Ann Beattie

From the Why the Hell Isn’t Anyone Talking About This? department:

The June 19th issue of New York Magazine — the “Summer Guide” issue — included five short essays from five name writers (such as Aimee Bender and Gary Shteyngart) that were presented as nonfiction and ran under the headline, “Hot Messes: Five memories of a season misspent.” The piece basically consists of four mildly amusing pieces about misspent summers … and then there’s the one from Ann Beattie.

In a piece called “Joyride, With Bullhorn,” which starts off by saying of what she did during the summer in question that “It was fate,” Beattie describes how when she was 17, using a bullhorn stolen from a police car, she and a girlfriend would drive around town, pull up next to other cars, stick the bullhorn into their window and scream through it at the unsuspecting drivers, then speed away: “I remember slipping down in my seat, window lowered, my friend wordlessly attuned to everything, extinguishing the headlights, the bullhorn raised, protruding into the other driver’s ear, just knowing we’d get away with it. Which we did.”

Thus setting the scene, the writer that drove the great American minimalist movement of the seventies and eighties continues, in her fashion, by ending the article with something she got away with:

One night I screamed, “Pull over!”—recoiling, myself, the sound was so loud. And the car I’d aimed the horn at—it just went crazily out of control and smashed into a tree. It all happened in nanoseconds.

My heart quickens thinking of it.

Mine too. It’s an astonishing scene, and an even more astonishing admission. The obvious question, of course, is what did she get away with? One assumes not manslaughter, although causing a car to go “crazily out of control” and crash into a tree isn’t exactly comforting language in regards to that possibility, nor to the likelihood that passengers in that pre-airbag car were at the very least seriously injured.  Equally astonishing is that rather than tell us that dreadful reality, and what she thinks now, years later, about her lack of compassion and why she left a crime scene, she resorts to the most unfortunate type of minimalism — the kind that withholds information for cheap effect.

And then there’s the question of why the editors and journalists at New York Magazine apparently felt no compulsion to query Beattie on her report or further investigate what really happened as a result of her actions. Because at least one thing is clear: It wasn’t fate.