The accomplished guest : stories / Ann Beattie

Most of the 13 stories take place in Maine, Key West or Charlottesville, locales Beattie has made familiar in previous collections. Many arise from fraught, alcohol-fueled encounters at birthdays, holidays and weddings. Such occasions (including a party to celebrate the sentencing of Bernie Madoff) are meant to be festive, but family and generational tensions, nursed over the years, can erupt in unexpected, sometimes violent, ways. Pity the title character in “The Astonished Woodchopper” who finds himself — while eavesdropping like “a dowsing rod, having located water” — in the crossfire of a fraternal argument at a wedding. “If the world belonged to the young,” one combatant tells himself, having angrily decided to strand his brother’s future stepson at the airport, “it was time for the kid to start coping.”

English.