues is a decidedly lighthearted frolic through some serious (and, eventually, unexpectedly tragic but enlightening) terrain, which, to me, sums up the '80s more flatteringly than I ever could. For all the issues I have with the decade of my origin, I get that it needed to be life-affirming through its desperate capriciousness, that the Cold War and rise of AIDS were only two of the ominous storm clouds hanging so heavily that the end of the world must have felt like a constant threat, a perpetual reminder that death is always just minutes away. One of the biggest successes of this book is that it emulates that need to celebrate every time a ray of light pokes through, however fleetingly, because there are no guarantees the sun will come out again. Every joyous moment existed between successfully dodging one bullet and hoping that luck will repeat itself when the next one comes, and Beattie is frightfully adept at conveying that frantic version of what it was like for anyone alive and kicking in the '80s to la la la la live for today.

The prevailing message I picked up from this is twofold: No one person is any one thing all the time. We are all as multifaceted as the story within this novel, with different voices jockeying for prominence and different circumstances necessitating any array of reactions. Knowing this, it is imperative to realize that we have no business assuming that we can ever truly know anyone because we are never privy to the day-to-day thoughts that propel a person down one path instead of the many others they could take to arrive at the end of the day, assuming they get there at all.

[Carol Storm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lucy the heroine is supposed to "shimmer" but she comes across as cold and basically lifeless. Her inability to love is never really explained, but we're meant to understand it's not her fault because . . . well just because. On the other hand, boyfriend Hildon is ultimately dismissed as a "cad" but Beattie never really gives him a chance, or explains why the stunning Lucy can't do any better. People who are meant to be tragic come across as grotesque, and people meant to be funny come across as not nearly as ridiculous as the author intends.

I really admired Anne Beattie 25 years ago, when I was just out of college. I read this book back then and thought it was amazing. Looking back though, it's actually pretty shallow. People say it's about the Eighties, but it's more like an autopsy on the Sixties. It captures everything that was ugliest about the generation -- the narcissism, self-indulgence, the veiled snobbery. But absolutely nothing of the energy, imagination, or excitement of change. Under the hippie chick veneer Anne Beattie is really a very sour personality who only sees the worst in people. And even that isn't right because she never captures the power of evil, but only the absence of goodness. At one point she invokes a quote by Yeats, "the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity" but she doesn't read beneath the quote to grasp how fraudulent and self-indulgent pessimism really is.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best way I can think to describe "Love Always" is as a hybrid of John Updike and Jane Austen, or maybe just Updike from a female perspective. The book is Updikian in its depiction of a group of affluent New England adults and their various romantic entanglements as well as in its pinpoint descriptions. There's a poetry in the way both Updike and Beattie describe people, objects, places, and behaviors with crystalline clarity, and the observations are the primary strength of "Love Always." But whereas there's also a poetry to the construction of Updike's sentences and the vocabulary he uses, Beattie in "Love Always" resorts to a series of short, clipped sentences, reminiscent of James Ellroy. The characters are somewhat less than gainfully employed, although a couple of them--Hildon and Lucy--put in time at a magazine Hildon founded called Country Daze, which appears to justify their existence in Vermont. Mostly the characters are transplants from more urban settings and they appear amused with small town life, although Beattie spends little time actually describing the small town or its lifelong residents. The characters all share a curious lack of inertia. Hildon has loved Lucy for years and the two are involved in a longtime affair but Hildon can't bring himself to leave his wife. Lucy meanwhile hangs around to write an advice column for the magazine. (She was left by her husband, who makes a strange and somewhat unconvincing reappearance in the book's final pages.) Lucy has a sister, Jane, who suffers a tragedy, and a niece, Nicole, who became for me the center of "Love Always." Nicole is a 14-year old soap opera actress who hopes to appear more worldly than she really is. She seemed the most human to me, her emotions and desires the most vibrant. Beattie's gifts as a writer are obvious. She achieves a casualness of tone that is enviable. However, I think this particular book suffers from a lack of focus and forward movement. Characters come and go. An artist, Edward, gets into an embarrassing entanglement with Nicole that becomes a legal issue but then vanishes from the story. We get lengthy vignettes of policemen, a young journalist, and an unhappy young writer and his nurse fiance, yet these people are all tangential to the novel's action. The end result is that it's impossible to connect with anyone. There's such a lightness of subject matter and tone through the first two thirds of "Love Always" that when Beattie inserts a more troubling incident into the book it seems just that--placed artificially by the author to lend weight to a story that, until then, had been floating lightly along. The event is discordant. And because there's no emotional connection to any of the characters, the event feels heavy and unnecessary. Maybe this was partly Beattie's point, to show the inability of people to connect, to depict their depressions and lack of inertia, but the side effect of this is that it creates a plodding and frustrating experience for the reader. One has the sense that when the author spends several pages describing two cops' daily habits and their McDonald's preferences, even she is unsure how to push the story forward.

