The New York Review of Books

Charles Baxter

While Charles Baxter is probably best known for his best-selling novel The Feast of Love (2000), made into a popular film starring Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear, the passion he inspires in readers—and in particular in readers who are writers—is focused chiefly upon his short stories. He has himself conceded that it is his favored form:

[I prefer] short stories by a long shot. I feel as if I’m in my family’s house when I’m writing short stories since I know where everything is. I know the logic of them so well. The other thing I like about short stories is that they often depend on characters who act impulsively.

Since 1984, Baxter has published five story collections, in addition to five novels and books of essays and poetry, and has gained over time, without fanfare, a significant and committed following, rather at the stately pace and in the discreet manner of Alice Munro. His new book, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, which shares its title with a story from his 1985 collection, contains both new work and highlights from his oeuvre thus far.

Baxter can be a beautiful writer—there are in his fiction finely lyrical passages, the more lovely for their lack of pretension—but he is far from a pyrotechnic stylist. His protagonists are similarly low-key: largely educated, liberal, amiable midwesterners whose lives have not unfolded in quite the dizzying way they had, in youth, imagined. He has explained, moreover, that their midwesternness is not irrelevant to his literary project:

Mystery can be found anywhere, but there is a quality in the Midwest having to do both with the blandness of the landscape and the ways in which people here don’t always talk about what’s on their minds. The combination of these two things creates an interesting field of vision for writers.

As Peter Jenkins, a childhood piano prodigy, recalls in “Harmony of the World”:

In college I made a shocking discovery: other people existed in the world who were as talented as I was. If I sat down to play a Debussy étude, they would sit down and play Beethoven, only faster and louder than I had.

Fenstad, in “Fenstad’s Mother,” teaches night school and invites his mother to class, only to find that “his mother was watching him carefully, and her face was expressing all the complexity of dismay. Dismay radiated from her.” In “The Cousins” (one of the book’s previously uncollected stories), having told us of his cousin that “we had a kind of solidarity, Brantford and I…. We were oddly similar, more like brothers than cousins,” Benjamin the narrator reflects that

What Brantford had expected from life and what it had actually given him must have been so distinct and so dissonant that he probably felt his dignity dropping away little by little until he simply wasn’t himself anymore. He didn’t seem to be anybody and he had no resources of humility to turn that nothingness into a refuge.

Brantford, a trust fund baby who squanders his inheritance, may have fallen farther than most, but Baxter’s people generally inhabit a world of compromise and tender regret: when, in “Snow,” Russell remembers being twelve and admiring his brother’s girlfriend Stephanie, he gives us a snapshot of her all these years later, in mid-life:

Stephanie had two marriages and several children. Recently, she and her second husband adopted a Korean baby. She has the complex dignity of many small-town people who do not resort to alcohol until well after night has fallen…. She has moved back to the same house she grew up in. Even now the exterior paint on that house blisters in cobweb patterns.

Almost nobody in Baxter’s fiction is without their “complex dignity,” afforded them by a writer whose eye is at once clear and unsparing. Part of the work’s appeal may be that it presents us to ourselves simultaneously as we would wish to be and as we fear we may in fact be. While his characters hail from various strata of life—Brantford and Benjamin in “The Cousins” are at one end of a spectrum that also includes “Harrelson, perpetual Ph.D. student, poverty-stricken dissertation nonfinisher” in “Winter Journey”; Cooper, a twenty-eight-year-old baker and law school dropout in “Shelter”; and Ellickson in “The Old Murderer,” a supervisor of hospital cleaning personnel who has lost his wife and children to his alcoholic bad behavior—all of them share a humility and a quiet striving. All of them, in one way or another, are decent guys, trying their best to do well by their loved ones and the world, grateful for their blessings and baffled by the sometimes bitter blows of fate. Even Ellickson, who “along with the alcoholism…had anger issues,” is by his own lights nobly struggling to rebuild his life, trying to reach out. Even Ellickson has hope.

This modest hopefulness is both an American strength and an American failing. It seems profoundly un-European, as an approach to life. Baxter sees that not only do Americans carry it around within us, but that those who come to America seek to find it here, as in the case of “The Disappeared,” one of his most mysterious stories, originally published in the appropriately named collection A Relative Stranger (1990). In it, a Swedish engineer named Anders arrives in Detroit on business, “to discuss his work in metal alloys.” Determined to see the city’s sights in spite of the dissuasive skepticism of the hotel doorman, he sets out to do so, and opens himself to an intimate encounter—of revelatory intensity—with an elusive woman named Lauren, whom he meets in Belle Isle Park. After a series of inevitable misadventures, Anders winds up in the hospital—as the hotel doorman all but told him he would—and realizes “that he must get home to Sweden quickly, before he became a very different person, unrecognizable even to himself.”

