Why Baxter Fears the Kremlin 

A former student asks Charlie about Communists and catalysts

If you ask, fiction faculty Charles Baxter will tell you that his new novel The Soul Thief is about "crazy love versus domestic, ordinary love." Baxter's handling of love and fixation in The Soul Thief has already earned this praise from the Seattle Post Intelligencer: "Few American writers handle those compelling subjects with a more sure touch or more worthy insight." And The New York Times Book Review calls it �gloriously done.� One of Baxter's former WW MFA students Jason Githens (fiction '07) interrogated Baxter about why he didn't quit writing and why he refuses to use Microsoft products.

 

I remember a story you told at one Warren Wilson residency about early in your career writing what you called your �farewell piece� to literary fiction only to have it picked up by a university quarterly just before The New Yorker called also wanting it. I continue to find that story inspiring, but I wonder, would that really have been �it� for your fiction writing career had no one accepted that piece? Would you still be writing fiction today if you hadn�t had the publishing success you�ve had?

People do quit. Writers sometimes quit after not-publishing, after publishing a few stories, even after publishing a book or two. It�s understandable, because writing is so difficult and because it�s an act of communication; if no one wants it or reads it, the activity seems almost futile, like loving someone who won�t love you back. I just don�t know what
I would have done if no one had accepted that piece. We�re all built differently and are wired to manage different levels of disappointment or discouragement. I thought then, and still think, that I had just about reached my tolerance-level for failure. If that story hadn�t worked, I don�t think I could have tolerated more failures (I had written three unpublished novels and umpteen unpublished stories.)

Your story �Westland,� begins wit h a scene in a zoo, where a guy comes across a troubled teenage girl who wants to shoot a lion. In The Soul Thief, you also set an important scene in a zoo. Additionally you�ve written abandoned amusement parks, chemical factories, and nuclear reactors into your stories. What do such landscapes represent to you? Why do you have such fondness for them?

They�re public spaces. Everybody knows them. And they sit there in the background of our lives. One set of those setting is industrial and grungy, and another set of those settings is recreational and grungy. I like grunge. It reflects our contemporaneousness. Or contemporarity. Or whatever.

When you helped me with my graduate class, we worked on the idea of the catalyst character. Defining such a character as �someone who brings a productive instability into the story,� and who �forces other characters to pay attention,� we worked to identify several stories where this character type was at work, such as Miss Dent in Cheever�s �The Five Forty-Eight� and Aunt Bernie in �Sea Oak� by George Saunders. I read Coolberg in The Soul Thief as another example of this character type. Would you categorize Coolberg as a catalyst character? When and how did you decide that this novel about the textures of love had to have Coolberg?

Well, he was part of it right from the start, because I had had, in my life, an imposter, a guy who went around the Los Angeles area claiming to have written my writings. Talk about de-stabilization! I got interested in the way that people go out to Los Angeles in an effort to become Somebody Else; it�s as if lots of people are walking around that city with aliases. Maybe they�re walking around everywhere.

We�ve talked before about landscape and the regional aesthetic. You mentioned in one letter how Fitzgerald�s �Winter Dreams� truly captures Saint Paul�s winters of those days. Also you talked about how regional characteristics make Gatsby who he is, and how Frost�s poems of New England reveal those �long haunted winters.� I feel that your work also renders landscape magnificently, and in The Soul Thief I was able to completely inhabit the early 70s Buffalo, New York. It�s difficult enough to convey a landscape when we�re actively living in it, much less to craft one that existed over thirty years ago. What are the most critical parts of portraying a resonant landscape in fiction?

Gee. Let me think about it. I suppose you have to try to extract a central theme or idea about a place before you can find the details that match up with that theme. With Buffalo, I was trying to depict a decaying industrial American city, an example of the sort of American city we used to have where things were manufactured, and men labored to make them. It�s snowy and overcast all the time. With Los Angeles, I was trying to depict a visual place, a place that�s sunny, but where all the manufacturing is that of images, of imagery. If you wanted to do Seattle, you�d probably have to have an idea of what Seattle is all about. I don�t have any such idea. Maybe David Shields does. He lives there.

During a recent panel discussion of Richard Yates, the moderator made a comment on how writers who go to Hollywood come back beaten and defeated. In that same forum, Yates�s daughter praised Hollywood for making a film of one of her father�s books, which she surmised would make him relevant again. Feast of Love was made into a movie, so where do you stand on Hollywood and literature?

Movies are a more important (that is, more money-making) medium than books are in our current culture, so people are always asking you about books being made into movies, as if the criterion for a book�s success is whether it got made into a film. But the true success of a book resides in its quality, right? I always thought so. The better a book, the more likely it
is that they�ll mess it up when they adapt it. There are a few exceptions, but not very many. The movie of my book came and went fairly quickly. I liked the direction and some of the performances, but overall, I didn�t care for it.

In The Soul Thief, Nathaniel�s adult life after having children is driven by schedules and routine. For instance, he picks up his son from swim practice every day at six thirty, and ponders briefly what would happen if he were late, though he�s never been late or failed to pick up his son. This is definitely not the same guy who was reading translated German poetry, seeing the gods at Niagara Falls, and working at the co-op in grad school. From the grown-up Nathaniel we get a sense of begrudging acceptance of his life�s trajectory; Would you describe how you see Nathaniel�s trajectory? As a writer, how does having children affect the writing life (both your own, and those you may have observed)?

Well, Nathaniel�s former life made him crazy. His domestic life anchors him to sanity. It may be dull sometimes, but he�s living a good life. The trajectory you described for Nathaniel is the one I had in mind. I�ve written about parenthood, fatherhood, in an essay entitled �The Chaos Machine� in the current issue of The Believer. My essay has corrective footnotes by Daniel Baxter, my son.


Finally, you mentioned one time that Microsoft Word was a curious product. Seeing as though I� work at Microsoft (and I�m probably the only MFA graduate here), I�d love to hear more about your struggles with that �puzzling� application, as you called it, as I�m sure that a number of writers out there have the similar struggles and questions.

I work at a Mac. I used to use AppleWorks. With Microsoft Word, I can�t find anything. Even the italics are hiding. It claims to have spell-checked the text when IT HASN�T SPELL-CHECKED ANYTHING! It�s like a bad worker who claims to have done a job but hasn�t done it. But I�m frightened to be saying these things, because your company is so powerful and has agents everywhere. It�s like telling the Kremlin what you think about Stalin. I fear the midnight knock on the door. �Where are you taking me? What did I do? I won�t do it again!