Since the publication of her first New Yorker short story in 1974, Ann Beattie has been associated with a certain minimalist style of storytelling. THE STATE WE'RE IN, an uneven work that's her first collection of original stories since 2005, suffers from a surfeit of this type of story, where the stakes for her characters too often don't seem high enough to consistently engage our interest.

As the collection's subtitle implies, virtually all of the stories either are set in Maine or allude to the state. Several are linked through a teenager named Jocelyn, whose mother, recovering from a hysterectomy, has dispatched her to the care of her Aunt Bettina and Uncle Raleigh. She endures a miserable summer in Maine while she struggles to write summer school essays on subjects like magical realism and has a fitful relationship with a boy who attempts suicide.

The problem can be seen in a story like "The Fledgling." At barely five pages, it's nothing more than an anecdote about an unnamed woman who scoops up an injured young bird using a pair of oven mitts. "Aunt Sophie Renaldo Brown" essentially is a character sketch of a woman whose sartorial choices include "two metal wire champagne cork baskets to suggest hugely protruding nipples" inside her push-up bra. There are other stories, like "Major Maybe," a flashback to an incident involving a dog in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, that have a static quality.

"There are moments of pleasure in THE STATE WE'RE IN that illumine the best qualities of Ann Beattie's fiction and undoubtedly will please long-time admirers of her stories."

Beattie peppers her fiction with references to popular culture, as when a dog's favorite toy is an "Ed Grimley doll," or when Jocelyn "skimmed an article about Jennifer Aniston and her new fiancé" or reflects on her Aunt Bettina's "truthiness, as Colbert would say. Colbert, who was selling out." While these observations serve to firmly root Beattie's stories in our time, one wonders whether they'll seem dated or puzzling to readers 10 or 20 years hence. 

But for all these shortcomings, there are some sturdily constructed, well-paced tales here. "Yancey" describes the unlikely but affecting encounter between a widowed septuagenarian poet and an IRS agent who’s come to her house to investigate the deduction she's taken for use of her writing room. The tax man's confession that he "liked Robert Frost when I was a VMI" and request for a recommendation of "one book of poetry I should read" leads her to recite the well-known James Wright poem that ends with the words "I have wasted my life," drawing an innocent, if puzzling, question in response: "Is that really a poem?" The unusual juxtaposition of these two characters and the odd turns of their conversation make this one of the book's standouts.

The same can be said for 'The Little Hutchinsons," the witty account of the disaster that ensues when a woman declines a request to open her backyard for the wedding of a friend's daughter and of the painful retribution meted out to the bridegroom who once purposely ran over a turtle while mowing the lawn proposed as the site of the ceremony.

The collection's concluding story, "The Repurposed Barn," offers a satisfying final glimpse of Jocelyn, her aunt and uncle, at an auction where one of the highlights is the sale of a collection of lamps featuring busts of Elvis Presley. Jocelyn makes a surprising discovery about the teacher who's been her nemesis for the summer while she ponders the unexpected result of her time with Bettina and Raleigh.

Beattie's spare prose does sparkle at times with a particularly apt turn of phrase, especially when it comes to character description. Jocelyn's mother dismisses her ex-husband as a man whose "idea of happiness and harmony with nature had been gambling amid potted plants in Atlantic City casinos." In "Missed Calls," the main character describes a fellow guide at Colonial Williamsburg who "got pregnant by the candlemaker, during the time she was in love with the blacksmith."

There are moments of pleasure in THE STATE WE'RE IN that illumine the best qualities of Ann Beattie's fiction and undoubtedly will please long-time admirers of her stories. One only wishes there were more of them to allow this collection as a whole to stand alongside her best work.