Review of My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, by Ann Beattie (Knopf, 307 pp., $24)
WHOEVER penned this novel’s dust-jacket copy either really believed that it explores “the sometimes subtle and sometimes startling differences between the way things look and the way they actually are,” or, more likely, was forced into grotesque overreaching by the book’s sheer vapidity. Jean, the narrator, is a young woman whose life-along with those of her fellow small-town residents-is badly damaged by the title character. Dara Falcon is a standard vixen, indistinguishable from those haunting many other mediocre fictions, but Miss Beattie must not read much of that sort of thing. Despite having her marriage, family, and car wrecked, slow Jean needs until page 296 to come to the startling realization that Dara was “the most manipulative person I had ever met.” Wow. Might therapy have helped? In spite of the novel’s heft, caused by Miss Beattie’s tone-deaf prose and her preoccupation with minutiae, it is appallingly thin. Dara Falcon is just “bad,” the narrator is just “passive,” marriages just break up, and so forth, without explanation. Reading Dara Falcon is similar to watching Oprah: spend an hour witnessing the sorry lives of assorted freaks, then forget them just as quickly.
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