A book like this, the perfect marriage of fiction and meditation on fiction, comes along rarely, and I feel like I’ve only read one other, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Ann Beattie has created a tender, delicate, and at times judgmental portrait of both Pat Nixon and the pen-wielding goliaths other wise known as writers.
The subtitle, “A Novelist Imagines A Life” generated some pre-conceived notions in my mind about this book. I imagined the novelist imagining, I imagined stilted presidential dialogue, I even imagined the upscale housewifely life Mrs. Nixon must have led. I didn’t realize that Ann Beattie would render the subject softly, meditatively, and personally, and what Beattie wrote and the way this book exists, is much better than I could have imagined as a reader. When I compare her to Kundera, it’s only superficially and almost flightily. Instead of remunerating in darkness, in heartbreak, Beattie deals in “what ifs,” family life, and milkshakes. MRS NIXON is ever-surprising, and at the end, I felt conflicting levels of placidity and curiousity, wanting to read more by Ann Beattie, and more about Patricia Nixon.
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