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Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
Pat Nixon remains one of the most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Ann Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon's point of view. Beattie packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom baby boomers came of age.
Zusammenfassung
Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon's wife: "interchangeable with a Martian," she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon's point of view. Beattie packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom baby boomers came of age. Mrs. Nixon is a startlingly compelling and revelatory work.
Rezensionen (5)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Reviewed by Jessamine Chan. Celebrated short story writer Beattie (The New Yorker Stories) juxtaposes a master class on writing fiction with fiction itself. Billed as a meditation on one of the most elusive first ladies in recent history, the book opens with an innocuous list of nicknames for Pat Nixon, nee Thelma Ryan. How did she become President Richard Nixon's beloved "Buddy"? Or rather, in what proves to be the book's central question: why did she choose to marry "RN," the man whose "self-created tragedy" determined her fate? To answer this question, while acknowledging its inherent difficulty, Beattie mixes reflections on Pat Nixon's life, works of literature, and the creative process with short passages written from the perspectives of Mrs. Nixon, President Nixon, and even their son-in-law David Eisenhower, calling upon such texts as Jonathan Schell's The Time of Illusion to provide a factual foundation. Though she professes not to identify with Pat Nixon, Beattie admits: "I sensed that she was something my mother might have become, if not for fate. If you married a man and that man became something else, it could trap a woman.... A lot of people liked her, but something seemed wrong because she was married to him." In the book's most inspired chapters, Beattie pairs the Nixons' love story with those from great works of literature, including Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog" and Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace." And in an experiment that few (besides Beattie) would dream up, she even funnels her subject's voice through a series of Oulipo language games. Beattie knowingly anticipates reader skepticism, even writing some imaginary letters: "'You obviously do not know the real Mrs. Nixon. I notice that your thoughts on her were not printed in The New Yorker.'" She thoughtfully analyzes works by a diverse range of authors-Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, and William Trevor, to name just a few-and cheerfully pulls back the curtain on the unglamorous, compulsive nature of a writer's life. Fellow practitioners will especially enjoy her list of truths about writers: finding a copy of Richard Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is akin to discovering a baby on the front step-they can't abandon it no matter how many copies they already own; writers wear only mismatched, shamefully tattered clothing while they work. Despite Beattie's accessible, engaging tone, the book's biggest challenge is negotiating its shifts to fiction, since it is, after all, difficult for fiction to seem effortless when so many nonfiction chapters are about effort. After getting lost in the erudite charm of Beattie's own voice, sections written in Pat Nixon's voice feel almost quaint, arch without accompanying vulnerability, and containing little of the human mess and propensity for error that makes Beattie's stories feel alive. Still, it is obvious how much fun Beattie is having with this project-an ideal book for readers who want to understand process as much as product. (Nov.) Jessamine Chan is a Reviews editor at Publishers Weekly. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist-Rezension
*Starred Review* After The New Yorker Stories (2010) showcased her masterful, award-winning fiction, this finger-on-society's-pulse storyteller presents a uniquely intimate and illuminating hybrid of biography, literary analysis, memoir, and fiction. The book's subject is as surprising as its form. Beattie confesses that the quietly loyal and enigmatic former first lady Pat Nixon was a person I would have done anything to avoid. Yet she became profoundly intrigued and inspired by the Nevada farmer's daughter, who was orphaned young and worked hard to excel. How to portray this intelligent and independent woman, who was leery of the man she married and who soon wearied of public life? Beattie, scintillating and intrepid, delineates the artistic challenges involved in fictionalizing historical figures; performs electrifying close readings of Chekhov, Carver, and Tennessee Williams; and shares her deep delight in and gratitude for the odd life of a writer. All this fuels her creative chronicling and improvisation on Mrs. Nixon's seemingly staid yet high-wire life. While Beattie offers hilarious if trenchant takes on surreal moments in the disastrous Nixon administration, her empathy and admiration grow for dignified, reticent, practical, and persevering Mrs. Nixon. Beattie has created a resplendent paean to the pleasures of the literary imagination, and a riveting and mischievous, revealing and revitalizing portrait of an overlooked woman of historic resonance. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Beattie, hailed as a national treasure, is always a reader magnet, but this book's fascinating subject and fresh approach will ignite exceptionally lively attention.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books-Rezension
IT was the vice presidency that John Nance Garner invidiously compared to a bucket of warm spit, but the role of first lady of the United States has got to be just as bad. Only Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton notched autonomous accomplishments of historical weight, though Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison also hover in the national pantheon. Sad to say, most presidential spouses - not necessarily through any fault of their own - achieve little of lasting note. Constrained by high-stakes politics and society's sexism, they can at best champion a safe, domestic cause like literacy or fitness before dissolving into the history books as yet another presidential helpmate. If first ladies present a challenge to biographers, Pat Nixon is an especially unpromising subject. As Ann Beattie notes in "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life,1' Richard Nixon's wife of 53 years wrote no memoir, rare among recent first ladies. Not only did Pat Nixon abjure any aspiration to realize independent public attainments, but her values and upbringing trained her always to be courteous, proper, self-effacing and traditional in her demeanor. The opacity of "Plastic Pat" signaled both a rejection of the feminist ideas then sweeping America and, perhaps, the lack of any tantalizing spark within. Beattie calls her "a person I would have done anything to avoid - to the extent she was even part of my consciousness." Yet, Beattie insists, Pat Nixon interests her as a writer. The woman's very inscrutability, her otherness, makes her an inviting subject for the novelist to imagine. (Beattie also implies that Pat Nixon reminds her of her own mother.) And given the