Are writers and visual artists playing the same game? "When my [painter] husband and I have given presentations together," fiction writer Ann Beattie (The State We're In) reports in her introduction to More to Say: Essays and Appreciations, "we're inevitably asked what the relationship is between painting and writing. 'None,' would be the short form...." Yet in one of the 28 enchanting essays that follow, Beattie writes, "One of the reasons I react so strongly to John Loengard's photographs is because I find them so literary." Tracing Beattie's evolving thinking is one of the many pleasures of More to Say, whose essays span 1982 to 2022 and are, in what's tempting to take as a gesture of diplomacy, almost evenly split into literary and art criticism.
Loengard is among the subjects that Beattie writes about in pieces that include straight-up book reviews, as of works by Peter Taylor and Alice Munro, and introductions to books by writers and artists: Andre Dubus and Sally Mann are two of the more familiar names. The richest pieces blend criticism with something else, as when Beattie takes a journalistic turn and delves into the story behind American Gothic, Grant Wood's "much misunderstood" 1930 painting. Although Beattie's fans shouldn't expect confessional content in More to Say, her personal acquaintance with a subject can add an extra layer of interest, as when she wonders about the writer Harry Mathews: "How did I become dear friends with a person who had specially sewn compartments in his shirt pockets for his cigars?" --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer