A Wonderful Stroke of Luck - Ann Beattie

Every so often, I come across a book that has me so mystified that I can’t see any reason to keep turning its pages - so I abandon it before wasting another precious day or two of my reading time on it. A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is not one of those books. Although this one mystified me, I expected that someone who writes as well as Ann Beattie writes was eventually going to wow me with her usual skills. So I kept reading. And then I turned to the final page, read the last paragraph, and wondered out loud what had just happened. I still don’t understand what Beattie was aiming for here. Whatever it was, she missed it.

 The dust jacket blurb says that A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is “about the complicated relationship between a charismatic teacher and his students, and the secrets we keep from those we love.” That is the original hook that convinced me to give it a shot. And if that representation were a bit more accurate than it is, I would have enjoyed A Wonderful Stroke of Luck a lot more than I did. 

True, Pierre LaVerdere, the teacher who leads the honor society at an exclusive New Hampshire boarding school called the Bailey Academy, is one of the book’s main characters. And it’s true that LaVerdere challenges his students to think for themselves during the open discussion that defines the typical honor society meeting. But the book’s rather interchangeable characters really don’t spend all that much time with the teacher, and after they graduate none of them seem to see him for the next few years. Oh, he was a “character” for sure, and his name comes up in the stories they tell each other, but other than influencing the way that some of his former students still reason, he seems to be no big deal in their post-high-school lives. 

Ann Beattie

You will be hard pressed to find a more insulated, ordinary, almost boring bunch of young people than the ones that Beattie created for A Wonderful Stroke of Luck. Most of them live in exciting cities, have decent jobs, and are getting on with their lives. But they’ve already managed to get themselves into what seem more like mid-life ruts than the lives you would expect much younger people to be living. Ben, the real main character of the book, is perhaps the biggest failure of them all. He’s alone, and he is struggling – as or all of his old friends – to find some meaning in his life. These people all live in a bubble in which they only know, much less befriend, people who think exactly the way they think. They are all liberal Democrats who so readily demonize conservatives and Republicans that they don’t even notice each other doing it anymore. 

But more importantly for the reader, nothing much ever happens to these people. As in nothing. And what little does happen is boring. So, perhaps in an attempt to end the book with some kind of a legitimate climax, Beattie brings Pierre LaVerdere back on the scene very near the end of the story. LaVerdere does shake up things in Ben’s world a good bit, but in the final analysis even Ben ends up unsure whether his old teacher is simply a liar or is really guilty of the awful deed he confesses to Ben. I’m still surprised that I finished this one.