In Baxter’s world, such apparently random encounters—often with people from outside the characters’ social sphere, the result, as he has said, of characters acting “impulsively”—propel the stories’ narratives. Whether on purpose or by accident, his decent people strike up conversations with strangers on the edges of menace, strangers whose unpredictability and unplaceability is distinctly at odds with the mild, ordered movements of ordinary, home-loving folks like Benjamin or Cooper. These encounters, in turn, open the characters’ lives to a gamut of possibility—good, bad, strange, sad, or just plain extraordinary.

In “Shelter,” also from A Relative Stranger, Cooper stops to speak to a homeless man on his way to work, and buys him a meal. Thus begins his journey to try to redeem, or at least feed, the homeless of Ann Arbor. Ultimately, he takes on a twenty-three-year-old named Billy Bell, met at the homeless shelter:

He was standing near the window, with the light behind him, and all Cooper could see of him was a still, flat expression and deeply watchful eyes. When he turned, he had the concentrated otherworldliness of figures in religious paintings.

This last ennobling likening is, of course, from within Cooper’s point of view: and it is this naive elevation of Billy that will prompt him to bring the younger man to his office and finally, unnervingly, to his house—to his wife’s horror. Bad things inevitably ensue from this breach of social decorum. As readers, we at once applaud Cooper’s empathy and scoff at his attempts to assuage his liberal guilt: How could he act so stupidly? And how could he expect things to turn out any other way?

British-born Warren Banks in “Westland” (from the same collection) is initially less deliberate in his courting of the unknown, but ultimately more persistent even than Cooper: approached by a young woman, Jaynee, outside the lions’ cage at the zoo in Detroit, he feeds her, takes her home, meets her father, Earl, and stepmother, and embarks upon a strange journey, with them and with Earl’s gun, which he has agreed to dispose of. Eventually, Warren finds himself shooting the gun at a nearby nuclear reactor:

There’s a kind of architecture that makes you ashamed of human beings, and in my generic rage, my secret craziness that felt completely sensible. I took the gun and held my arm out of the window. It felt good to do that. I was John Wayne. I fired four times at that building, once for me, once for Ann, and once for each of my two boys.

It is not unlike Anders’s encounter with Lauren: in meeting Earl, Warren has somehow allowed an opening for a part of himself heretofore unexpressed. He has also embraced some sense of Americanness—a theme that runs subtly but distinctly through the story. How this actually relates to Earl—whether Warren owes him something, perhaps a gesture of friendship; whether Earl is in some way a part of him—is complicated and uneasy, and Baxter wonderfully captures this uneasiness in the story’s final scene, where Earl summons Warren and his family to Westland, a suburban mall, to watch Earl dressed as a clown to raise money for the Jerry Lewis telethon:

I looked around the parking lot and thought: Everyone here understands what’s going on better than I do. But then I remembered that I had fired shots at a nuclear reactor. All the desperate remedies. And then I remembered my mother’s first sentence to me when we arrived in New York harbor when I was ten years old. She pointed down from the ship at the pier, at the crowds, and she said, “Warren, look at all those Americans.” …And it came back to me in that shopping center parking lot…that feeling of pressure of American crowds and exuberance.

Like Anders, Warren has one reaction only: “I had to get out of there immediately…. I don’t know how I managed to get out of that place, but on the fourth try I succeeded.”

This opening to strangeness and possibility, while always risky, is by no means unmitigatedly negative. In “Kiss Away,” originally published in Believers (1997), a young woman named Jodie (“She was unemployed. She had been out of college for a year, hadn’t been able to find a job she could tolerate for more than a few days”) takes up with a guy she sees from the porch of her apartment. Walton Tyner Ross, nicknamed “Glaze,” and his dog Einstein make their way into her wary heart, in spite of the advice of Jodie’s older sister: “Be careful; he might be a psychopath. Sit tight, she said. Jodie thought the advice was ironic because that kind of sitting was the only sort her sister knew how to do.”

When finally they have sex, she reflects that “maybe fools made the best lovers. They were devotees of passing pleasures”; and it is this sense that they are soulmates, destined for each other, that renders her deeply skeptical of—indeed, hostile to—Gleinya Roberts, an ex-girlfriend of Glaze’s who contacts Jodie to warn her that he is not as he seems, that he is violent, and that his brutality will, in time, show itself.