No one's been better than Ann Beattie at dropping a couple of brand names, book and movie titles or references to food and fashion to conjure a particular time and place and circumstance. The smart young denizens of the '70s and '80s who populate her best-known fiction tend to be clever, artsy types who, if they haven't attended a notable university or law school, are taking night-school courses in poetry. They smoke joints, drink wine spritzers, eat ramen noodles, underline Russian novels and quote Wallace Stevens. They wear jackets from L.L. Bean, listen to Lou Reed, make mixtapes and know things like how to identify a Limoges plate without looking at the back. In her slim new novella, 'Walks With Men,' Beattie conjures New York in the 1980s, though it soon becomes clear that her narrator is looking back at that archaeological era through a rear-view mirror. It's a time when hipsters looked for jazz albums in the Village, browsed paintings at the Mary Boone gallery (p. 6) and 'contextualized' their angst 'by quoting Proust, Rilke, Mallarme and Donald Barthelme.' (p. 4) The Trump International Hotel on Columbus Circle was known then as the Gulf & Western Building, (p. 5) and Chelsea was still less than fashionable (p. 13-4). When you were put on hold on the phone, you were likely to hear a Muzak version of 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.' (p. 47). A kind of distillation of Beattie's narrative techniques from both her early minimalist stories and later, more full-bodied ones, this intriguing but flawed tale chronicles the relationship of a naive young writer named Jane with an older Svengali of a lover named Neil, who promises to explain the world to her and change her life. 'The deal was this,' she explains. 'He'd tell me anything, anything, as long as the information went unattributed, as long as no one knew he and I had any real relationship. At first it didn't seem like much of a deal, but my intuition told me he knew something I didn't yet know about the way men thought -- and back then, I thought understanding men would give me information about the way I could make a life for myself.' (p. 1) The pieces of advice Neil dispenses are less life lessons than pretentious instructions on how to be a snob: 'purchasing only the finest brands' (like Burberry scarves (p. 3) and Barbour jackets) (p. 2) 'or shopping at thrift shops was the only way to acquire things -- anything in between was bourgeois and pathetic;' only 'dumb people bought cars instead of leasing them; crystal wineglasses were for morning orange juice, and grappa was best sipped from the bottle; Turgenev was a greater writer than Dostoyevsky; using an exclamation point for punctuation was interchangeable with eating food and drooling.' (p. 12-3) It's quickly obvious to the reader that Neil is a complete jerk -- a self-congratulatory poseur who says things like 'When you travel to Europe, never wear a fragrance from the country you're in. In France, wear perfume made in Italy.' (p. 90) Or who urges Jane to 'think about the world as if' contemplating it 'from the perspective of a figure in a Hopper painting. Maybe the collie.' (p. 41) Jane, however, is smitten, and she leaves her old boyfriend Ben for Neil. Though Neil, not so surprisingly, turns out to have a secret -- he's married! -- Jane is undeterred. She leaves Neil for two weeks, listens to a friend's advice to dump him, and then promptly returns to him in the middle of the night, wearing a raincoat over her nightgown and high heels. Three months later, after Neil obtains a quickie divorce, he and Jane are married. (p. 27) As for Ben, he finds religion, changes his name to Goodness, (p. 43), comes to New York to open a meditation center (p. 38) and dies, after being pushed under a subway train coming into Union Square station (p. 42). Things happen abruptly like this in Beattieland. Although she's made a concerted effort in her later fiction to connect the dots -- sometimes resorting to ridiculously contrived plots, as in the unfortunate 1997 novel, 'My Life, Starring Dara Falcon' -- Beattie's most famous work tends to renounce causality and consequence. Accidents and random events plague her characters, and many of them, like Jane here, are oddly passive, drifting or going with the flow, trying to live willfully in the present, as if past choices and mistakes never piled up. Specialists in irony and emotional hibernation, Beattie's people are prone to alienation and disengagement. And Jane is no exception: no doubt she did not need Neil's advice to try to contemplate the world from the perspective of a figure in a Hopper painting -- that's something she already knew how to do. She tells us that she sometimes plays 'a little game' in which she thinks of herself 'as 'Jane.'' 'It's a good game,' she explains, 'because it really does give you some distance from yourself, and it lets you sort out what's important and what's not. If a character named Jane does this or that, you are only a kind of reporter. And you can report on something any number of ways.' (p. 70) This is as good a description as any of Beattie's early and widely imitated technique: a cameralike recording of the things that happened to her characters; glittering bits of their funny, rueful conversations; and a reluctance on her own part to analyze or comment. In her best recent stories, like the ones in 'Follies,' she's demonstrated a greater interest in exploring her people's emotions and giving us a wide-angled take on their romantic and familial histories. Middle-aged now, her men and women can no longer look back on their experiences as a series of non sequiturs or discontinuous incidents; whereas many of them once 'just sailed through situations,' (p. 89), they've now been forced by age and illness and loss to survey the overall arc of their lives. And readers, who were once handed strobe-lit snapshots of these characters' pasts, are now given something more like a movie. In 'Walks With Men' Beattie seems to want to give Jane this sort of retrospective outlook on her life, using her excursions into the third person (describing how 'Jane' coped with Ben's death and the outcome of her relationship with Neil) to illuminate both her own need for detachment to understand her life, and the alchemy of the fiction-making process. Unfortunately, Beattie doesn't fully commit to this perspective, refusing in the end really to delve into Jane's psyche and resorting in the volume's last few pages to a hasty summary of events and an anecdote from later in Jane's life that may or may not have anything to do with what has gone before. In the end, Jane, like so many Beattie characters, comes across as vaguely shell-shocked, but in this case it's not clear to the reader whether she got this way by trying to forget her past -- or by trying to remember. PUBLICATION NOTES: 'WALKS WITH MEN' By Ann Beattie 102 pages. Scribner. $10. 