Charles picks up a pile of mail and opens first a small blue envelope addressed to him in unfamiliar handwriting. It is a small blue booklet: “Why you didn’t get a Christmas card from us.” He begins reading: “Did you wonder, in all the holiday hassle, why you didn’t get a Christmas card from Carolyn and Bud? The answer can be quickly given: Carolyn and Bud were having problems. But there’s more to the story than that. After all, each could have sent a card. But each was too preoccupied during the season of brotherly love to do so. To wit: Bud told Carolyn a week before Christmas that he was going to divorce her for a blonde cutie. Carolyn cried, agreed. Bud ran off that night with the cutie, and Carolyn ran around in her sweat suit in the cold streets all night, crazy with jealousy. The next morning she found Bud back, but she threw him out. The cutie called: Please, Carolyn, take him back. I know he never loved me. Not on your life (jog, jog). Bud then got irate. Mad at both of them. Would Bud have thought of sending you a Christmas card? Non, mesdames. Non, messieurs. Would Carolyn? Non. But here’s a late wish from her, and a ‘Here’s hoping your New Year is Merry.’” On the back is written: “Sequel: Bug and C. are back together. How tasteless of C. to send this. Wait till Bud finds out. Will you be the one to tell? Love, C.” — p. 101Well, well, that was fun. This one’s quite simply an American classic. An American classic which hasn’t even gestated into a plain ol’ cult classic. However, I won’t be using any superlatives to describe this novel, because it doesn’t use any superlatives itself. Utterly prosaic. Droll.I can see how folks see this as a mimick of Catcher in the Rye. Charles gets caught up in cinematic delusions sometimes while he’s talking. And the slacker mood. But he doesn’t think he’s so cool. In fact, everyone is doused in listlessness. Makes it hard to do anything.So, to me, it becomes its own genre. It feels newly invented. Half of it is the present tense, matter-of-fact style. Which blends with this other half: the dreary, mundane, self-conscious life. You can tell Pete is pretending to be happy. He crumbles every time he gets on the phone.Also, the recurring motifs are brilliant. Susan looking at the snowman while she is spanked. Charles’ ambivalent feelings toward oranges. Olives are a big thing, too. Hanging a towel on the lamp. Whether Charles’ mom destroyed Pete’s pillow. Whether Bob Dylan’s new album is out yet. There’re simply too many things I liked about this book to enumerate.Most of all, I like how deceptive this book is. You just want things to happen. You want to see if Laura’s all she’s cracked up to be. Right now he is very tired. He rests his head against the foggy side window. He closes his eyes and imagines scenes that never took place: he and Laura went to the beach, and she got sunburned and he rubbed Solarcaine on her back; Laura cooked a ten-course Chinese dinner for him, gave him a surprise birthday party; she asked him for advice, and he gave her good advice that made her happy; they ate Fudgsicles in a park in Paris. Do they have Fudgsicles in Paris? They must. — p. 81And that’s the deception that turns this book into such an intense romantic novel. It’s a book about love where only one person is here. This guy is burning. But where is Laura? Is she anything at all? She’s just more delusions isn’t she? Ah, it’s perfect.
