I have enjoyed Ann Beattie's books in the past, but this one just didn't work for me. I had to abandon it about one third of the way through.

I seriously never abandon a book without finishing it. But this book was so genuinely terrible I had to abandon it at about 40% because I just couldn't go on any more, even skimming it. Truly one of the worst, most pretentious, rambling, boring, awful things I've ever attempted to read.

This is one of those stories that I just didn't get. It started out with students at a ritzy private school and ended up with a former teacher/student reunion. After the first two chapters I sort of lost interest and skimmed. I usually like Ms. Beattie's books but this was a great disappointment. I received a copy of this ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I had high hopes for this novel because of Beattie's reputation, but I found it very disappointing in terms of plot and character development. There was nothing to draw me into the story or make me care about the characters or what was happening to them.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/book-review-a-wonderful-stroke-of-luck/

Ben–no last name–a student at a boarding school in New England, is just Trying To Figure It All Out, man, as one does during the throes of late adolescence. He has an engaging, enigmatic teacher who treats him like an adult, a cold, aloof father, an unknowable stepmother, and various classmates juggling tics and mottled pasts. Ben wanders, dazed, through the present’s half-comfortable wreckage, staring down a future that doesn’t promise anyone anything, perceiving reality in temporal curlicues of consciousness that are at first manageable and later almost impossible. In that sense, he’s a lot like most of us. He’s also, unfortunately for him, an Ann Beattie character trapped within A Wonderful Stroke Of Luck, the latest Ann Beattie novel.



Critics have slapped the label of ironist on Beattie, who first found fame in the early 1970s as an author of short stories. Early comparisons to the late Donald Barthelme were frequent and largely baseless. In actuality, her gift is to observe modern life from odd angles, and to ramble. In a 2011 Paris Review interview no longer available to non-subscribers, she confessed that much of her fiction is improvised, unplanned, completed at one sitting. Whether or not this is true, it has the ring of truth. For less-than-fastidious readers, it complicates the experience of being a Beattie fan. She’s written a lot of short stories that she’s compiled into a lot of short story collections, many of which you can find cheap in paperback at used bookstores. Buy one sometime. Read it, slowly biting, slowly chewing.

These stories generally drift and meander, but they meander languidly, cruising to meaningful resolutions only on occasion and usually concluding before a traditional climax is anywhere in sight. Short stories, I learned, should zoom in on impactful moments in characters’ lives. Beattie, who taught writing at colleges for years, happily disregards this writing-seminar tenant in her own work. The disaster doesn’t happen, the confrontation is postponed, the realization arrives years too late. The reader’s own inference can be a key to cracking these stories’ codes. Whenever I try to sell friends on Beattie, I bring up “Fancy Flights” from The New Yorker Stories, where an out-of-work father’s life is slowly falling apart–a failing marriage, a steady intake of substances, a splintering of self and perception. Nothing significant happens. Beattie acts as a non-judgmental narrator, though it dawns on us that some dads should never receive unsupervised visitation rights.

She has an ear for details and dead-ends and a penchant for piling them up in upper middle-class tableaus. A softly aching sadness pervades all of her writing. Reading her, you get the sense that your very existence, and its little pockets of joy, are doomed to impermanence, that the ideal soundtrack for every waking moment is probably a Carpenters best-of collection.

But it’s easier to meander for 10 or 20 pages than it is to meander at novel length. With the notable exception of 1997’s excellent My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, where a nearly blank protagonist battles with the titular, Gatsby-esque grifter for the reader’s attention, Beattie’s novels and novellas are tough hangs . They’re difficult to read once, let alone twice, yet you can’t dismiss them outright. Time jumps, light surrealism, and aching, aimless stretches compel, eventually drawing you back. She surprises you. Picturing Will, from 1989, includes around its midpoint a single chapter so retrospectively inevitable and excruciating that I remember it several times per year, shuddering. That book also featuress a number of piercing, acid-trip descriptions of dreams experienced by its characters.

Did people actually read this novel in normal book clubs? How terse and silent and unbearable must those meetings have been? How aghast must Beattie’s friends and colleagues been when they’d finished the galleys? And why aren’t we talking about A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, her first novel since 2002, which is ostensibly the focus of this book review?

Why? Because Ben is a typically hopeless Ann Beattie protagonist. The author clearly had more fun putting words in the mouth of Ben’s teacher, Mr. LaVerdere, than Donna Tartt had with Julian Morrow in The Secret History. Luck follows a similarly neurotic, discursive course. There is a pleasure in reading along as Ben grows up to an unsettled middle age, awash in details, missed connections, and blind spots. Beattie understands well what most adults should grasp after a while: daily life eagerly serves up a cornucopia of demands that allow for the ongoing elision of personal problems and their root causes.

