“Beattie is an artist of silence, of the things we don’t say or can’t, the things that find expression anyway. She is an artist of the space between the words—of commas and dashes and periods; of section breaks, blank spaces that her characters seem to hit as if running into a wall.”
The Nation has an in-depth profile of Ann Beattie, which reviews her short stories and her later work, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life.