Onlookers

Award-winning and beloved short story writer Ann Beattie returns with a brilliant new collection of closely linked stories all set in Charlottesville, Virginia, a place Beattie knows intimately.

Onlookers is an astute new story collection by award-winning author Ann Beattie, about people living in the same Southern town whose lives intersect in surprising ways. Peaceful Charlottesville, Virginia, drew national attention when white nationalists held a rally there in 2017, an event whose aftershocks and repercussions are still felt today. The stories have a common denominator in the Confederate monuments that were then still standing, such as General Robert E. Lee atop his horse. Such statues are a constant presence, as well as a metaphoric refrain throughout this collection, though they represent different things to different characters.

In “Nearby,” an elderly man and his younger wife watch from their penthouse as a group of protestors gathers to oppose the once “heroic” explorers Lewis and Clark, and their native guide, Sacagawea, located in a subservient position. A lawyer in “In the Great Southern Tradition” deals with a crisis on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, while his sister and nephew plant tulip bulbs at her rather grand former home, which he calls, “Delusional Folly.”

For the characters, some landmarks, however symbolic, have habitually faded away, while the provocations embodied in others, when viewed through newly opened eyes, almost hurl themselves into their—and our—consciousness.

In these stories of unexpected friendships and affiliations, life in the time of Covid-19, and personal, as well as national unrest, Beattie involves the reader in complicated questions about community, inheritance, and how the present interacts with the past.