Gelide scene d'inverno �� un romanzo di quelli che ti fanno scivolare lentamente nell'inerzia; il torpore ti avvolge, l'atarassia ti penetra lentamente nel sangue e tu resti l��, con Charles, ad aspettare che la vita succeda.Ricordo di aver amato molto, negli anni '80, quella generazione di scrittori nordamericani, accomunati dalla definizione "minimalista".Non so se sia passata l'epoca, per me, per amarli, o se in fondo Ann Beattie, conosciuta pi�� per le sue short stories che per i romanzi, non sia del tutto parte di quel gruppo di scrittori che comprendeva, tra gli altri, Jay McInerney, Breat Easton Ellis, Susan Minot e David Leavitt; perch��, nonostante le premesse, non mi sono trovata a mio agio tra le sue parole ed il suo stile mi ha allontanata sin dall'inizio.Troppi dialoghi scarni, al limite della sceneggiatura teatrale, per un romanzo che si rivela per�� corposo, ma solo per il numero delle pagine, e che dovrebbe rappresentare il disagio della generazione dei quasi trentenni negli anni settanta, mentre finisce solo per essere la cronaca della quotidianit�� di Charles e di quelle cinque o sei persone che ruotano intorno a lui in cui il "troppo freddo" sembra avere la meglio in tutti (e "su tutti") i sensi.Peccato, perch�� invece la prefazione dell'autrice, in cui la Beattie afferma ���bench�� non mi senta di affermare che ���Charles, c���est moi���, Gelide scene d���inverno �� probabilmente quanto di pi�� vicino a un���autobiografia mi capiter�� di scrivere���, mi era piaciuta molto, brillante e acuta, cos�� come mi era piaciuto leggere che Laura, la donna di cui Charles �� innamorata, l'idealizzazione dell'amore e la sua dolce ossessione, era un omaggio letterario a Petrarca.Belle infatti, oltre l'omaggio al Petrarca che denota il grande amore della Beattie per la Letteratura e la Poesia, anche le citazioni, sparse qua e l��, di opere e canzoni in auge nel 1976, l'anno in cui il romanzo �� stato scritto.Peccato, quindi, per l'assenza di empatia tra me e un'epoca che ormai, forse, �� anche letterariamente tramontata; anche se, nonostante tutto, Charles �� uno di quei personaggi che, parafrasando Salinger, ti fa venire la voglia, pur non amandolo, di chiamare l'autore per sapere cosa fa o come se la passa e chiedergli tutto quello che ancora vorresti sapere di lui.
What do You think about Chilly Scenes Of Winter (1991)?
I probably shouldn't read books like this. I know plenty about disenchanted youth. I'm 24 and spend a lot of time in small bars and on lonely buses. And I liked the book, but I liked it in this weird self-indulgent pornographic way. Yes, every conversation rang true, every character was real. But a Raymond Carver or a Grace Paley can take that grit and veritas and turn it into pure transcendence. Beattie's bleak world sings some, but it doesn't transcend.And this is probably a terrible metric for measuring a book, but it didn't make me feel any less disaffected. OK, so the ending was a glimmer of light. But if anything that felt like a bit of a cop-out. My immediate thought was "oh, so it's OK for him, but how does this help me? Holy shit, I'm using novels as self-help books. And I recognize that that's self-indulgent, but this was a self-indulgent novel and I'm self-indulgently writing about it on a self-indulgent social network."And I apologize to anyone who's reading this, by the way, but that's what you get when you transform the solitary act of reading into a social act. Navel-gazing. Lots of navel-gazing.Would I read more Ann Beattie? Yeah. She's talented as hell. Maybe, if you are the sort of person who generally feels OK about things, you'll appreciate it more legitimately.
—Andrew
This is my favorite Ann Beattie book. I wish she wrote happier material. Ann Beattie is very deliberate in her words and descriptions. Often compared to Carver. She doesn't like the tag of being a minimalist. When Ann Beattie writes about a man she writes it like a man. Most of her stories are nearly the opposite of a love story. The line from Charles goes something like this, "Why Would you chose someone who loves you less over someone who loves you more?" You get submerged into charles character. He's not just as he seems at first as the happy going 20-something with a house he inherited, he has a decent job, a moocher college friend, a sister he's close to, a troubled mother, a stepfather he dispises, and a woman that he wants to be with.It touches on common ann beattie themes: the post 60's generation, close-knit friendships, co-dependency, and depression.It also touches on: abandonment issues, romance, obsession, aging parents, alcholism, A-Frame Housing, and social acceptance.
—Jim
There's a reason that there aren't many published female minimalists. If you'd like to learn why, read Beattie's "Chilly Scenes of Winter." Take everything about minimalism that works, how minimalism is just about the only literary style where action works in replacing, and even enhancing, the overall narrative and characterization, and now get rid of that. Feminize it. Have everybody talk and feel endlessly, but express it in the way of a noon-time soap-opera where also, instead of actors, they're replaced with cardboard cutouts with microphones wheedled where the mouths are.It doesn't work. Male and Female contest is certainly an old and unfashionable thing, but Hell if you've ever come across a more obvious divide between the sexes than right here with minimalism. This is the most tasteless, dull, overt, and depressingly obvious plea for reactionary sensitivity you'll come across. If you can get through even the first 20 pages, where the most bizarre, ostentatious, and transparent use of "Awakened" is not only applied but also overkilled, you're in for a treat of that same inappropriate word-usage and cardboard plot-progression for the rest of the entire novel.
—n
