I make day to day events compelling."
- Charles Baxter
'U' Prof. and author
In a story in University Prof. Charles Baxter's new collection of short fiction, "Believers," a character relating a tale at a dinner party says, "I keep forgetting about the necessities of violence in the USA. Well, if you were expecting violence, you'll be disappointed. Something else happened."
This statement is almost emblematic of Baxter's own work. His stories, in their graceful depiction of Midwestern life, never hinge on overt brutality. Something else is always happening in Baxter's work - something dark, something slow, something heady, but always something subtle and well-crafted. Even when he's describing an assisted suicide or a bar brawl, Baxter's writing is endowed with careful clarity and wit.
"I've come to feel that the real challenge to me as a writer is to take ordinary experiences and to make them interesting again," Baxter said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. "Apparently it's not my mission in life to take the huge subjects - war and peace - and deal with them. What I do is to take some of these more day-to-day events and make them compelling."
The author's statement is a bit humble, considering that the "huge subjects" in most people's lives are the ones Baxter writes about. Marriage (the lasting kind), conventional confusion and the after-effects of death and disease are mainstays of his stories. As he writes about confused people making choices, Baxter avoids the flamboyant and focuses on slower, scarier realities. In his fiction, a drunken driver will avoid crashing his car, only to have to face the wreckage of his life in the morning.
This year has been particularly productive for the author: Besides "Believers," which is in stores now, a book of his essays, titled "Burning Down The House" will be available in April. Vintage Books is also issuing his first collection, "Harmony Of The World," this spring. In addition, Baxter is the current director of the English department's MFA program.
Though Baxter focuses on the short story genre, he has written two fine novels - "First Light" and, most recently, 1993's "Shadow Play," as well as a collection of poetry. His work is regularly published in academic journals and such mainstream magazines as Harper's and Atlantic Monthly."Baxter is frequently anthologized in "Best American Short Stories" and has received numerous accolades, including an O. Henry Price award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Baxter's collections of short fiction have garnered him the most attention. Despite his forays into other forms, short stories continue to fascinate him. "I really like the poetry and the compression and the scope of the short story, how much you can tell in a limited space," Baxter commented. "Within this small size, this constriction ... I think you can do amazing things."
Baxter's characters are particularly memorable - a young child experiencing the death of his grandmother, a bored banker determined to explode his life, an elderly woman deceiving her husband on his deathbed.
Baxter explains that his style of character influences his use of the short story: "I like characters that are impulsive and impulsive characters are more suited to short stories than novels. I like that in short stories you don't have to give a character's whole history. You just put a character in front of the reader and have that character start to do something."
The novel form influences Baxter's work in a different manner. "I really think novels are more about time and memory and people making plans. Novels are often up to the business of creating histories."
"First Light," for example, traces the relationship of a brother and sister in reverse chronological order, starting from a present-day holiday party and ending at their first meeting in infancy. The book is particularly apt at showing the connections between the characters' past and present circumstances; each episode reveals a little more of the complicated links between past events and present pain.
Baxter is a native of Minneapolis and has taught in the state of Michigan since 1974. His writing is nearly always set in the Midwest, most particularly the fictional rural town of Five Oaks.
"I write about the Midwest because I know it and because I'm a Midwesterner and you write about what you know. Even Stephen King writes about Maine because that's what he knows," he said. Baxter's stories are eerie portraits of the region - they accentuate the surreal in the most commonplace of Midwestern lives.
Five Oaks is Baxter's own mental sandlot: "My imagination can really go wild in it. It really doesn't exist anywhere. I keep fudging the geography ... sometimes that town is near Kalamazoo and sometimes it's up near Bay City or Saginaw. It goes wherever I want it to be. In my head it's this little playground I've created in which I put my characters and I just watch them do whatever I want them to do or whatever they want to do.
"It's true that my fiction is called realist but I get to change the rules because I'm writing it. If changing the rules suits me and as long as the story seems to be plausible, I can get away with that."
Chances are a character in one Five Oaks story will pop up again in another story. The most famous of these recycled characters are Saul and Patsy, a married couple that first appears in Baxter's second collection of stories, "Through The Safety Net," and shows up again in "Believers."
Baxter said of Saul and Patsy: "You write a story and months go by or a few years go by and it turns out that the characters haven't disappeared on you. They're still completely alive in your imagination. They're still up to something and they want you to go on writing what they do. There's something about those two that keeps at me."
Other Five Oaks characters circulate throughout his stories. Bit parts abound. The town's barber, for example, has appeared with most of the important characters in Baxter's work.
"There's a kind of ecology of character - you never throw the characters away. You keep them around and ... when it seems appropriate you bring them back. I just love the idea of infinite complications. It doesn't sound very appealing but it's like learning more and more about family members. They get more and more interesting as time goes by."
Baxter's writing does have its ardent fans. "Some people just want to see him as a nice Midwestern writer, but he's got a dark view," said Elwood Reid, University composition lecturer. "Inside (Baxter's) normal appearance lurks an edgy guy." Reid compares Baxter to John Cheever. "His writing is very well-observed. It's dead-on ... there's not a wasted word."
Reid also has kudos for Baxter's teaching style: "It's one of the reasons I came here. He offers little bits of wisdom, hard-won for him, and he just gives them to you. He's very considerate - he tells you exactly where your writing's not working." Baxter only took one creative writing course in his undergraduate career. For him, the craft of writing is not something easily taught.
"I think what (I) primarily do ... is to help people, teach people to look at their own work analytically. Not from the point of view of scholar, who's analyzing it for themes and symbols, but to look at it as a maker, a crafts-person and to see what it may need in emphasis, clarity, (and) coherence."
Baxter does attempt to give students direction. "I try to help people find what their voice is, what their themes are. I try to help people find their way onto a path in which they can say: 'This is what I do; this is the kind of story I write; this is the voice that I have.'" His work as a teacher has had some influence on his own writing.
"It's caused me to write more slowly, and to revise more, because I'm more conscious of the craft now, with what I'm doing, than I used to be. I used to be able to write very quickly ... now I lug along, looking at everything I've done to see if it's okay."
Early on in his career, Baxter struggled to find his own voice. He wrote three novels, all of which were so bad they had to be discarded. "Writing spontaneously ... was great but the trouble was that a lot of that writing I did was awful, and I didn't know that it was. And when I did figure out that it was awful, I didn't know why."
Chastened, Baxter said he turned to short stories. "If you write a bad short story you haven't lost a year out of your life, the way you can if you set off and start writing a novel and make a wrong turn."
Baxter offers this advice to young writers: "I think you can learn more about writing fiction by writing short stories initially than by writing novels. Start with short stories and then if you want to write novels then that's what you do."
JOHN KRAFT/Daily
Charles Baxter.