A Summer of Discontent

By R.Z. Sheppard

FALLING IN PLACE by Ann Beattie; Random House; 342 pages; $10.95

Skylab is falling; Blondie's throbbing Heart of Glass dissipates in the air waves; the gas pumps are sucking dry. It is the summer of 1979, the twilight of an entropic decade and the desultory time frame of Ann Beattie's second novel. Her first, Chilly Scenes of Winter, was filmed last year as Head over Heels, and her short stories have been collected in two books, Distortions (1976) and Secrets and Surprises (1979). Beattie, 32, writes with quiet wit and subdued sympathy about the states of mind that have become the cliches of middle-class malaise. One need not elaborate, except to say that after 30 years of postwar fiction, American writers appear to have reversed Tolstoy's happy-family dictum. It now appears that all unhappy families are alike.

The Knapps of Falling in Place are typical. Marriage for Louise and John survives by inertia. A divorce requires action and that is precisely what they are unwilling to take, or incapable of taking. Instead they have a vague arrangement: John comes home to Connecticut on weekends for picnics and such with Louise and their children, Mary, 15, and John Joel, 10. During the week Knapp commutes from his Manhattan office to his mother's house in suburban Westchester County. He usually arrives late because he spends the evenings with his mistress Nina in the city. At home, his children grow aimless and petulant. Visions of Peter Frampton fill Mary's head and threaten her chances of passing a summer-school English course. Obese John Joel's idea of a perfect day is: "Have Mary out of the house. Have the air conditioner on and read comics. No big deal."

In fact, neither the Knapps nor the other characters who mill through the pages of the novel have an idea of what a big deal is.

What affects them is not the summer heat, but the cultural humidity, which Ann Beattie maintains just this side of a dramatic downpour. The single break in her purposefully oppressive atmosphere occurs when John Joel plinks his sister in the side with a gun he did not know was loaded. It is the sort of casual, thoughtless act usually associated with children. But then most of Beattie's grownups, particularly her men, behave in childish ways.

Knapp, for example, tries to penetrate his wife's loneliness with an insensitive sexual prank that involves a duck's foot taken from a Chinese restaurant. Louise doesn't see the humor: "Is this what you and the New York girls are into?" Hardly, as Nina can verify. She suggests that Knapp uses her apartment as a refuge, and he comes to see her point: "She was right that he hid in her apartment. He was hiding from himself, or at best playing peekaboo, pretending it was a safe game and that there were only little surprises: the infant seeing that it's still a friend behind the fingers."

Between the Knapps and their children is a middle generation of bemused souls. Cynthia Forrest teaches summer school and has the unenviable task of getting Mary and other Peter Frampton fans to pay a little attention to Jane Austen. Cynthia's boyfriend, Peter Spangle, is in Spain dribbling away the last of a small inheritance. He left before reversing the fan in the kitchen window; the hot air blows in.

Falling in Place is full of such little disturbances: dirty windshields, over-plucked eyebrows, a candlestick too high to hold a candle and still fit in a bookcase, a cut finger, a blister on a toe. Things, events and even characters are as weightless and isolated as those poker-faced plaster figures by George Segal that John Joel and a friend gape at in Manhattan's Whitney Museum. A party at Nina's sums it up pretty well: "The game now was pin the tail on the donkey, but instead of a tail there was her green bathtowel, and instead of a donkey there was a yelping, stoned person who thought he was playing another game, insisted on it, and was getting very annoyed at being pursued as a donkey. At least, that's what it seemed like. No one was communicating terribly well."

Beattie, at least, gets her point across by casually shifting scenes, deliberately slowing the pace with seemingly gratuitous descriptions of daily tasks and the sort of lines that sometimes pass for sophisticated humor in New Yorker cartoons ("Cynthia, meet Peter Spangle--a man who knows how to treat a girl who makes three-twenty an hour").

There is a languid fascination in the way Beattie evokes this circle of emotional drifters. She exhibits a casual grace and some knowing moves, but not much more. Reading Falling in Place is not unlike watching someone stir the summer air with a Frisbee.

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