MORE TO SAY

A collection that shows Beattie “moonlighting as a nonfiction writer.”

In this entry in the publisher’s Nonpareil series, acclaimed novelist and short story writer Beattie offers a series of essays on literature, art, and photography. The author is an accomplished essayist with an elegant, precise writing style. Peter Taylor’s short stories “deepen, brushstroke by brushstroke, by gradual layering,” their surfaces “no more to be trusted than the first ice on a lake.” An Alice Munro story is “always a tactile experience,” but “beware the convenient cliché.” Andre Dubus is “one of the best American short story writers ever.” Beattie is also amazed by the novels of her friend David Markson, many of which are “spoken of as representing a leap forward for American literature.” In a lecture scrutinizing John Updike’s use of language, she writes, “I am in awe of what he can conjure up with a sentence or, at other times, a word.” Beattie also writes about her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, whose art is “painted so as to keep the eye in motion.” He’s active as he paints, while Beattie is silent and stoic while at work “to better encourage or trick the character into coming out of hiding.” In “The Distillation of Lavender,” the author lovingly profiles the photographer Jayne Hinds Bidaut’s tintypes—“Reverent. Fragile,” like “lyrical poems.” Beattie’s charming portrait of Grant Wood’s Iowa and his American Gothic is spot-on. She ponders tone in a piece on Georgia Sheron’s “extraordinary” photographs and is mesmerized by Trisha Orr’s unique paintings of antique pitchers and jars “spilling forth intricate flowers spun together as if contained within a painterly spiderweb.” Joel Meyerowitz’s “glorious” photographs of Cape Cod “open us to the exhilaration of feeling something that we thought we knew, only to have it reappear as something infinitely more complex and more beautiful.”

Shimmering prose and critical acumen on display in an eclectic collection.