Oh, and by the way, it’s all chaos, or it’s a system beyond our knowing. They’re snobs, saying, “I’m looking down at this, and I’m telling you how all this works. You’ve seen that video thing in the Onion? The Franz Kafka International Airport? It’s fantastically funny.īut that’s fundamentally it: Kafka is always down here with us, and I don’t get that feeling with some of Pynchon, and I don’t get it with Gaddis or some of the others. Every time you go to an airport, it feels as if it’s the Franz Kafka International Airport. And, though it’s a trivial example, I thought: Kafka was right about this. When I was trying to get my PhD diploma at Buffalo, I kept going to the registrar to find out if I was going to get my degree, the one on paper. His characters are always asking, “Where are we? What is this that I’ve gotten myself into?” Kafka is down here with us, looking around, trying. The characters are trying to figure out what they’re enmeshed in, and there’s an overflow of feeling-mostly claustrophobia, but it can be mixed with other emotions too. In Kafka you don’t even know what the system is. How’s that different from Kafka? You mentioned at your reading last night that you think Kafka is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. They’re placeholders for certain ideas that the writer’s moving around.
The characters don’t come to life they have a kind of symbolic importance, but you don’t view them completely as human beings. That’s what a lot of postmodern writers do, though it seems unfair to Barthelme to say so. That’s power: to think of people as little objects moving around on a chess board. I wanted to be one of the writers who flies way up there and looks down at people like little dots on the map. In your writing about fiction, you talk about postmodernism and about Barthelme and about being enamored of postmodernism’s ethic or ideal. We met with him at the Spokane Club during Spokane’s annual Get Lit! literary festival. It is the work of an artist, teacher, and scholar. So the cumulative impact of Baxter’s work is-like that of the literary giants he cites: Stein, Brecht, Barthelme- more than the work of a prolific writer. He treats his teaching and mentoring of young writers as a natural extension of his vocation, and in the past twelve years he has published two exceptional books of essays on the craft of fiction, Burning Down the House (1997) and The Art of Subtext (2007). For many years he directed the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and he now teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he was born. Unlike many writers employed at universities, Charles Baxter doesn’t complain about his day job. Baxter’s career is marked by this kind of persistence and flexibility and by a generosity that is evident in his teaching. It was his first book of fiction and came on the heels of three failed attempts at novels. I know the logic of them so well.” But he didn’t publish a collection of stories until he was thirty-seven, in 1984.
In an interview with the Atlantic, Baxter said, “I feel as if I’m in my family’s house when I’m writing short stories since I know where everything is. His novel The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000, and he has received National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation grants. Baxter, who has called himself a “former poet,” is the author of five novels and four collections, including Believers, which he described to us as probably his best work.
#FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE USED IN I LOVED HER FIRST BY HEARTLAND PROFESSIONAL#
There is a kind of consensus among professional and amateur reviewers that Charles Baxter is a writer’s writer.