[Pantheon; 2011]
by Nika Knight
When asked what no one ever asks him in an interview, Charles Baxter said, “the sense of being excluded from happiness… [is] really the only thing that nobody ever asks me about. It’s always seemed to me that a lot of my work has to do with somebody watching somebody else who is happy.”
In Baxter’s fiction, you could easily exchange “happiness” for “love” with no loss in meaning. This is the author of The Feast of Love –- a writer whose work is filled with people standing on the outside of love: obsessing over it, tenuously grasping at it, occasionally drowning in their desperation for it, and all the while feeling their own distance from it. And through this, Baxter surrounds his protagonists with eccentrics, the demented and the simply clinically insane. The link between love, madness, faith and fanaticism is one that runs through the short stories in Gryphon, Baxter’s latest collection of new and collected stories.
In one story, “The Disappeared,” we meet one protagonist who finds himself possessed by an unstable, infatuous love, which is — of course — a feeling he can’t name. Anders, a Swedish engineer in Detroit for a conference, is a hopeless foreigner, instantly and perpetually lost amid a sea of missed signals in his exchanges with Americans. Anders meets and sleeps with Lauren, a beautiful American woman who belongs to The Church of the Millennium, “where they preach the Gospel of Lost Things.” When they first meet, Lauren warns him, “My soul is radioactive. It’s like plutonium.” After their encounter — one that leaves him reeling — Anders wanders the empty, ruggedly depressed streets of Detroit, the crippled landscape an echo of how he feels “like a stump, amputated from the physical body of the woman”:
Anders noticed broken beer bottles, sharp brown glass, on sidewalks and vacant lots, and the glass, in the sun, seemed perversely beautiful. Men were sleeping on sidewalks and in front stairwells; one man, wearing a hat, urinated against the corner of a burned-out building. He saw other men—there were very few women out here in the light of day—in groups gazing at him with cold slow deadly expressions. In his state of mind, he understood it all; he identified with it. All of it, the ruins and the remnants, made perfect sense.
And Baxter’s depiction of the depressed Midwest is one that makes perfect sense as a reflection of and opposition to the ebbs and flows of the desperations, longings, jealousies and small failures of his characters -– one aptly expressed by an earlier protagonist’s fellow music student: “‘Caterpillars!’ Juan shouted, his tears falling onto my shirt. ‘Failures! Pathetic lives! Cannot, cannot! Who would hire you?’”
Painted across the rusting gray canvas of the upper Midwest, the faith, madness and obsession that drives so many of his characters boils down to a simple longing for love. On the prevalence of the subject of love in his writing, Baxter explained,
For some people, it’s just not an important subject. It’s something that they take for granted, and it’s something that they can get past. It has not been something that I have ever been able to take for granted. My father died when I was a baby. My mother was unstable. I always knew where the next meal was coming from, but I developed what therapists call hypervigilance. The question of whom I would love and who would love me became almost a matter of life and death for me. Almost by necessity, given the nature of my early life, I got attuned, I got obsessed by it. When The Feast of Love came out, I made statements of this sort, and some readers said, “But this is not mature love in your novel.” Well, of course it isn’t. It’s not stable. The kind of love that’s portrayed in that book has to do with infatuation and instability, and that’s the reflection of somebody who has never found that landscape to be particularly stable.
Baxter’s terminally displaced protagonists explore, with an unabashed seriousness — one at turns childlike and insane — our desire for love: why and how we want it, and why and how almost always feel deprived of it –- in a way that, while often devastating, refuses to be distant, or cynical, or hardened. And for this, as a reader, I feel intensely grateful.
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