ONLOOKERS

A half-dozen loosely interconnected stories chronicle life in Charlottesville in the grip of Covid.

Beattie taught for many years at the University of Virginia, and her familiarity with the town surrounding it shows in the references to the streets, shops, and local landmarks through which her anxious characters wander—masked or social distancing in some stories, as the collection moves from the early days of the lockdown through the turmoil over the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park. The decision to remove the statue and rename the park Market Street Park prompted the 2017 Unite the Right rally that ended with the death of a counterprotestor. Beattie’s protagonists are middle-class, liberal people appalled by the rally but ambivalent about “Lee’s visage [serving] as a magnet for all that was wrong with race relations, the past, the present, the future.” They are also preoccupied with personal issues. The woman living with her fiance’s father during lockdown (“Pegasus”) wonders how committed her absent lover is and worries about the father’s failing memory. He’s not the only one getting lost in familiar places; the confusion of several elderly characters serves as a metaphor for the larger bewilderment of people who once had a comfortable, secure existence and now feel adrift in an angry world. Of course, as memories unfold in “In the Great Southern Tradition,” “Alice Ott,” and “Monica, Headed Home,” we see that family relations, marriages, and friendships have always had tensions, but the furious outbursts in “Pegasus” and “Nearby” seem fueled by outside forces as well. Beattie allows her characters to speak for themselves as they grapple with old problems and the new normal. Their underlying malaise becomes explicit in the collection’s closing story, “The Bubble,” set in a nursing home housing several characters we have met previously. Charlottesville was once envied as existing in a bubble, thinks the facility’s head nurse, “but in Lee Park, that bubble had popped—as had her own protective bubble.”

Sharply focused work from a master of the short fiction form.