Tentative Notes on Charles Baxter

It is hard to write about former teachers without it seeming like you’re sucking up. I should note that Charles Baxter is a former teacher of mine and that I am immensely grateful to him for many reasons. Most pertinently, he insisted that every piece of fiction is a distinctive solution to a distinctive problem and that the duty to understand the writer’s intentions precedes the right to opine about the writer’s work.

It took me a while to figure out the reason for the metafictional twist in The Soul Thief–a book partly written in a third person with the opacity and instability of first person–but I think I’ve sussed it out: The Soul Thief is about sabotage and the twist is a kind of sabotage. 

(I'm still thinking about his decision to relay the pivotal events of the story in a summarized retrospect.)

Baxter’s acrobatic structures–First Light, my favorite, proceeds backwards–can distract from his other great strength: prose which surprises sentence by sentence.

Almost at random, this description of LAX: 

My fellow passengers trudged out of the plane, blinking like moles exposed to the sunshine. The demon-child I had entertained slept, now, in his mother’s backpack. One woman, clearly, a tourist, pulled her luggage-slop (beach bag, reticule, cosmetics kit) out of the overhead bin and staggered toward the exit. As soon as she reached the gate, she uttered a dissapointed “huh?” at the ceiling.

Then a few sentences later: 

“In every interior nook and cranny, TV sets, hanging like huge spiders from the ceiling, boomed down disinformation from the Airport Channel. You stumble toward your luggage.”

Note the small daring onomatopoeic accuracy of “luggage slop”; the freighted verbs “trudged” and “stumble”; the hint of the narrator’s campus radical past in “disinformation”; the rightness of the spiders metaphor, the weird 180 of the mole metaphor (they are emerging from the sky). 

Comments

[Mandy]

I was just about to copy that LAX passage in my book quotes thing - it's a useless notebook but makes me feel as if I am doing something important. Um, can you explain the metafictional twist to me over email or something? I think I get it but I'm still dangling my foot in the air, unsure if I'll hit ground. I love First Light, too. Also Saul and Patsy.