The Chain Smoker In The Closet

The Mrs. Nixon You Don't Know

Ann Beattie's playful and polymorphous new book, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, is unlike anything she has written. Beattie is noted for the spare, unpredictable stories that started appearing in The New Yorker in the 1970s, when Watergate was in the air and there were cultural references to the cynical Nixon White House, including digs at Nixon in her own stories. She has published seven novels and nine story collections, including last year's The New Yorker Stories, which gathered four dozen stories from 1974 to 2006 in a literary scrapbook filled with pop-culture references ("Kyle Brown lived on hydroponic tomatoes, Shake 'n Bake chicken, and Pepperidge Farm rolls").

Mrs. Nixon revolves around a marginalized character long vanished from the stage, a first lady best known for blandly "behaving well" under horrendous circumstances (scandal, impeachment, leaving the White House in disgrace).

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