The first weekend at their summer home in Vermont, Joe, Tom and Byron went out for pizza.
The opening line of this story is representative of Beattie’s writing style as whole throughout this collection. Few if any reviews of her short stories have ever drawn a comparison with William Faulkner when it comes to style and mechanics. These are stories for those readers who do not like their sentences to become long and winding roads leading to the dazzling display of literary virtuosity. These are stories for readers who like writers to get to the point by stringing together an accumulation of details as simply and declaratively as possible within a more restricted realm of virtuosity.
“My feeling is that for whatever reason you duck your head and slam on the brakes, it’s mad to act like that in the Holland Tunnel. Those Jersey punks have been carrying water pistons for years.”
This is another opening line that is equally representative of a certain stylistic choice which recurs over and over again in the stories comprising this collection. In this particular case, the story kicks off in the middle of a conversation without any context provided in the way of descriptive prose. The first half of the first page is almost entirely conversation between Liz and Matt. This structure will not continue on through the narrative. Indeed, for most of the next nine pages, dialogue is rare and the story is conveyed through description. Only on the last page does dialogue again become the predominant form for transmission of information. The effect of introducing the reader to the characters by tossing them into the middle of a conversation which has already been well underway is just one of the ways in which the author displays a distinct preference for beginning her tales in the middle rather than at the beginning.
No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow—an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was.
“Snow” is another example of Beattie engaging the use of a first-person narrator. This is yet another similarity tying the stories together. And, like the others, “Snow” is not just a short story, but a very short story. In fact, it is a very, very short story: a mere three pages long. Most of the stories are about twice that length, but regardless of whether the length is three, six or ten pages, it is the ending of this story which is most representative. Beattie’s tales do not result in action-packed climaxes; she is simply not that kind of writer. On the other hand, she is the kind of writer of whom it might be expected that the story concludes on a note of transformation or enlightenment. Or, to be more precise, a moment of epiphany. No such moment of sudden illumination and insight can be detected in the ending to “Snow” and this pretty much applies broadly across the board. Instead, the stories end quietly on a note of understatement which is perhaps most accurately termed an exclamation point on the atmosphere or tone the story has to that moment been working within.
