Spanning 32 years, 48 stories, and every piece of fiction Beattie ever published in The New Yorker, [Ann Beattie’s The New Yorker Stories] amounts to a career compendium, a chronological record of a confirmed master’s best work. It starts with twenty- and thirtysomethings languishing in commuter towns, has a fling with New York life, survives the fallout from a few midlife affairs, and settles back into the (now upper-middle-class) suburbs to make labored conversation with grown children in the new millennium.

Along the way, we realize what distinguishes those well-known early stories from her recent work. Beattie started as a writer in the shadow of the liberalizing ’60s and the crush of the recession. Her fiction from this period traced not only the mood of her young cohort but an identity crisis in the middle class: a point when old measures of lifestyle, success, and ambition had been overturned and no new measures had replaced them.