Review by New York Times Review
SOME OF OUR sturdiest atheists now allow that those inexplicable, ineffable, somehow enlarging experiences traditionally classed as religious also happen to people who adhere to no particular doctrine, lack acquaintance with the theologians and reject all deities. You could say that religious experience shorn of (most) religious context is the overarching subject of Charles Baxter's winning and ingenious new story collection, "There's Something I Want You to Do." The book follows a group of Minneapolis citizens, including a pediatrician, a young drug addict, a translator and a car mechanic - all of whom, like the rest of us, crave love and meaning and moral goodness while confined by the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of their own personalities. These characters slip in and out of one another's stories, and while some never meet, they eventually constitute, if not exactly a community, a shimmering web of interconnectedness. Nobody would mistake this book for a novel in stories; there are no throughlines, and the material is too far-ranging. But Baxter clearly has had great sport constructing his inventive linkages. A "request moment" using the book's title is planted either verbatim or slightly askew in each story like a bean in a Christmas cake. Some requests hit with the weight of commandment; at least one is a joke. "There's something I want you to do," the dead poet of "Forbearance" informs his stymied translator in a dream. He wants her to give up on the poem that has tied her in knots, and work on one called "Forbearance." The request is a gift to her; the easy translation restores her confidence, and the translated poem proves eerily appropriate to read a few days later at her niece's funeral. "There's something I need," a young man tells a drug dealer in "Charity." After volunteering at an Ethiopian medical clinic, the speaker has brought back a viral arthritis so painful, he's desperate for opioids. But his request opens a trapdoor into crime, addiction and self-obliteration. "There's something I can't stand about this....I don't want you feeding Raphael," the young mother in "Bravery" tells her pediatrician husband when his habitual nurturing threatens her maternal authority. Enraged, he storms out and returns hours later, bloodied, having interrupted a crime and discovered the enormous satisfactions of a well-aimed punch. Moved, his wife tenderly puts him to bed. Her gripe about the feeding can wait another day. "There's something I want you to do," says Wes's bipolar ex-wife, now a bag lady who has resurfaced after 15 years. She won't say what it is. Once spoken, though, the request irradiates the story with her need - to get help, to rejoin a family, to live somewhere - and Wes, a good-hearted mechanic, feels he must address it. "I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She's wreckage. It's as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins." As Baxter said in a 2013 lecture about writing: "Request moments ... expose the ethical obligations that we feel we owe toward others. What can we give to someone by fulfilling a request, and what is their claim on us? Thus they force choices on us, choices that reveal our character." Baxter's secular saints and sinners slide up and down the moral spectrum. The most conventionally religious is Dolores, sweet Wes's mother; she's in the background in "Loyalty" and narrates the powerful "Avarice." A former librarian, she attends Bible study and has been personally visited by Jesus ("He came to me one night and said, in that loving way He has...."). Widowed young when a drunken socialite killed her husband in a hit and run, Dolores found that her subsequent hatred of the woman altered her sense of self. "Looking at me, you would probably not think me capable of murder, but I found that black coal in my soul, and it burned fiercely. I loved having it there." The stout, kind pediatrician with the good right hook and a prophet's name, Dr. Elijah Jones, figures in the most stories and becomes the book's emotional heart. A specialist in mitochondrial disorders in children, he has witnessed "the insane cruelties of God fully on display." He overeats, he decompresses in a coffee shop by the river. In middle age, Eli has "been granted certain ... visitations." While his fellow doctors might prescribe antipsychotics or lock him up, Eli knows he's not delusional. "He was just seeing things as the shamans once did.... He was becoming a holy man." And "the prospect of going mad, or holy, did not seem to be that much of a catastrophe to him as long as he could keep calm while the specters appeared." One such specter is a loquacious Alfred Hitchcock ("Good evening"), who, serving a purgatorial stint of penitence on Eli's riverside bench, hilariously narrates life around them as a movie: "That man who looks like a bum is actually in flight from people who are pursuing him for reasons that I shall disclose once I think of them." The 10 stories are arranged into two thematically linked sections: virtues ("Bravery," "Loyalty," "Chastity," "Charity" and "Forbearance") and vices ("Lust," "Sloth," "Avarice," "Gluttony" and "Vanity"). Baxter hits these sermon topics at odd, sometimes quite oblique angles, so how each theme informs its tale becomes another bean in the cake. Avarice, for the dying librarian in the story of that name, is an addiction to worldly goods so numbing that "hypnotized, you drive away from a dying man stretched out bleeding on the pavement." Chastity, meanwhile, takes the form of a woman phobic about kissing - "like she was guarding her soul," her lover says. I'm still puzzling out what the sloth is in "Sloth." BAXTER HAS PUBLISHED five novels and five previous story collections, along with two books about the craft of fiction that include essays on lushness (he's for it) and epiphanies (he's against them). His prose is lively, well modulated and so well crafted you can't slide a knife between the words. He can match syntax to subject ("after negotiating three hairpin turns and avoiding death by collision from an errant truck out of whose way she had swerved in a last-minute effort to save her own life") and spiral languorously into psyches: "Tonight the air above the river smelled of vegetation, a green turtlelike aroma thick with reptilian life, but despite the attractions of the watery stink, Benny did not cross the street to the sidewalk beside the river until he had passed the unlit park where demons sat coiled patiently in the shadows waiting for him." Literary influences waft through the pages like the visiting phantasms: Doesn't Wes, narrating "Loyalty," have a Raymond Carveresque lilt? And doesn't "Chastity" echo D.H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"? Isn't some of the wordplay distinctly Lorrie Moore-ish (the woman's T-shirt that says "WHOA IS ME," the translator's sardonic observation when she refuses her grocer's romantic poems: "What the world needs now, she thought, is much less love")? The technique can