Skillful collection taps into dark, frail reality

In general, I love short stories. They can capture the essence of an experience, memorable characters define and deliver the emotional impact of a force that can not pass many novels. Short stories can also serve as tutorials for aspiring writers, illustrating what constitutes a great and inspired use of language and show us what a tale of good appearance and looks.

This collection of Charles Baxter is a cleverly written, but disturbing.Baxter writes about the particular experiences people have when they meet by chance, for example, a zoo, a bus, in a country from the airport or abroad, or in the same neighborhood. His characters are generally isolated and alone for reasons of divorce, alcoholism, physical or mental illness, irresponsibility, age or simply by choice. They take easily with complete strangers, providing them with food, shelter, money, the use of a car or a certain generosity of others. When they are robbed or otherwise taken advantage of, or when the relationship ends vaguely or badly, as it invariably does, our protagonists are left as alone and lonely as before and usually seem not to understand exactly what went wrong.

Many of Baxter’s stories take place in the Midwestern states, the population of which a number of us think of as clean, sensible, restrained, church-going, blue collar middle class, homogeneous, hardworking and dull.

Baxter shows us, however, that even supposed to boring places have their fair share of eccentrics, drunken, irresponsible, unstable citizens with a bad decision, failed relationships, cabinets shabby, broken cars and decrepit homes . It reminds us that shocking, scary things can happen in these places, too.

Baxter is the. Absurd, dark and gloomy in the mundane is a master of the creation and implementation of tone: the solitude of the cold, dark winters of Michigan, the impenetrability of snowy landscapes under a gray sky, the cold sterility of the ponds and lakes.

In the worlds of his characters, we do not bathe often enough and the clothes are stained, loose and wrinkled.

People have bad breath, smoke and drink too much and show few social graces. The buildings are dilapidated, houses and apartments are crowded and dirty, and the air in a room or a city or country is outdated and unpleasant to breathe.

My favorite of this group is challenging the eponymous "Gryphon", a history professor Mary Poppins-like substitute not said a boy of view. Unfortunately for her and us.it does not land in the household indulgent Banks Mary Poppins flew in, but in conservative, rural community of Five Oaks, Michigan and she has a dark side. His departure carefully, if bohemian appearance begins to fray and deteriorate, and delicious ideas outside the walls become erratic and disorganized. One day she reads odd fortunes of Tarot cards for some of his students. One of the children informed the school principal, and Miss Ferenczi in a few hours away, never to be seen or heard again.Does it really exist, or was it created in our imagination to provide relief from the monotonous predictability of an elementary school classroom?

Charles Baxter's Gryphon: Fabulous Stories of the Ordinary « Short ...

Occupy the small towns, rust belt patches, and anonymous suburbs of Michigan and Minnesota—settings blighted and ramshackle, when not boring and mundane. It’s a corner of ordinary America on which Baxter has made a distinctive claim over a career of short stories carried out in what Joyce Carol Oates (see below) calls the “well-crafted” mode: primarily third person point of view, focus on character, careful use of symbol and metaphor, and a setting in real time and place. What that means is that Baxter lets the stories, not the form, do the work of engaging and surprising the reader. And in these sixteen previously collected and seven new stories, Baxter does that exceedingly well, mining the critical moments of his characters and laying bare the struggle, desire, and heartache that everyday people ordinarily take great pains to hide from each other and themselves.  

Many of the characters in the stories are reduced by circumstances; the fading strains of intellectual aspiration often mark their declines. Classical music is a common thread, from the annoyed disdain of the failed piano prodigy in “Harmony of the World” to the burn-out daughter-turned-nursemaid of “Ghosts.” Learning is pronounced in other ways, too: a PhD student slides drunkenly about the snowy streets on a quest to pick up his former fiancé in “Snow,” a spurned lover finds solace in offbeat translations of Ovid in “The Cures for Love,” a father leans exhaustingly on stores of distancing quotations and manners in “The Eleventh Floor.” But rather than insulating the characters from the humdrum pathos of the culturally middle class—the barbeques and Jay Leno—the intellectual artifacts create difference that helps explore the terrain of weariness—middle management on down—where most of America fights its daily battles.

The recipe for class conflict is at times strikingly simple: get two people with different incomes—and the different agendas, expectations, and interests that come with them—on the same page, and see what happens. Obvious examples stand out, as with the naïve husband who makes a calling of helping the homeless and is betrayed for his trouble in “Shelter,” the good Samaritan of “Westland” who returns a wayward daughter to a turbulent and strangely endearing working-class home life, and the widower advertising exec of “The Eleventh Floor,” who struggles to negotiate his relationship with his son and his son’s new working-class girlfriend. The protagonist of “Shelter” works against his wife’s wishes and perceived common sense, and he’s let down accordingly, but it provokes more than “I-told-you-so” scorn, it opens a window into what we need from each other, in society and in relationships. In “Westland” the Samaritan—not a native-born American—gets an introduction to a shabbier patch of suburbia, a whole neighborhood that’s grown up around the Westland mall. But the runaway girl’s father defies type in a host of endearing and engaging ways. As the end makes clear, it’s not the narrator’s first choice of lifestyle, but give credit where credit is due—people are getting by, finding joy where they can, and there’s something to be learned from that, wherever it’s found. Lastly, in the well-crafted “The Eleventh Floor,” the son is embarrassed by his intellectually uncouth father, who makes a show of his erudition in front of the girlfriend, a grocery store clerk. It is not a story of love transcending class—that the son and the girlfriend will make it is far from a given—but the conflict generated offers fresh perspective to the son-strays-from-his-overbearing-father motif.

Gryphon, New and Selected Stories

Gryphon, New and Selected Stories

Fiction, Reading, Reacting, Writing

Reader Response Criticism on Charles Baxter’s "Gryphon"

Children playing before a statue of Hercules