3 out of 5

‘Someone’ is undoubtedly indebted to the various movies and books to which it continually makes reference.  Short stories are an ideal platform for a technique that can be more difficult to pull off in a novel: things left unsaid.  Plenty of literature has layered meanings or elements ticking in the background, but to make the focus of a story the lack of What’s Going On is a tricky play; keeping your reader engaged requires a proper push and pull of interesting information without too over- or un-obviously giving away whatever elements you’re trying to withhold.  Because shorts are what they are, one can ratchet up this dynamic without having to pad it as one might in a novel.  And that’s what Ann Beattie’s tale seems to be trying to do, to me, with a sense of remove lain atop this telling of sisters Nona and Prue – mostly from Nona’s perspective – at a time later in their lives, post marriage(s) or children or break-ups, and informing us of these past events as Nona preps some desserts for a local farmer’s market stand she’ll be manning for a friend.  Songs, books, films are name-checked; we’re even told a blurb about how Nona likes to entertain her sister and husband by reading to them from Charles Dickens.  Characters float in and out with guessed-at histories, and it ends with a reminder that we’ll make our own assumptions in lieu of the facts.  Beattie effectively maintains that information balance: our brief trip into Nona’s life is interesting, even though nothing is really going on.  However, by frequently leashing the story to these outside references – some modern ones – it gave me (and so perhaps other readers…) the feeling like I wasn’t connecting with the material because I wasn’t familiar with whatever media piece was being named.  Modern books and movies are modern books or movies; period pieces are period pieces.  ‘Someone’ is a character piece, and plies at sensibilities which are timelessly human, but Beattie’s interest in tying her story to these references never allowed me to settle into the characters or text, restlessly left wondering if there was some further element I wasn’t appreciating because I haven’t seen ‘Match Point.’

Ann accomplishes the more difficult part – the things left unsaid – rather masterfully.  I’d prefer to see the reality-building done in-house instead of pointing to outside media sources.