Books like Chilly Scenes of Winter

I probably shouldn't read books like this. I know plenty about disenchanted youth. I'm 24 and spend a lot of time in small bars and on lonely buses. And I liked the book, but I liked it in this weird self-indulgent pornographic way. Yes, every conversation rang true, every character was real. But a Raymond Carver or a Grace Paley can take that grit and veritas and turn it into pure transcendence. Beattie's bleak world sings some, but it doesn't transcend.And this is probably a terrible metric for measuring a book, but it didn't make me feel any less disaffected. OK, so the ending was a glimmer of light. But if anything that felt like a bit of a cop-out. My immediate thought was "oh, so it's OK for him, but how does this help me? Holy shit, I'm using novels as self-help books. And I recognize that that's self-indulgent, but this was a self-indulgent novel and I'm self-indulgently writing about it on a self-indulgent social network."And I apologize to anyone who's reading this, by the way, but that's what you get when you transform the solitary act of reading into a social act. Navel-gazing. Lots of navel-gazing.Would I read more Ann Beattie? Yeah. She's talented as hell. Maybe, if you are the sort of person who generally feels OK about things, you'll appreciate it more legitimately.