Believers: A Novella and Stories

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Overview

With his five previous books of fiction, Charles Baxter established himself as a contemporary literary master, in the traditions of Raymond Carver, William Maxwell, and Alice Munro. This radiant new collection confirms Baxter's ability to revel in the surfaces of seemingly ordinary lives while uncovering their bedrock of passion, madness, levity and grief.

Believers powerfully reaffirms Baxter's standing as a true contemporary master of the short story.

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More About This Book

Overview

With his five previous books of fiction, Charles Baxter established himself as a contemporary literary master, in the traditions of Raymond Carver, William Maxwell, and Alice Munro. This radiant new collection confirms Baxter's ability to revel in the surfaces of seemingly ordinary lives while uncovering their bedrock of passion, madness, levity and grief.

Believers powerfully reaffirms Baxter's standing as a true contemporary master of the short story.

Editorial Reviews

Chicago Tribune
A luminous and moving book. . . establishing [Baxter's] place as one of our most gifted writers.
Chuck Wachtel
A remarkable storyteller. . . . Rarely have I been stopped by what I read and moved so deeply. -- The Nation
More Reviews (5) Fewer Reviews
Michiko Kakutani
In these eight stories, Charles Baxter displays once again the ability to orchestrate the details of day-to-day reality into surprising patterns of revelation and the knack for describing the fleeting moments that indelibly define a life. -- The New York Times
Ron Hansen
. . .[O]riginal, gracefully written, always moving, frequently funny and — that rarest of compliments — wise.
— The New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
Baxter's (Shadow Play) sixth work of fiction is something of an incongruity: seven virtuosic stories preceding a novella largely bereft of the stories' shared merits. Ambitious and accomplished, the shorter works here tackle slippery themes and subjects -- fleeting moments of truth; the ambiguities of daily life and the defenses through which ordinary men and women attempt to clarify them. In 'Kiss Away,' for example, a young woman wonders if she should believe a stranger's announcement that her lover has a history of battering women, or if the stranger is no more reliable than the alcoholic who promised to grant her three wishes (which, incidentally, come true). Here as elsewhere, Baxter unrolls his canvas slowly and deliberately, convincing the reader of his characters' vitality and patterning their responses delicately and with pathos. In the title novella, however, the suppleness of the author's observations coarsens into heavy ironies and almost melodramatic revelations. Narrated with deliberate (and often painful) artlessness by the protagonist's son, Believers pits a good country priest against a wealthy and corrupt couple who might be outcasts from a Fitzgerald novel. It is 1938, and they lure him from Michigan to travel with them to Germany, where the wife briefly and admiringly encounters Goebbels and the priest loses his faith (the wife 'throw[s] rocks through the glass of his soul'). Fortunately, the novella comes last: newcomers will have seen what Baxter's reputation is built upon, and admirers will not mind that his gambles do not always pay.
Ron Hansen
. . .[O]riginal, gracefully written, always moving, frequently funny and -- that rarest of compliments -- wise. -- The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
No one will ever accuse Baxter of literary frivolity—and that's the problem. In these eight stories, even the most casual events come bathed in sociopolitical gloss, often to the detriment of Baxter's modest narrative instincts. Believers, the novella that takes up a large part of this volume, strives for world-historical significance to explain one man's loss of faith: the narrator's father, a former Catholic priest who was seduced from his bumpkin modesty in the Midwest by a couple of northeastern smarties, a Protestant husband and wife who aspired to be America's answer to the Cliveden set—witty and urbane fascists, with oodles of dough and a fancy estate in Michigan. The narrator's frustration is simple: He was conceived as a direct result of apostasy and abandoned celibacy. Such clear and easy ironies abound in Baxter's remaining stories as well. In 'The Next Building I Plan to Bomb," a seemingly bland (and heterosexual) midwestern banker finds a threatening message on a piece of paper and decides to act out his own need to be dangerous by engaging in unsafe sex with a young man. Baxter's well-written narratives are distinguished by such surprises—the odd revelation in an apparently ordinary life, like the neighbor who may or may not be a child molester/killer ('Time Exposure'); the happily-in- love young slacker who isn't sure whether her boyfriend is a woman beater or not ('Kiss Away'); and the married father who acts like a fool over his first wife, whom he hasn't seen since she left him over a decade ago ('Flood Show'). Linked by their underlying concern with the forms of passion, these stories are best exemplified by 'The Cures For Love,' arelatively modest tale of a classics teacher who finds solace in Ovid. Baxter's banal commentary about America as mouthed by his characters is slightly more endurable than those same characters' tendency to write things like 'sadness' on grocery lists. A fine writer is here tried (tired?) and true.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780679776536
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 9/28/1998
  • Pages: 288
  • Sales rank: 626,152
  • Series: Vintage Contemporaries Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.18 (w) x 7.98 (h) x 0.58 (d)

