‘Gryphon: New and Selected Stories’ by Charles Baxter

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn

Judging an author’s short-fiction output, in this case a book that collects several decades of significant work, is like trying to assess the importance of an obelisk erected by a distant generation. It’s there, it’s undeniable, the reason for its existence may be forgotten or dimly remembered, but it’s still to be admired, if only for its imposing height. Sixteen of the twenty-three stories in Gryphon, an impressive gathering of Charles Baxter’s best, appeared in previously published volumes. To read these stories presented as they are in chronological order, over thirty years of narrative exploring the accidents of life in Middle America, is to be struck by the remarkable consistency of the prose. It seems that Baxter had already solved the many stylistic problems writers grapple with over a career, the choices of tense, tone and mood, the structural experiments and the chameleon-like imitation, by the time he published his first collection, Harmony of the World, in 1984. The resultant voice is intelligent, reasonable and clear, as if an eloquent storytelling uncle has come to visit and has had only ginger ale to drink.

Baxter unwinds tales of people we all know or have heard about. His characters inhabit a limited world, an America where failure doesn’t have to lead sensationally to drug abuse, murder and imprisonment. The evidence of such desperation does exist in his Minneapolis and his New York; it’s just way over there on the other side of town. The homeless play a minor role in some of these stories, mainly as a prick to middle-class conscience. Baxter’s protagonists speak literate English, they’ve gone to good schools and have advanced farther than your average student of the piano or reader of Ovid. They’re the sort of citizens you could have a nice meal with, listening to their side of the story and gaining perspective on what it’s been like to live in America since the days when Ronald Reagan set out to restore his City on a Hill.

The limits, then. Call them the ground rules: the stories will revolve primarily around white folk. From time to time they will involve an exotic Other. The family unit sits like a sometime fractured foundation at the base of this collection. The story might begin with a marriage in dissolution. A recently divorced couple spends their final hours together cleaning the house they cohabited and which they’ve sold to a young married couple with a baby. In another story, a single man raises his nephew after the boy’s parents are killed in a car crash. Aged parents wander the margins of competency and cogency, never out-and-out crackers but often bringing a perspective skewed just enough to shed fresh light on a difficult situation.

“Fernstad’s Mother,” for example, is a gentle, hopeful, quietly subversive story. Although the title character is elderly and beginning to show signs if not of dementia then of reduced mental capacity, she continues to be interested in life in a manner usually reserved for the young. She sits in on her son Harry’s night class, English composition, and makes connections with his students in ways he hasn’t been able to. Like the book’s title story, about an unconventional substitute teacher in charge of a grade four class, “Fernstad’s Mother” illustrates the importance of seeing beyond convention. In a lesson on logic, Harry tries to lead his students to identify the error in the statement, “I, like most people, have a unique problem.” They zero in on the word, “problem,” asking for more information, suggesting that whether or not the utterance is logically flawed might depend upon the nature of the speaker’s particular difficulty. Harry wants them to understand the inherent contradiction in the pairing of the phrase, “like most people” and the word, “unique,” but what he doesn’t see is that although the condition of a majority of people suffering a problem might not be unique to any single one of them, each problem, because it involves a different person and a different set of circumstances, can arguably be deemed unique. Fiction’s power derives from that same source. His mother intuits this, despite the blunting of her mental acuity. In an unexpected role reversal, Harry, a man of religious faith, prays for her, an atheist, knowing she would disapprove of such a spiritual appeal. He finds happiness, the holy grail sought by all Baxter’s characters, ice skating late at night, and his mother comes to watch, secretly, that she might see joy in motion. It’s a hushed, assured, some might say soft landing. Though neither mother nor son can answer life’s difficult questions, it’s this relative lack of a moralizing thrust that makes the story memorable. Here the author is more Chekhov than he is Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. His fictional world simply is. We live it and judge it however we will.

