FALCON-CROSSED

IN ANN BEATTIE'S NOVEL, A WOMAN HITS TOWN LIKE A WHIRLWIND, AND NOTHING IS EVER THE SAME

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, April 27, 1997

Page: D18

Section: Books

This tendency casts a certain poignance over all her fiction, from the arresting melancholy of such early work as ``Falling in Place'' to the more recent depths of the stories in ``What Was Mine'' or her last novel, ``Another You.'' Beattie's writing often feels emotionally intuitive, as though a range of feelings gave birth to her characters, rather than the other way around. You can sense these impulses at work in ``My Life, Starring Dara Falcon,'' which is told as a first-person retrospective by a woman named Jean Warner. But gone are the familiar signifiers of Vietnam or rock 'n' roll, the intimate apparel of Beattie's milieu that has made her voice distinctive and sometimes subject to parody. Instead, one gets the odd impression that Beattie discarded such markers intentionally, concentrating on the story of a woman trapped in an insular existence in small-town New Hampshire and trying to break free. The inner landscapes here are quite different from most of Beattie's fiction. And while this must have been a challenge to imagine, the result has strains of that ambition but not much payoff. In attempting to penetrate the life of a young woman without much sophistication or irony to speak of, Beattie has unwittingly made her story as flat-footed as the very stereotypes she may have wanted to transcend.

The problem is not with poor Jean Warner, to whom one's heart goes out, but with Beattie's having lowered the ceilings on her protagonist's psychic interiors. Dropping out of college in the early '70s to marry Bob Warner, a stand-up guy who's come home to join the family greenhouse business, Jean finds herself steeped in the provincialism of Dell, N.H.: family dinners and problems she doesn't want to inherit; a set of stoic Warner brothers who only reinforce the young couple's silent ennui; an aimlessness of intention on Jean's part hardly challenged by her day-to-day life. Bored to numbness, she takes a job typing the memoirs of an elderly local woman who's had three husbands -- or three that she chose to write about, anyway, in a narrative as flat and empty as the high plains. Propelled by mercy, Jean tries to imbue Grace Aldridge's life with more meaning than Grace herself could give it -- but when Grace dies, Jean realizes that her recorded life wasn't much more than a series of prosaic marriages and memories.

Into this hardly scintillating milieu comes one Dara Falcon, a charismatic troublemaker and aspiring actress for whom life is one large audience waiting to be manipulated. Spotting Jean for the kind tabula rasa she is, Dara sets out to appropriate her as best friend and confidant, meanwhile either seducing or infuriating every man she meets. She embroils Jean in her own affair with a business competitor of Bob's; she has a brief liaison with Bob's alcoholic brother, whose wife is Jean's closest ally. Wherever a wisp of smoke appears, Dara is the flame behind it, but Jean is too enthralled and trusting to spot this woman for the fraud she is -- or rather, to do anything about it beyond suffering her wraths and psychodramas. When Dara plays Nora in a local production of ``A Doll's House,'' Jean is dazzled; when Dara decides to bring Grace Aldridge's sad memoirs to the stage, Jean sees the gesture as a redemptive performance rather than the cruel satire Dara means it to be. Eventually, Dara's reach is great enough to propel Jean where she would have landed anyway, nutty friend or not: out of a tepid marriage and claustrophobic life, back in college in Connecticut, and on a search for an autonomous identity.

Jean's passive alliance with Dara, her quest to find beauty and splendor within the more challenging boundaries of the self, is the central tension of ``My Life, Starring Dara Falcon'' -- even the title is revealingly ironic, implying that the ``my'' is Jean's life, plundered by Dara. But Beattie has made a fatal error in this novel by imagining her Jean to be ploddingly ingenuous, or at least portraying her the way a worldly writer might imagine a guileless, small-town woman to be. For a special occasion, she dresses Jean in polka dots and black, patent leather high heels; in describing one of the Warners' basements, that legendary Beattie eye here reveals plastic ferns, fake aquarium fish, and a Farah Fawcett poster. It's an incredibly tacky milieu, in other words, and its depiction as such seems more patronizing than revealing.

Not that this was Beattie's intent; ``My Life, Starring Dara Falcon'' is stiflingly earnest. But it mirrors Jean Warner's own attempts to find transcendence in her employer's poor autobiography, as though Beattie wanted to create her own Grace Aldridge, then have her rise to the occasion of her own life. Even if Jean ultimately slams the same door Ibsen's Nora slammed, she is hardly rendered here with the same moral persuasion, nor is Bob Warner any Torvald. Literary references are sprinkled through the novel like pepper on pudding; most of them belong to Dara, though to little avail. Jean herself is not so creative: ``Like the runoff from a stream,'' thinks Jean, ``my thoughts had eventually overflowed and trickled off -- in the direction of Dara. She had a very literary bent; that analogy was the way she chose to express it.''

Now really. No writer of Beattie's normally wonderful talents can think up such a bad simile, then call attention to it, without seeming utterly condescending. I seriously doubt this was her intention, but she has envisioned Jean with cliched limitations -- with a big-city person's impression of what a rural, unexamined life must be. This portrayal is not only boring, it's wrong, and one need only look so far as the fiction of Russell Banks, or Richard Russo, or Raymond Carver to find the alternative truth. But then alternative truth -- fractured narratives and relative realities -- is what ``My Life, Starring Dara Falcon'' is supposed to be about. Despite some nice set pieces and dreamy introspections, Beattie must have been listening to an inner song that no one else can hear.

``You made it!'' Tom Van Sant said. ``Hey, Dowell, is this a familiar face?''

Dowell looked perplexed. He obviously didn't recognize her and wasn't quick enough to cover his confusion.

``Sweetie!'' she exclaimed to Tom. ``This is very cruel of you. I do not want to think that I look the way I looked in high school. Otherwise, what is all this hair color for and why have I thrown away my Doll Pink lipstick, if he's going to still recognize me?''

The bird/cake carrier was still in Bernie's hands. It swayed slightly, like a big lantern. She stood beside Dara, her brow knitted. It was obvious Bernie had no idea who this woman was.

ANN BEATTIE, from ``My Life, Starring Dara Falcon''