It’s somewhat difficult to relate what happens in “A Wonderful Stroke of Luck.” This isn’t surprising: Beattie has never been a plot-driven writer. In her best earlier work, that isn’t a problem. But in this novel, I found myself wishing for an index of characters so I could see who was who, to figure out what mattered and why.

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Ultimately this is a novel in which nothing seems to matter much. It’s so discursive and shapeless that I found it impossible to glean what story Beattie was trying to tell and why a reader should care. We are told that LaVerdere is brilliant and compelling — but nothing he does or says makes him seem that way. Here are his first words: “Talk’s overrated. We see an example of this in our current president, George W. Bush, who cannot articulate a comprehensible thought — though politicians who preceded him, such as the estimable Gerald Ford, who pardoned President Richard M. Nixon, were notorious for actually falling on their asses.” Not exactly the level of oratory that would bind a band of teenagers to one another or to him forever. But it is the level of oratory that continues throughout the novel, not only from LaVerdere but from everyone.

There’s also a troublingly blinkered aspect to the world Beattie has created, as regards race, age, gender, technology — really, as regards the modern world. The novel presents itself as contemporary (with mentions of cellphones, texting and eBay) while being stuck culturally in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. For example, there are two mentions of the performance artist and writer Spalding Gray, who died in 2004, but whose heyday was in the 1980s. The Gray references, both linked to LaVerdere, are (I think) meant to indicate LaVerdere’s artsy pretensions. But because the reader is given no information about who Gray is, what his work is or why it matters to LaVerdere, the reference offers no insight. Not only are we left confused, but his name is spelled “Grey” instead of the correct “Gray” both times it appears.

There’s no way for the reader to know if this error was introduced during the editing process or if it’s a typo of Beattie’s that eluded the copy editor. And it could be argued that it’s a slightly embarrassing but unimportant mistake. To my mind, though, it’s symptomatic of a larger issue — a seeming carelessness throughout that extends to a reliance on clubby shorthand that speaks only to certain people (literary-minded baby boomers) instead of creating a compelling narrative peopled with diverse, vivid and interesting characters. I’m a 58-year-old literary writer who knows and loves the work of Spalding Gray, so I’m in the club — but a novel shouldn’t be a club. Unless you’re making a conscious decision to hold the reader at arm’s length for aesthetic reasons (and Beattie has never been that sort of writer), readers should be invited in. Not babied. But welcomed. Over and over, Beattie closes the door rather than opening it.

Not only are the references dated, unrevealing and insular, many of them come from a cohort of characters who, based on the novel’s timeline, are in their mid-30s. These are ’90s kids — but the names they drop are those of prominent figures from well before they were born: the folk singer Woody Guthrie, the writers Russell Banks, William Kennedy and Susan Sontag, the photographer Thomas Victor and the actor Christopher Reeve, to name a few. And almost all of it comes from the minds or voices of Ben and his friends. Even if you grant that there might be 30-somethings who use these names as touchstones or shorthand, the characters in this book haven’t been drawn that way. They’ve barely been drawn at all. If they find the late 20th century groovy, then in the words of Eliza Doolittle, show me. Show me where that impulse comes from and why it matters.