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would like to be more driven to read fiction, I sure collect enough of it.

I'm not exactly bowled over by the first tweny pages, it seems kind of vacuous, but I'll keep with it.

I've finished and I still say reading this book was almost torture for me. Supposedly it was meant to be this way -full of vacuous charachters: a closeted bisexual wife abandoning magazine publisher, the abandoned wife advice columnist, her sister, her mother and assorted aquaintences I didn't care enough about to keep track of so most of the time couldn't figure out who they were. They were all hopeless except for a slightly more sympathetic 14 year old soap star who was spending time away from LA in Vermont with her aunt. (I could say I felt sympathetic toward their St. Bernard.) It's scatalogical style, charachters who pop up from nowhere, a delivery man, a rich man working in a nursery instead of living off his parents dole, etc., etc. did nothing for me. This is the first time I read a book about nothing. Mothers and daughters who don't get along. Inconsiderate daredevils - a whole bunch of nothing. It didn't get semi- interesting until an under age girl gets caught nude with a friend of the family taking photos to get his girlfriend jealous. The only bit I thought was funny was toward the end when feminists got vocal in a girly boutique.If anyone else has something to discuss about this book, please do. The hype on the book jacket didn't reflect what I encountered on the inside except for John Updike's remark: "The novel is sadder than satire, for it is about the emptiness not of these lives but of our lives."

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was on my shelf of older inherited books and promised a satirical comedy that would have me smiling but also thinking. Not sure it delivered on either. Surrounds mostly rich people living a life of sorts in Vermont, and how they interelate and deal with heartache and love. One or two of the characters were interesting but most of the others were painted with such heavy brushes in one way or another, it just didn't flow character wise. I was enjoying it though for the most part till the last quarter or so - a tragedy occurs that changes just about everything....but does so in a way that all of a sudden two almost absent people end up the focus of the story for way too long to use as the conclusion and the whole tone and tenor of the book shifts.

Could be I am just too distracted these days to have picked up on the nuances....but mostly just seemed like not that great a book.

[Ronnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

She felt sorry for all the people who didn't realize that their world could change in a second.

Fun book, especially if you're a fan of the '80s. Maybe because the title of the trendy magazine introduced in the first paragraph is Country Daze, but I began thinking fairly early on that this book's setting sort of does for rural Vermont in the mid-1980s what the movie Dazed and Confused did for Austin, Texas, in the mid-1970s, at least as far as capturing a time and place. It's chock-full of topical allusions that anyone of age in 1984 will recall, from Cabbage Patch Kids and Gremlins to manual typewriters, cassette players, and Brooke Shields at Princeton. The songs and singers alone sort of provide a soundtrack of the year's greatest hits--Boy George, Duran Duran, Men at Work, Michael Jackson, and, especially, Cyndi Lauper. Anyway, took me back. The plot definitely has its zany moments but ultimately is only so-so, but it's worth reading for the scenes with P.G. "Piggy" Proctor alone. I've scanned a few of the reviews here and keep seeing Updike evoked, but Beattie's style here reminded me more of McInerney of all people, possibly because he was pretty big for me in 1984, too.

First line:
"The music was appropriate, although Hildon thought this particular version of the song was a downer: Barbara Streisand, singing 'Happy Days.'"

