Onlookers: Stories

This latest story collection from Beattie (The Accomplished Guest), winner of a PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story, revolves around familiar aspects of the unprecedentedly disorienting years of the COVID pandemic. Charlottesville, VA, and its various landmarks and environs—including recently torn-down Confederate statues—becomes a microcosm for larger exploration of shared experiences of the pandemic, complete with quarantines, economic upheaval, political and societal turmoil, and considerable personal uncertainty. Overlapping relationships slowly reveal how we are all connected to some degree, however seemingly tangential, even if we feel like disconnected onlookers. Beattie deftly weaves together the intricacies of these various components in stories that invite readers to reflect on these oh-so-recent, still reverberating events. Many of the details of those strange days/months/years are recalled: struggling to find a mask in a bag, struggling to stay safe, struggling to remember what day it is, struggling to hold onto reality, struggling to stay connected. Perhaps we can begin to assimilate and accommodate these recent, disrupted years with the help of such stories.