Customer Reviews

A RELATIVE STRANGER.

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Many of these brilliant, thoughtful stories are about people at unexpected moments of boiling over. Something is wrong in these characters' lives--a minister anchored in security who desperately needs his own sermon on fear; an adult ed. teacher questioning what he believes and teaches--their emotional well-being, as a whole, may not be in peril, but something is. And Baxter has the grace and patience to take us about as far as one could go into small yet poignant circumstances of recognizable characters. Baxter's prose is lilting yet potent: "He was ball-and-chained to his emotions. On some days the obsession weighed him down so heavily that he could not get out of bed to go to work without groaning and reaching for his hair, as if to drag himself up bodily for the working day." This passage from "Saul and Patsy are Pregnant" illustrates Baxter's gift for confusing the comic and tragic--should these be opposites, one thinks--after reading this stunning collection.

My favorite story in this solid collection is "The Disappeared" -- a Swedish engineer comes to Detroit on business and tries to make sense of the world he finds himself in. It's one of the best stories I've read this decade, and a number of others in this collection rival it as well. (I liked this collection more than "Believers" and "Harmony of the World" -- but his essay collection Burning Down the House is great, too.) Baxter's not a flashy writer, but he's never simple -- more Edward Hopper than Norman Rockwell. Sample one story and you'll probably find the collection worth buying. These stories should last.

Why aren't more people reading Baxter? These wonderful stories are so moving they hold weight against writers like Cheever and Englander. Each is exquisitely wrought and powerful. A true master of craft...and (finally) suspense!

I think it was Raymond Carver who was touted as being one of the writers responsible for "reviving" the lost art of the short story. Carver was an astonishing writer, an author capable of throwing his two cents in but making them look like one. He joins, for my money, writers like O'Connor and Ford (among others), authors with a taste for grit, putting out the kind of deceptively simple stuff that sometimes doesn't really punch you until after you've shelved the book and are thinking about something completely unreleated. "Dirty realism," I believe the critics called it, minimalism's orphaned brother. (Bukowski would perfect it before scrubbing it dry.) Where does Baxter fit in here, though?

He's a hopeful. This collection contains stories often so whithered of meaning, that they rely on nothing more than the reader to give them any kind of serious impact. I'm not going to go into the solipsism and deconstruction that might make these little literary bon mots interesting or clever; sure enough, there's a potency in Baxter's prose, a certain definable direction. Instead of letting the landmarks of his landscape point us onward, though, Baxter usually pounds some pretty large, reflective signposts into place. The best stories in this collection ("The Disappeared," "Saul and Patsy Are Pregnant," and "Snow") are gussied up with abstract philosophizing at the last minute, made cutely poignant by (maybe) the artist's fear of an uneducated audience.

Baxter's point, unfortunately, is pretty much the same in every tale. Every story contains a man who cannot (or won't) be happy, who finds distraction in a world at odds with the awkward ambition man's soul seems to be fat with from the moment he crawls mewling from the womb. God bless these poor tortured fellows.

In some cases, they are blessed -- by women. There's a lilting sexuality in most of the tales, an almost innocent sensuousness that tries impassively to guide these poor, self-deluded souls into calm and peaceful waters. It reads like congratulatory pitying, to me, these peaceful, clairvoyant ladies offering the guidance of only a wrist's slight pressure. There are moments where it's truly beautiful (the end of "Prowlers," the concept behind "Scheherazade," the multiple mockeries of "Shelter"). Still, it doesn't fit right, like a too-tight tie or stockings one-size large; Baxter wants to slip his simple thoughts into the stories like sweet, invisible splinters, but most of them clank in place like rotting railroad ties.

In spite of the sometimes ingratiating mendacity of many of the tales ("Silent Movie" is not what it wants to be, "The Old Fascist in Retirement" is much more than it should), Baxter proves he's got skill. "Scissors" and "Westland" both prove he's capable of telling a story without also clubbing it flat with moralizing metaphors; these are about as good as stories get. It seems, like the dirty realists before him, Baxter's going for something simply wet, something unremarkably muddy, and sometimes he gets there. In other cases, though, the tales are either too clean, too clumsy, or just plain small. I came to this collection at the advice of a friend; I haven't given up on the man ("The Feast of Love" lies somewhere in my stack). I'm not what you would call turned off on the guy, but I've yet to be impressed.

This is a wonderful book of stories. Fenstad skates on his way home from church because he is happy. Harry Fenstad writes brochures for a computer company. He teaches an extension course on composition. His hopefulness and didacticism has been picked up from his mother. Fenstad invites his mother to attend the class. Harry likes skating in the dark with a pharmicist friend, Susan, and he likes having his mother in the back of the writing class. His mother appears at the skating rink and things change, her frailty is exposed.

Detroit has four shopping centers at its cardinal points. The state of Michigan is like Holland. In another story a long lost brother finds a man whose monstrous behavior has just driven his wife and baby out of his house. He hits the brother in a bar following a baseball game. His hobby is building ships in bottles. It turns out that the men have nothing in common but they continue to see each other.

One of the characters, Cooper, decides that he must do something for the street people. Bringing someone home he offends his wife who works as a prosecutor. When he is hit up for money on the street by an old man his young son is offended. The little boy starts to hide his money from his father. A woman of the street misunderstands his interest and believes that he seeks a romantic encounter. He is told to do sweeping at the shelter to overcome his sense of guilt. The collection includes the silence of an Ezra Pound-like poet.

We used this collection of short stories as a text for a creative writing workshop. Baxter is an award winning, literary fiction author. The collection carries a thread of family or relationships in each story. As a text it was very useful. There are a variety of structural elements and the stories are interesting. I can recommend it for academic literary work or purely for enjoyment.

I was assigned this book to read in a class called "Studies in 20th Century Literature." The theme of the course focused on short-story collections written in the last century. At first, I was skeptical of this book, as I am of a lot of modern fiction. We had to read it alongside "Dubliners" and "Winesburg, Ohio", and before beginning to read this book, I wondered how it would stand up to these classics; and when I finished all of them, I came to the conclusion that "A Relative Stranger" is a modern classic. "Winesburg, Ohio" didn't seem real to me, by the way (that's another topic for another arena).

The stories in this collection are masterfully crafted and imaginative. The only story that I thought didn't fit (unless I missed something) was "The Old Fascist in Retirement." I won't go into why. Being from Michigan, I enjoyed the allusions and references to the state and to the city of Detroit and surrounding communities laced throughout the stories. In "Westland", he is on target, describing that city's denizens and their foibles with accuracy. "The Disappeared" is amazing; the reader can really feel the ennui and isolation of the characters. Although the story might seem at first improbable, thinking more about the story led me to conclude that the characters' actions are believable. I think we'd all feel and act the same if we were those characters. I won't go into the other stories here, but in conclusion, I have to say that Mr. Baxter definitely has his craft down. I look forward to reading his other works and seeing what happens to my own writing after assimilating his influence.

The author provides an excellent portrayal of ordinary people faced with frequently occurring dilemmas of comtemporary living. Each story is succinct and well-written. The author conveys a sympathetic tone to these often lonely people. I found the writting style subtle and open to interpretation but not distracting. I would recommend the book to those of a more literary nature.