border on the hectic; at times one senses the writer exhorting himself with tips: Make every iteration new! Vary those sentences! Swerve clear of that epiphany! While Baxter perfects his prose, he allows his imperfect characters free range in the fields of the Lord - or whomever. God is watching (as Dolores believes) or he is not (as handsome Harry Albert says), or he takes more of an interest in us (as the Italian shopkeeper says) if we "acquire new vices" as we age. As for those who think they have it all figured out? The elderly, Schindler-rescued Jew in "Vanity" has this to say: Don't kid yourself. MICHELLE HUNEVEN'S fourth novel, "Off Course," was published last year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 8, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Baxter follows his new and selected short story collection, Gryphon (2011), with a book of subtly connected tales pegged to five virtues and five vices. These accomplished stories of precarious marriages and family strife are so laced with paradox and the unexpected and so psychologically intricate, one turns them over and over in one's mind, seeking patterns and gleaning insights. In Bravery, we meet Elijah, a pediatrician growing increasingly distraught over the suffering of his young patients. Elijah serves as the link between characters in the other tales, such as architect Benny, who, in Chastity, falls for Sarah, a suicidal stand-up comic. When she asks him to design a house in which a human being might be happy, he views this baffling request as an architectural koan. Baxter's stories are literary koans, riddling tales that embed moral and spiritual questions in the lives of people who are suddenly confronted by inexplicable troubles; they try to be heroes and sometimes succeed. Gradually, Baxter leads us into eerie and cosmic realms, as in Sloth, when Elijah is assailed by visitations and assures himself that he's just seeing things as the shamans once did. Rooted in Minneapolis, its industrial ruins so poetically rendered, these ravishing, funny, and compassionate stories redefine our perceptions of vice and virtue, delusion and reason, love and loss.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Five stories named for virtues and five for vices make up this collection from a master craftsman. Set mostly in Minneapolis, Baxter's (Gryphon) interlinked narratives feature ordinary people extending themselves beyond the ordinary for those they love, or used to love, or cannot love. In "Bravery," a pediatrician and his new wife visit Prague, where a madwoman's ranting appears to predict their future. In "Chastity," a lonely architect stops a woman from jumping off a bridge; she turns out to be a stand-up comedian whose dark humor and elusive emotions enthrall him. "Loyalty" focuses on a mechanic as he takes his destitute first wife back into his home; years before, she'd abandoned her family, and now she blogs about the experience. "Sloth" shows the pediatrician from "Bravery" in middle age, talking suspense with the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock, who haunts Minneapolis. Baxter's characters muddle through small but pivotal moments, not so much confrontations as crossroads between love and destruction, desire and death: a translator dreams of the poet whose work defies translation, a gay businessman searches the Minneapolis underworld for his lost lover, and a dying woman looks forward to the resurrection like others look forward to weekend football. The prose resonates with distinctive turns of phrase that capture human ambiguity and uncertainty: trouble waits patiently at home, irony is the new chastity, and a dying man lives in the house that pain designed for him. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. In one of his essays on craft, Baxter (Feast of Love) talks about the art of subtext. His new collection of short stories shows him to be a master of that art. His characters, mostly Midwesterners, are smart and well educated but not glib and have strong feelings they can't articulate fully. The book is divided into two sections, with the first part comprising stories titled after classical virtues, e.g., bravery, loyalty, and forbearance, and the second titled for five of the seven deadly sins (lust, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and vanity). This structure may seem overly programmatic and potentially predictable, but the stories themselves are anything but. A few repeating characters play leading roles in both parts. Moreover, the stories named after virtues don't necessarily end happily, nor are those named after vices free of heroic gestures. Among the memorable characters are Benny, who repeatedly falls for difficult women ("Chastity") and falls apart when they leave ("Lust"), and Elijah, a sweet-mannered, handsome young pediatrician who, a few decades later, displays a paunch and eats jumbo bags of potato chips while alone in his car ("Gluttony") even as he fiercely defends the honor of his seemingly taciturn son. VERDICT Baxter's delightful stories will make readers hungry for more. Fortunately, there are more out there, and, one hopes, more to come. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/14.]-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The author's sixth collection of short fiction features stories linked by place, character, verbal echo, and a master's hand for foibles and fellowship. The place is mostly Minneapolis, the repeated phrase is that of the title, with its modest appeal and its larger reminder that no one gets through life without hearing a call or cry for help. A young pediatrician bravely breaks up a mugging. A man who has been mugged (and whose assailant in another story will need help with his drug addiction) stops a woman from leaping off a bridge. A man gives shelter to his ex-wife after she turns into a bag lady. (The book's last use of the title comes somewhat too pointedly from a Schindler Jew.) Several characters have encounters that suggest nonhuman help is available (a spiritual element also lies in the ten stories named after five virtues and five vices). The pediatrician's wife on their Prague honeymoon hears a crone's prophecy of her pregnancy. The doctor, the book's most frequently recurring figure, spends most of one story talking to the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock on a park bench and then asks his wife to pray for him. Bare storylines can't convey the quickly captivating simple narratives around them or the revealing moments to which Baxter (Gryphon, 2011, etc.) brings the reader, like the doctor's exhilaration with the physical violence of beating the muggers. Similarly, Baxter, a published poet, at times pushes his fluid, controlled prose to headier altitudes, as in "high wispy cirrus clouds threading the sky like promissory notes." Nearly as organic as a novel, this is more intriguing, more fun in disclosing its connective tissues through tales that stand well on their own. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
