Appraisal of Beattie's recent work has been mixed. Writing in "The New York Times", Michiko Kakutani called her novel "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life" (2011) "preposterous," "narcissistic," and "self-indulgent"—the "sort of pretentious volume that makes people hate academics." In "The Washington Post", Book World Editor Marie Arana characterized it as "a bill of goods" devoid of "anything resembling a story line" that is "less about the eponymous Mrs. than about an endless parade of wordsmiths trotted out for show." The book "is not, except in the most perfunctory way, about Mrs. Nixon," Arana determined. "It's about Beattie." "he book does not succeed," wrote William Deresiewicz in "The Nation". "Its bric-a-brac approach is ultimately wearying: nothing ever quite gets under way. One ends up feeling as if Beattie has spent the whole performance clearing her throat. . . . Her subject often seems a pretext, something just to get the conversation started." By contrast, Dawn Raffel, in the "San Francisco Chronicle", called the book "splendidly tricky", "at times... movingly lyrical", and said "Nothing in "Mrs. Nixon" is perfectly clear, and that is the source of its power."