[What] matters most in Ann Beattie's short stories and novels is her absolute ear and her masterly deadpan humor. When the two work together, the results are dazzling….

Ann Beattie's characters have an autonomous quality, as if they had stepped whole into her novel from somewhere else. She pores over them, then tells us how they work. (p. 148)

She does not spend much time on exteriors—on streets and highways and landscapes. But she never misses the people who populate them….

There are constant closeups—but of a strange kind. They are not of her figures' faces, which she never describes, but of their actions and their talk, which she makes almost visible. She cuts adroitly between the strands of her story, inching her figures through their experiences, some of them wrenching, some of them ordinary. (p. 150)

Not all of Ann Beattie's characters come into focus. She regarded...