[Arnie Kahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's probably only 2 stars, but for all its flaws I enjoyed it. The book is very 1980s. The characters are pretty stereotyped and many situations are not believable. Nonetheless, there are some very funny situations. I especially liked when the 14-year old soap opera star was interviewed by a man planning on writing a novel based on the soap opera. Approximate dialogue: “You didn’t scream or shout when Clair discovered [something, I don’t remember what]. Why not?” She replies, “It was Clair’s scene.” “But how did you feel about Clair at that time?” “I felt it was her scene and I didn’t want to surprise the cameraman, who might shoot me instead of Clair.” I paid $1 for this hardback at a thrift store and it’s autographed by the author, “Charlottesville: June 14, 1985. For Della, with best wishes! Ann Beattie”. What a bargain.

[LisaMarie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I remember reading this like at least 20 years ago and it caused me to scratch my head over why AB was granted SO MUCH literary cred. I know that back then chick lit wasn't the established genre it is now (or that her writing necessarily belongs in it) but it stuck me as a novel that would be more popular than critically acclaimed. I didn't much like the characters or the story that much but I also didn't trust my own critical judgement much back then so I assumed it was just me.
Well I just got The State We're In, a short story collection, from the library so I'll have a chance to reassess her writing.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

When found in a thrift store, Vintage Contemporaries should be bought on principle. This one was fun enough, sort of like watching a John Hughes film with all the references to 80's stuff and the drama and heavy feelings.

Some parts read really well, and were gripping. In the end though it sort of felt cobbled together, and like Beattie wanted to get 200 pages out of a 150 page novel. Some of the writing is jut boring, listing off in great detail what a character is doing in real time, and the twenty page chapter the explains Jane and Lucy's childhood in great detail in the last fifth of the novel just seemed shimmed in.

[rndgmoat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I very desperately wanted to love this novel about boomers in Vermont in the mid 80s--a book that skewers and attacks this group of former hippies--but just found this a hard read. There are passages of her brilliant writing and some sections that could be orphaned as some of her trademark short stories, but I just struggled really hard to connect to it, let alone keep track of all the many characters. What a bummer!

[Denise Schlachtaub · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was supposed to be funny, but I found it cynical and depressing. And at the end, after reading 247 pages, I wasn't at all sure of the point of the book. What did I just read? And why? I am not impressed.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel has not dated all that well. It is hard to care much about these bloodless characters. Beatty tosses in aphorisms and dry observations with a clinical detachment that left me cold. Comparisons with Waugh and Updike aren’t wrong per se — but this is thin gruel from another era...maybe when magazines seemed to matter more.

[Ricky Carrigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book quickly, and I’ll forget it quickly. A thoroughly mediocre book.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I liked: every chapter has its unexpected moments, the humor, Lucy and Nicole, Rita’s chapter (my favorite)

What I disliked: most of the secondary character chapters took me out of the story and were hard to follow as a whole. The pacing was affected by this and felt choppy.

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

“A master chronicler of our life and times." —Newsday

"A very funny book. . . . If Jane Austen had been crossed with Oscar Wilde and re-crossed with the early Evelyn Waugh, and the result plonked down among the semi-beautiful people of late 20th-century media-fringe America . . . the outcome might have been something like this." —Margaret Atwood

"Ferociously funny." —The Los Angeles Times

"Beattie's new novel, her third, is a gratifying surprise. Love Always will be welcomed by the large and loyal Beattie readership, but there is much that recommends it to the previously unconverted." —Harper's Bazaar

"Beattie's most comic—indeed her first satiric—work to date. . . . Much of the book's authenticity derives from the accretion of felt detail—a Beattie trademark. She captures 1984 Vermont with right-on references to Cyndi Lauper, Horchow catalogs, and 'pre-Cabbage Patch' Coleco." —The Christian Science Monitor

LIE. LIE. LIE.

Okay, so this is my first ever foray into Ann Beattie’s writing. But still, none of the blurbs matched my feeling when I read it. I didn’t laugh, i didn’t sympathise with the characters, i didn’t invest in any of them, and to be honest, for such a little book, it felt terribly long. I skimmed through most of the pages and I still couldn’t find anything of substance.

The novel is basically about nothing. There is no character development, it tried to tell several stories at once which achieved nothing, and in the end, none of the characters changed for the better! They just remained....

What a waste of time.

The only one that truly reflects this book is a remark from John Updike.

"The novel is sadder than satire, for it is about the emptiness not of these lives but of our lives."

