Ann Beattie, Mrs. Nixon
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Hotwires historical biography with fiction
Ann Beattie hotwires historical biography with fiction (and a spark of literary theory) for a Warholian portrait of first lady Pat Nixon: with layers of pop gloss and some creative license. Perhaps best known as a writer of short stories, Beattie has long documented Boomers with sharp, era-appropriate detail. (As Jay McInerney wrote: “Just as an earlier generation used to read Hemingway in part to learn what to drink and where to travel, we read Beattie in part to learn what to listen to and read and what to wear.”) So Mrs. Nixon is a logical choice of subject — the politician’s wife existed largely in the background of her D.C. youth — but, she explains in one of many personal and professorial asides, the decision was largely out of writerly curiosity. “Writing fiction about a real person tests my unexamined assumptions, letting me see if, in the character I create, my preconceptions are reflected, reversed, or obscured.”
With extensive research to back up her imagination, Beattie aims to “animate a character against a stage set believable enough to transcend its artifice.” On stages both theatrical (an appearance in the 1935 film Becky Sharp, based on Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair), and political, Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan Nixon (who died in 1993 at age 81) is a complex figure: a romantic, a hard worker, a stoic and devoted wife. Beattie, who narrates, clearly delights in old letters and magazine profiles as she reconstructs the romantic heart of a famous Washington marriage.
