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ANOTHER YOU by Ann Beattie Kirkus Star

ANOTHER YOU

by Ann Beattie

Pub Date: Sept. 22nd, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-40078-8
Publisher: Knopf

Beattie's first novel since Picturing Will (1990): a chilling, intriguing, and altogether deft exposition of the domestic life of a middle-aged college professor who finds his world cracking beneath the strain of a deluge of unsought revelations. Marshall Lockard is going through something a good deal worse than your ordinary midlife crisis. An English professor at a rather woebegone little college in New England, he plods through his coursework, hardly enthusiastic but too cynical to be disillusioned. Meanwhile, his wife, Sonja, is involved in a loveless affair with her boss; his stepmother is dying; and one of his students has flabbergasted him by telling him dreadful things about a colleague. Haplessly, Marshall allows himself to be drawn into a very tangled web of rape, perversion, pathological lies, obsession, and mental illness, in which no point of view is reliable, and truth itself seems to exist only as a rather callous metaphor: "Literature was the study of Them by Us. It was undertaken by people smart enough to make a microscope of the page—or, more fashionably, to assert that things could shake out any number of ways because the page was a kaleidoscope." The investigation that Marshall takes on at his student's instigation succeeds in discovering unimagined secrets at just about every remove of his own life, and he takes to the road—comically enough, to Florida during spring break—in an attempt to settle the mysteries of his own childhood. Through all of this, Beattie manages to keep the metaphorical elements here grounded in a narrative at once compelling and disturbing, and she broadens the perspective immensely by juxtaposing the unhappy marriage of Marshall's father—as revealed in old love letters interleaved throughout the text—with the spectacle of Marshall and Sonja trying to make a success of their own married life. Vivid, rich, and utterly real: this time, Beattie has fitted her voice to her subject perfectly, and shaped her subject without flaw.