Meet the Author

Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of seven other works of fiction, including Believers, Harmony of the World, and Through the Safety Net. The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Biography

Although his body of work includes poetry and essays, award-winning writer Charles Baxter is best known for his fiction -- brilliantly crafted, non-linear stories that twist and turn in unexpected directions before reaching surprising yet nearly always satisfying conclusions. He specializes in portraits of solid Midwesterners, regular Joes and Janes whose ordinary lives are disrupted by accidents, chance encounters, and the arrival of strangers; and his books have garnered a fierce and loyal following among readers and critics alike.

Born in Minneapolis in 1947, Baxter was barely a toddler when his father died. His mother remarried a wealthy attorney who moved the family onto a sprawling estate in suburban Excelsior. From prep school, Baxter was expected to attend Williams, but instead he chose Macalester, a small, liberal arts college in St. Paul. Intending to pursue a career in teaching and writing, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, attracted by a faculty that included such literary luminaries of the day as John Barth and Donald Barthelme.

After grad school, Baxter moved to Michigan to teach at Wayne State University in Detroit. He spent more than a decade concentrating on writing poetry, but after a particularly discouraging dry spell, he decided to try his hand at fiction. He labored long and hard over three novels, none of which was accepted for publication. Then, just as he was about to give up altogether, he attempted one last trick. He whittled the three novels down to short stories, replacing epic themes, extraordinary characters, and ambitious story arcs with the small, quiet stuff of ordinary life. It was a good decision, In 1984, his first collection of short fiction, Harmony of the World, was published. Another anthology followed, then a debut novel. Published in 1987, First Light charmed readers with its unusual structure (the story unfolds backwards in time) and a cast of richly, draw, fully human characters.

Baxter continued to publish throughout the 1990s, alternating between short and full-length fiction, and with each book he garnered larger, more appreciative audiences and better reviews. His breakthrough occurred in 2000 with Feast of Love, a novel composed of many small stories that form a single, cohesive narrative. Described by The New York Times as "...rich, juicy, laugh-out-loud funny and completely engrossing," Feast of Love was nominated for a National Book Award.

"Every time I've finished a book, it feels to me as if the washrag has been rung out," Baxter confessed in a 2003 interview. Yet he keeps on crafting absorbing stories infused with quiet (sometimes absurdist) wit and a compassionate understanding of the human condition. A longtime director of the creative writing program at the University of Michigan, he is known as a generous mentor, and several of his students have gone on to forge successful literary careers of their own.

Good To Know

In our exclusive interview, Baxter shared some fascinating insights with us:

"My novels are sometimes criticized for being episodic, or structurally weird. And they are! I like them that way. It's fairly late in the day -- 2003 as I write -- in the history of the novel, and I think it's fair for writers to mess around with that form, and to stop thinking that they have to write books that move smoothly from the first act to the second act, and then to the climax and the denouement. I like digressions, asides, intrusions, advice, anything that gets in the way of a smooth narcotic flow. New novels should not look like old novels, except when they want to."

"My father died when I was eighteen months old, and I expect the unexpected to happen in life and in art, and my fiction is full, or loaded down, with unexpected fatalities of one kind or another. For me, that's realism."

"I had an unhappy childhood that I thought was happy, and I dove into books as inspiration and relief and comfort and security and information about what people did and how they thought. I can still get happy and sentimental just over the thought of libraries -- the image of a woman sitting quietly and reading is a terrifically sexy image for me."

"Like many writers, I'm private and quiet and observant and bookish. For a physical outlet, I lift weights at the gym two or three times a week, and I don't quit unless and until I've worked up a fairly good sweat. Many writers need an outlet like that to counter the sedentary nature of what they do. I don't have any wild delusions about the greatness of my work: I am happy to work humbly in this field where so many writers have created so many immortal manifestations of the mind and spirit. As Henry James said, you work in the dark; you do what you can; the rest is the madness of art."

    1. Hometown:
      Minneapolis, Minnesota
    1. Date of Birth:
      May 13, 1947
    2. Place of Birth:
      Minneapolis, Minnesota
    1. Education:
      B. A., Macalester College, 1969; Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1974
    2. Website:
      http://www.charlesbaxter.com

Table of Contents

Kiss Away 1
Reincarnation 39
The Next Building I Plan to Bomb 63
Time Exposure 75
Saul and Patsy Are in Labor 97
Flood Show 121
The Cures for Love 141
Believers 163

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