If the Readers’ Guide questions hanging over Luck are “What kind of school was Bailey?” and “Why was Ben a student at Bailey?”, the novel answers them eventually. But those answers aren’t a reason to hang in there. Instead, wait for the 9/11 chapter, and for every ounce of nuance Beattie wrings from what previously registered as a rather staid boarding school setup. Also hang in there for Ben’s brief, hostile pre-Cornell habitation with a dour Bailey classmate and his asshole roommate. There’s a post-Cornell interlude where, after Ben catches an on-again-off-again girlfriend in a threesome during their vacation, a couple awkwardly fails to pick him up. And eventually you also get revelations of what was bubbling up between adults in the background of those now fading years back at Bailey.

Luck, like so much of Beattie’s other work, is pregnant with possibilities of where the narrative could lead. Characters enter the story, drop out, or maybe return transformed. The settings sidle ambivalently toward the author’s beloved Northeastern United States where, as anywhere and everywhere, Ben and every one of us are stranded and ultimately alone. Remember a discussion point from Mr. LaVerdere’s class, earlier on in Luck: “The subject seemed to be whether things that were enigmatic held more fascination than things transparent­–the question being: Might we be impressed by having to figure something out, while sometimes failing to appreciate equally important ideas merely because they seemed so accessible?”

Keep that in mind as the almost casually innocuous final line of this novel hits with the force of an anvil.

Beattie is one of our finest literary writers of short and long form. This novel surprised me simply because she normally writes about adults, unhappy old ones at that, yet here she has turned her focus to people my age--older millennials or people born in the mid-80s. Beattie does a great job describing the culture of the high school--in the style of Tartt's The Secret History, this is the kind of place I'd want to study and live in longer. Like Tartt's version of Bennington, this campus also feels untouched by time; it is somewhat contemporary (and touches on political and feminist themes), but it also feels oddly timeless, like it's occurring in the 70s. What I liked most about the novel was the whipcrack of Beattie's pen, still sharp after all these years. She has a knack for describing people in nasty, withering ways. This novel could have let me live more pleasantly in the setting instead of being so acerbic to everybody. Like Prep and A Separate Peace, there's an idyllic quality to the setting, and I wanted to like it there. It seems like the setting is the only thing the characters really like. But I enjoyed this novel and would read it again.

I’ve been a bit exasperated with the currently fashionable critical focus on “stakes” in books, because it seems to put the focus on plot at the expense of beautiful writing. And then I read A Wonderful Stroke of Luck by Ann Beattie, and all of a sudden, I get it. Because there really is some beautiful writing here, as when Beattie compares a character to “cigarette ash, her grudges tiny, glowing embers waiting to flare” or describes a handshake as “a firm grip with soft skin, like a pillow-top bed at an expensive hotel.” But there are no stakes here at all: the book’s campus novel opening—which introduces several students in a boarding school honors club moderated by the supposedly charismatic Pierre LaVerdere, a teacher who his students almost worship, even though nothing about Beattie’s characterization of him merits this—feels at odds with the rest of the book, which morphs into a coming-of-age story about one of these students, Ben, who is a self-described “withholding” person and therefore perhaps not the best choice for a protagonist.

It doesn’t help that many of the major emotional events in the book—deaths, a suicide, etc—happen offstage, with the reader finding out about them well after the fact from an offhand comment by one or another character and therefore having no real connection to them. Or that the characters themselves are generally unlikable and unmemorable and, even more problematically, cycle in and out of the book irregularly and somewhat distractingly. (Jasper, we hardly knew ye!) The one constant is Ben, but his meanderings through multiple dead end jobs and relationships are more frustrating than compelling. (And why does Ben suddenly hold a grudge against LaVerdere—not that I blame him!—after being so besotted with him in high school—and well before some plot points involving other characters later in the book give him some legitimate reasons to find him repugnant?) LaVerdere himself makes a late reappearance for no discernible reason and is no less a cipher at the book’s closing than he was at the start.

I’ve not read any Ann Beattie before and was really excited to start this book, as I’ve heard such good things about her, so I’m going to assume that A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is just an uncharacteristic miss. I do appreciate receiving an ARC from NetGalley and Viking in exchange for my honest review.

Ann Beattie’s novel is told from the perspective of a young man, beginning with his adolescence in a north-eastern boarding school for troubled kids, and continuing until he is in his mid-thirties, living in suburban upstate New York. While it feels risky for a woman in her 70’s to write from this perspective, it felt largely authentic and I was interested in Ben, his friendships, his relationships with women, and his career.

I have to say that I’m baffled by the ending. I turned back the pages of the ebook several times, trying to determine if something had been inadvertently deleted.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Beattie fans know that she's wonderful with language. That's true for this novel as well. Regrettably, the plot didn't grab me. It felt stale in a way that surprised me. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. While I did not enjoy this, I'm sure others will.

I've been a Beattie fan for most of her career, but this one didn't appeal to me much. I had trouble identifying an actual plot and didn't connect much with characters.
May be more appealing to a younger audience.
I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was not thrilled with this novel by Ann Beattie. Her character development is usually what I love about her books, but I felt A Wonderful Stroke of Luck was lacking. I felt no affinity to any of the characters. Regardless, I know our patrons will want to read this book. It will probably appeal more to a younger audience. I will be glad to point it out and recommend it.