psychological acuity Beattie has long brought to her fiction, she might seem just the person to pull this off. Beattie writes of her admiration for "Don DeLillo, entering the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald's mother in 'Libra,' and Donald Barthelme's extraordinary story, 'Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning.'" And yet, for all her psychological prowling, she never quite makes Pat Nixon come alive the way she so deftly does with her fictional creations. In this rumination - not quite a biography, not quite a novel - Mrs. Nixon emerges, much like the standard popular image, as lonely, inward-looking and long-suffering. Experimenting with form, Beattie renders different chapters of the book in starkly different styles and voices - some in her subject's, some in Richard Nixon's, some in a more omniscient tone. In storytelling, Beattie writes, "we are not supposed to digress," but digress she does, constantly and knowingly. "Such drift seems endemic to writing about the quietly loyal and enigmatic Mrs. Nixon," she acknowledges. IN one of many provocative excursions into the nature of writing, Beattie proposes this idea: "Fiction is all about covert winks, deliberate stumbles, things happening off the page, allusions that function as scaffolding. Metafiction announces, and inherently questions, itself." Is it metafiction - something closer to Donald Barthelme's postmodern jags than the minimalist gems for which she's best known - that Beattie is after in this book? I'm not sure, but "Mrs. Nixon" is metasomething. In fact, it's best when Beattie sets forth her thoughts about other writers, as she does often: Raymond Carver, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Delmore Schwartz, Tennessee Williams, Gish Jen. Like a backstage tour, these riffs on writing take us into the artistic process of someone whose published work seems intricately and carefully crafted. Their relation to Pat Nixon, however, isn't always easy to discern. This book could have been a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," Tom Stoppard's play from the viewpoint of two extras in "Hamlet," or a "Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys's "Jane Eyre" prequel (two books Beattie mentions). But Pat Nixon is ultimately too weak a character to consistently divert our focus from her endlessly fascinating husband. The gravitational pull of his sun is too strong; she floats in the outer reaches of Nixon administration lore like a minor satellite. Thus Beattie winds up falling into the trap of conjuring not only Pat Nixon's interior life but that of her husband - and inserting Richard Nixon into fiction usually yields cringe-inducing results, as works by Gore Vidal and Philip K. Dick, among many others, can attest. (Two admirable exceptions: Mark Maxwell's delightful "Nixoncarver," a story of our 37th president as though written by the short-story master; and Philip Roth's parody "Our Gang.") "What you will read," Beattie tells us, "is based on research." But the books she cites most often - musty relics from the 1960s and '70s - lack the authority of history, and their regular appearances serve mainly as stand-ins for the easy assumptions of that time. (Who relies anymore on Jonathan Schell's arch, dated New Yorker dispatches?) I have never believed that novels should emulate history - with diligent investigation undertaken to show a superficial verisimilitude - but in the challenge of capturing the elusive Pat Nixon, insight might well have been gleaned not only from the large literature on Nixon published in the last three decades but also from the now-abundant scholarship on women, politics and the 1970s. Beattie does offer some perceptive, well-turned observations - comparing, for example, Nixon's efforts to drum up supportive letters for his policies to "flashing an 'applause' sign for the studio audience." But on the whole, given its inherently political topic, "Mrs. Nixon" shows surprisingly little interest in politics. Writing great fiction is hard. Historians and other academics occasionally leverage their stature into contracts for a novel, but most of them fail artistically. We're frequently intrigued, however, by a novelist holding forth on politics, as if he or she has access to some special insight unavailable to journalists, historians and political scientists. But we should remember, particularly in our age of easy opinion, of pundit TV and content farms and Web-wide blogorrhea, that writing about history and politics - and writing about it well -is hard too. The woman's very inscrutability, her otherness, makes her an inviting subject for the novelist to imagine. David Greenberg, an associate professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, is the author of, among other works, "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image."
Kirkus-Rezension
The New Yorker Stories, 2010, etc.), Beattie circles around an enigmatic First Lady in an odd text that takes a lit-crit approach to a biographical subject. The subject is Pat Nixon, the model political wife who stood silently by her husband during such humiliating episodes as Richard Nixon's "Checkers speech" and his resignation in disgrace after the Watergate scandal. Beattie conveys considerable factual information: Mrs. Nixon's birth name was Thelma; both parents were dead by the time she was 18; she acted in amateur theater and briefly considered a career in movies; she hesitated a long time before marrying Nixon; she didn't much like his being in politics; she advised him to destroy the tapes of his conversations about Watergate. The author's real interest, however, is trying to get inside the head of a woman who never wrote a memoir and kept her public comments as innocuous as possible. To this end, Beattie examines specific aspects of Pat Nixon's life and character through the lens of various short stories. Raymond Carver's deadpan tone in "Are These Actual Miles?" spurs her to see more than banality in 12-year-old Thelma's conventional remark about her mother's corpse looking beautiful. Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog" shapes her view of Pat and Dick's courtship. A few bravura passages validate this approach, and a marvelous chapter entitled "The Writer's Feet Beneath the Curtain" suggests that Beattie, a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Virginia, must be a terrific teacher. She fails to convince, however, that fictional techniques are more than tangentially revealing of Pat Nixon's inner life, and chapters purporting to be narrated by the First Lady are similarly unpersuasive. There's a whiff of condescension about the whole enterprise, and when a chapter describing "My Meeting with Mrs. Nixon" [p134] is immediately followed by one titled "I Didn't Meet Her," readers may well feel that Pat isn't the only one being patronized here. Self-indulgent though fitfully intriguing.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal-Rezension
The penetrating and sometimes caustic Beattie, who defined a generation with her O. Henry- and PEN/Malamud Award-winning works, reimagines someone we've hardly thought about at all: Pat Nixon, wife of the hugely ambitious and hugely fallible President. Here's a book that, like Sebald's A Place in the Country (see p. 57), examines the imagination of the writer as much as the subject itself. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.