Baxter tends to show his hand whenever an idea is too big to be contained by ambiguity. The narrator of “Harmony of the World” was a child pianist steered away from the pursuit of greatness by a teacher who told the boy that his playing made the man physically ill. Though technically proficient, the boy is told he lacks passion. He becomes instead of a performer a music critic and the lover and accompanist of a classically trained singer whose vocal flaws prevent her from achieving stardom. When he administers to her the same stunning slap his teacher gave him, their love withers. Perfection, the critic learns, comes only in death. To seek it in life is nihilistic, even cruel. Meanwhile, the truly tormented are those who glimpse perfection and spend the rest of their lives trying to achieve it. Baxter leaves open the answer to the question, Is this a tragic condition or merely the way of the world? Is life mostly good, sometimes pleasurable and many times off-key, or is it a limbo of “grief without torment?”

The big ideas, those that won’t be contained or suppressed, tend in Baxter’s world to be the deeply rooted Judeo-Christian ideals of pity, charity and selfless love. Characters get themselves entangled in the lives of those they are compelled to help. In “Shelter,” a law-school dropout turned baker, a man named Cooper, gives money to the homeless. In contrast, his wife, a prosecutor, is guided by a strong belief in retributive justice formed early at the hands of bullying brothers. When her husband brings home a youth from the shelter where Cooper volunteers after-hours, she and their young son are made profoundly uneasy by the street kid’s behaviour, so much so that she asks the homeless boy to leave. Cooper’s son is so afraid his father will give away everything they own to bad-smelling, weird-talking street-people that he hides his piggy bank. The episode ends with Cooper promising never again to cross that line by bringing the frightening world of the poor into their home. That night in bed he asks his wife to shelter him in her arms. Is this the limit of the man’s brave altruism? The story certainly delineates a line of discontinuity dividing the do-gooder from his loved ones, who happen not to share his enthusiasm for philanthropy. Executed with clarity and economy, the story is yet missing a hot core of emotion that might have rendered the street kid’s subsequent act of retaliation against Cooper not only understandable but inevitable. In lieu of passion, like his failed pianist Baxter posits another defining idea: “What was the price one paid for loving one’s own life? He felt a tenderness toward existence and toward his own life, and felt guilty for that.”

That we fall in love with our lives, often after squandering the riches of youth, is a recurrent theme in Gryphon. “Once, back then in my twenties,” muses Benjamin, narrator of “The Cousins,” “all I wanted to do was to throw my life away”:

But then, somehow, usually by accident, you experience joy. And the problem with joy is that it binds you to life; it makes you greedy for more happiness. You experience avarice. You hope it will go on forever.

The story turns on the apparent surprises any life will reveal, the unexpected developments of character, when its temporal connective tissue is excised. Benjamin, an unemployed actor waiting tables and writing screenplays, morphs into a successful lawyer. Guilietta, the photophobic girl he brings to a party but who disappears, we assume for good, surprisingly turns up later as his wife. As we age we step from one skin into successively better fitting ones. When Benjamin’s rich aimless cousin takes up with a lowly shop-girl, after having lost his fortune, the last thing we expect is that she will transform into a formidable widow. (Her husband dies stepping into traffic, possibly to save a dog, possibly to kill himself.)

Like others in the collection, this story veers into a minor key at its conclusion. An exchange with a taxi driver about the differences between Somalis and Ethiopians makes a bridge to the ending, in which Benjamin watches his wife working at home with an autistic Somali girl, he standing outside looking in. Guilietta looks up when he raps on the window, but because she is wearing her required dark glasses, he can’t see where she is looking. What do those sunglasses represent? Are they the imponderable barriers two people must be willing to accept for their marriage to be happy? If we could see all, know everything our partner was thinking, our union might be unsustainable. “The Cousins” is one of the wisest and most hopeful stories in the book. Structurally it seems off-balance and haphazard in trajectory, that is until we remember that it is describing an elliptical path and that its lacunae aptly illustrate its theme. Study any life, turn away for a time, and when you return to look again the subject has been altered, having grown or shrunk, become a lover, a hater or, worse, someone lethally indifferent to the world.