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was uncertain what Beattie felt about these characters. Were they laughably pathetic and self-centered, or were they sadly deluded and lost? Ultimately I guess they were both, but also very human and sympathetic. The end where Lucy and Jane’s mother is remembering when her daughters were children is very heart-felt and tender. The men, of course, don’t come off too well in this story—they are mostly absent or drone-like, except for the wimpy writer guy, who is so pathetic he needs to give up his man card. The dialogue between Piggy and the doctor about Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, was brilliant. One sour note was when Beattie paired a farmer’s (wholly appropriate) note of indignation at being given cash rather than an apology for the death of a farm animal, with his misspellings, prudishness and threats; this made the initial indignation at the poor manners of Lucy seem laughable—but the indignation is not laughable—in fact, it is no laughing matter. The thinking that cash is sufficient and apologies or sincerity don’t count for squat is part of the pavement on the road to hell Americans were putting in one stone at a time back in the 70s and 80s.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

fun little book. was able to be 'straightforward and realist' [ie, didn't have any overt 'tricks'] while still keeping my attention, making me think / laugh consistently.

reminded me of lorie moore's novel 'who will run the frog hospital', in form more than theme.

for the most part, each chapter is from the viewpoint of a different character -- some characters get 2 or 3 chapters -- and i think this is why the book didn't ultimately do anything amazing for me. each character had an interesting story -- nicole's and lucy's the strongest for me -- but without giving each much time, and not having a very strong central bond which they surround (beyond all running in the same fairly expansive social circle), the book didn't end up feeling like it was 'about' much.

because of the hyper-fractured viewpoint, even the small moments of truth didn't feel like they contributed to some bigger, overall [something]

i would recommend this book to anyone interested in good writing about writers (which beattie does commendably and unusually well) and society in country life.

[Unbridled · Rating 2 out of 5]

First Beattie. Found her prose capable but less than stimulating and found many of her metaphoric efforts to be clumsy. She does have a storytelling talent. Her main characters are developed with skill and the story moves along at an easy clip. The book works when it combs through the textures of its main characters, but it also seems to throw away its gains for a compromised net effect. The humor was mild and tepid, consistently at play, and nothing to shake you out of the narrative. Overall I was reminded of reading 'contemporary' fiction in college and wondering if, as the old guard noted, it was true that this kind of referential writing would defeat itself with its looseness with the cultural/commercial spigot of its era. In this case, it would seem so – while there is nothing wrong with feeling a book is 'dated,' unless it has a singular nature, it grows moldy in the wasteland.

[Victoria Grusing · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love books. I read every word. Rarely do I not finish a book as it makes me feel like the book has won. This was a book that I had to force myself to read and actually skimmed through pages. All the characters were shallow. There was no lesson to be learned from the book. It made me feel that I had wasted the part of my life spent reading the book. It is amazing that it was allowed to be published when there are probably many better writers. Sorry to Ms. Beattie; but I will probably not try any other of your books.

[Scott E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally enjoy this kind of story, multiple interrelated characters with no real protagonist and many story lines. This is the first of Beattie's novels that I've read. I'm a big fan of her short stories, of which she is a master. Unfortunately, Love Always didn't last for me throughout. May give it another shot down the road. Rating: 3.4

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some great moments in this one, but I got left a little cold in when they were put together. I either missed the totality, or it didn't do much for me. The book sprawled a bit for being short and I just wondered where we were going, because it seemed like it should be somewhere. It was probably just me, but it was disappointing since I liked it so much on a moment level.

[Judith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Love Always by Ann Beattie is a very 1980's comic novel about lifestyles of the glitterati. New Yorkers seek peace and beauty in Vermont, and they do find the beauty, but growing up is not for everyone.

[Spike · Rating 1 out of 5]

Silly. Trite. 80's references drove me crazy. Annoyingly clever, but then 2/3 of the way goes off course into a serious story. Too many problems to expound on here. Don't waste your time reading this one.

[Cherie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A- Interesting story, though at times the characters got annoying

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this book and enjoyed it, though it was pretty melancholy. On the strength of this short little book, I picked up "My Life, Starring Dara Falcon." Be ye not so stupid. It was terrible.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked it up at the junk shop for a nickel, and I thought it was great. I think about it poignantly, as if I used to be its boyfriend.

[Miles Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

i like everything i've read by this author.

[Sandra · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not like

[Colleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

ok. very post 60's idealism - a little esoteric