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Review by Ron Fletcher
"We all have our little fictions about people," observes Jean Warner, the protagonist and narrator of Ann Beattie's latest act of burrowing beneath the all's-well surface of American life. "We guess at their sex lives, become titillated by their friends' gossips about them, imagine what they look like doing something humbling . . ."
Jean's reluctant attempts to make sense of the comfortable, even life she has slipped into turn deliberate if not urgent soon after the arrival of a young actress who seems to lead a life of daring and drama. Meet Dara Falcon, a devilish dervish of deception who delights in waking up without warning the many sleepwalkers of Dell, New Hampshire.
Time spent in Dara's company comparing breezily perspectives on life's beguiling abstractions -- love, vocation, fulfillment, friendship -- compels Jean to unravel her own story and, eventually, attempt to craft a more honest narrative of self. And though the mystery that is Dara's life unfolds less rapidly than Jean's, the revelations are no less dramatic.
With pathos and passion Beattie examines the intersection of two lives, blurring in the process the distinction between remarkable and unremarkable. Throughout the novel, Beattie gives us reason to care about her characters.
In My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, Beattie examines deftly the fictions we create of and for ourselves as well as the fictions of past and place that both sustain and restrain us. She makes evident the extent to which we are made and remade by the company we keep and the worth and worry of turning our lives into stories.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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