A Charles Baxter fiction, which we can without diminishing his contribution to the art form call the Well-Crafted Writers Workshop Story, is never humdrum. It may begin slowly and travel with one eye cautiously in the rearview mirror, but it always takes a fascinating route off the beaten path. Estelle, grandmother to Freddie, an obese 12-year-old loner in “Mr. Scary,” is married to Randall, a steady, somewhat boring, semi-retired veterinarian. When two men start fighting in the checkout line of the local discount store where she is buying her grandson a softball bat, we learn that “Stel” has a thing for dangerous, unreliable hotheads. Case in point: her first husband, Matthew, nicknamed Squirrel. Married life with Squirrel was unsettled, to say the least, as they crossed state lines in search of the lucrative venture that would “put them on the map.” Removed yet again, this time as managers of a fishing lodge in rural Minnesota,

Estelle thought they were finally free of adventures. They’d come to the calm expository part of the movie, the part after the big opening attention-getting mayhem. Squirrel’s mischief-making had been all used up, she thought, just flushed right out of him….

Many of the stories in Gryphon are “calm” and “expository” even when their subject matter is anything but. Too often, regardless of its assured execution, the fiction feels like an account from which the vital sap has been carefully drained. Whenever Freddie shows himself to be eccentrically interesting (he loves playing that bizarre musical staple of early horror movies, the theremin), Estelle, who raised him, responds with a squelching, grandmotherly, “that’s nice, dear” damp-down. For all her latent fondness for the bad-boy type, she wants her grandson to be a regular kid who fits in. She calls this stage of her life “Part Two,” with no Part Three in sight or welcome.

The story ends in a way that both reinforces the dominant Baxterian theme, that of good but imperfect people falling late in love with their lives, and subverts it. We know that a softball bat revealed in Scene 1 must be employed before the final curtain, and so, true to the rule, Estelle, Randall, reluctant Freddie and their neighbours gather on a leafy, suburban, long shadowed, summer evening to play a pickup game. The composition has Norman Rockwell slathered across its surface. Baxter, however, reveals himself to be an articulate hard-nose who refuses to alter the universe one iota for his creations. (Maybe our beloved uncle has something stronger than ginger ale in his glass.) His turn at bat, Freddie might well defy augury and make contact with the ball, but don’t expect the outcome to be rousing, fist pumping, pride filled or teary.

Aside from the title story, the quirkiness of which might be its undoing, two in Gryphon deserve to be read for their own sake. In “Snow” the narrator, Russell, remembers a time when his twelve-year-old self, his older brother Ben and Ben’s girlfriend Stephanie walked out onto a frozen lake to see a car that had broken through the ice. “Flood Show,” on the other hand, is a story of middle-age craziness that makes perfect sense, beginning to end. The crises of both stories hinge on water’s inherent danger. Both are also about love and sightedness, in particular the requirement that the latter be in effect for the former to thrive.

In “Snow,” sixteen-year-old Stephanie is uneasy, about the gruesome possibility that a corpse resides in the ice-sealed car, and about the fact that Ben doesn’t really see her, doesn’t pay attention to her the way she thinks someone in love should. Similarly, the way Conor in “Flood Show” once regarded his first wife, Merilyn, explains why they are no longer together. It takes Janet, his second, present wife, a less physically attractive woman than Merilyn, to tell him what went wrong, specifically that he made the mistake of looking at his beautiful bride the way other men did, full of leering lust. In each story a brief moment of eccentricity—Baxter holds tight the reins against full-tilt insanity—is like a lamp being switched on. To get Ben’s attention, Stephanie removes her boots and socks to stand barefoot on the ice before climbing into the car to drive with him, foolhardily, across the lake. To illustrate her frustration that Conor is still in love with his first wife, Janet strips naked in front of him and their children. “I’m different from Merilyn,” she asserts. “You can look at me anytime you want.” All the love, pain and bitterness, her uncertainty, her fear of losing him, resides in that raw gesture. It hurts to watch. Later, when Conor has to be rescued from the rising river by his and Merilyn’s teenaged son, all we feel for the man is the pity we might have for any diminished soul. The rescue itself would have marked an adequate conclusion. The masterful stroke comes next, with the confident son driving his soaked shivering father home. Baxter puts them on an uphill grade behind a slow moving wide-load, an entire house being pulled on a giant flatbed trailer blocking the road. Patience, the sign attached to its tailgate might well be saying, this is your life. It’s unavoidable. Don’t even think about passing.