Chilly Scenes of Winter; Distortions

ANN BEATTIE has been getting a lot of hype since her first two books were published simultaneously, and on the whole the claim that she is one of the most promising writers around right now seems justified. Both Chilly Scenes, a novel, and Distortions, a collection of short stories, center on the same theme: the emptiness of relationships formed through inertia, the bleak mindlessness of lives without purpose.

But Beattie develops her characters with enough skill to avoid most of the tedium that can set in when you describe boring lives. The first 100 pages of Chilly Scenes get a little hard to take--the characters lead such bleak lives, moving between depressions, neuroses and unemployment--and some of the stories in Distortions undermine the characters' reality in their tendency towards absurdism. Still, Beattie includes enough gentle humor in her presentation to keep you interested. You come to hope desperately for resolution, for an end to the emptiness and an advent of warmth. Beattie isn't liable to satisfy you (her favorite symbol for the human condition is snow, covering anybody's attempt to find happiness) but she'll keep you involved to the end.