From four time O. Henry Award-winning author Ann Beattie, a
compellingly tender, acute, and revelatory collection of stories.
Ann Beattie's Follies is a superb novella and collection of stories
about adult children, aging parents, and the chance encounters that
irrevocably alter lives. Beattie is a masterful observer of domestic
relations and the idiosyncratic logic that governs human lives.
In Follies, her most resonant collection, she looks at baby boomers in
their maturity, sorting out their own lives and struggling with parents
who are eccentric, unpredictable, and increasingly dependent. In
"Fléchette Follies," a man rear-ends a woman at a stoplight, and the
ripple effect of that encounter is vast and catastrophic. In "Apology
for a Journey Not Taken," a woman's road trip is perpetually postponed
by the UPS deliveryman who wants to watch TV in her house, by the girl
next door who has lost her dog, and by the death of her friend in a
freak accident. Impatient in his old age, the protagonist of "That Last
Odd Day in L.A." can hardly manage a pleasant word to his own daughter,
but he finds a chance for redemption on the last day of a vacation he
spends with his niece and nephew.
Ann Beattie is at the top of her form in this superb collection, writing
with the vividness, compassion, and sometimes morbid wit that have made
her one of the most influential writers of her generation.
