Interview with Charles Baxter by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais Page 2 of 4 JL/KR: Was the Charlie Baxter character, who ties all the narratives together in The Feast of Love, always part of the novel? How different would the novel be if not for that character? CB: That was not always part of the plan. Originally, the first couple of chapters in The Feast of Love belonged to Diana and to a character named Jonah, whom I eventually cut from the novel. Some excerpts appeared in TriQuarterly and never made it into the book. I had all these first-person accounts of happy or unhappy love lives, and I needed a structure to hold the accounts into some kind of shape and solution. If I didn't explain where these voices come from and how we hear them, the book would seem even more episodic than it is. That is when I decided to use a metafictional device of a narrator, Charlie Baxter, who goes out into the streets of Ann Arbor to collect stories. I didn't think it was particularly wild or experimental. It's actually an ancient way to structure a story. You can find a lot of precedent for this device. Some of the reviewers seemed quite shocked that there is a character named Charlie Baxter, but it is incredibly na?ve to think that this character is me. It testifies to a certain lack of sophistication among readers to believe that just because I say there is a mirror at the bottom of the stairs in his house that doesn't reflect anymore, that in my house there is such a mirror. It has surprised me how taken aback some reviewers are by the Charlie Baxter character. They think I've radically broken some rules. They're quite shocked, and I'm shocked that they're shocked. JL/KR: Do you find that many readers want to locate the writer in the novel? CB: It seems increasingly common that the readership in this countryӠaybe because of the rise of confusion between public and private?ill look at a text and say, "The writer must be here." We're trained, in a way, to go after the personal. For me, one of the great pleasures of reading fiction is getting out of the writer and into a different world. I'm not in the business of self-expression anymore, if I ever was. I try to get onto the page people who are not really like me but whom I can imagine into life. I'm bored with myself. Chloé and Harry are both much more interesting than I am. Readers are fascinated by autobiography, and it may be because mass media encourage a culture of scandal and personal revelation. If you look at a magazine like People, you'll see that the lives of people they follow are distinguished usually by two things: fame and a problem that provides a narrative. It's difficult to publicize writers because they're not famous in that way and they often don't have a problem. JL/KR: In many ways, The Feast of Love is about breaking the rules of fiction, often with a wink to the reader. The character Bradley even tells Charlie that he can't start his novel, also titled The Feast of Love, with a character waking up, which is how your novel begins. CB: Some reviewers have taken me to task for breaking that rule. There are some creative writing teachers who will tell students, "Don't start a story with a character waking up in bed," but it's by no means a universal rule that everybody knows. There's another problem in the book that had to be solved: people don't just talk about their love lives to anybody; it's private. I thought that even given the fact that there is a rupture between the public and private now?articularly with TV shows that make entertainment of the intimate details of regular people's lives? still had to explain the origin of these voices. I needed a character whom people would trust enough so that they would reveal themselves. Once the reader gets used to that, I could eliminate Charlie from the mixture and let the story tell itself. I wanted the sense of the characters speaking. I don't think that you can get that into a book without explaining how it got there. JL/KR: In First Light, you tell the narrative backward, beginning with a brother and sister at middle age and following them to the sister's birth. What prompted you to explore this structure? CB: I was reading a book on 20th century British literature, and there was a reference to a novel by C.H. Sisson called Christopher Homm, which was written in backward chronology. That idea stuck in my head. I had been focused on a book about a brother and sister for some time before that. I saw a little girl pasting stars on the ceiling of her bedroom and thought, "Who does she grow up to be? Maybe she grows up to be a physicist, an astrophysicist." At that point, it occurred to me that I could write this book as a backward chronology because if she were an astrophysicist, a cosmologist, she would be interested in the origins of things. I wanted to go back to the origins of this particular family, not because there is any one point of origination?here isn't?ut because it would give the reader a feeling of simultaneous dramatic moments, all of them in the present tense. First Light is a mosaic novel. You start at the beginning and read forward, which is to say move backward in time. The last chapters feel like a silent movie. I wanted them to be mostly visual because I think that is how almost everybody's first memories seem. Those were the intentions I had when I started First Light. JL/KR: One of the unexpected things about First Light is that we as readers think that because the story begins at the end, we must already know everything about the characters. We expect that only the details will be filled in, but the way you structure this story creates a continual element of surprise. CB: Some readers wanted something huge to happen to Dorsey and Hugh as a reason for the novel existing, but the book is made up of more or less mundane events. I wanted to create a place for the mundane in that book. I don't know why anybody should feel the necessity of blowing up a Chevrolet?aving a moment of violence?o justify the narrative. It's not as if events like that don't occur, but the biggest thing that happens to Hugh is that his father makes him pledge to always look after Dorsey. In its little way, that's quite traumatic for him, and it sets the scene for everything that happens to both of them. JL/KR: How did you research the scientific element of Dorsey's character? Did you know much about astrophysics when you set out to write the book? CB: I knew nothing about it. I don't like research much, but I couldn't very well put a character in a book and say that she's an astrophysicist or a cosmologist and not show that she has any idea what these things are. I did a lot of reading, mostly popularizations of contemporary physics. I took some physicists out to lunch and talked to them. I read accounts of Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos atomic bomb project. The physics is cobbled together from what I read and what I thought Dorsey might think. There are places where she is too ambitious, where an actual, practical physicist is not likely to have thought what she thought. The novel does take some liberties with that material, but I think it's reasonably close to the sensibilities of a young and fairly gifted physicist. The physicsӠissing mass, for example?ives, I hope, a metaphorical dimension to her life. JL/KR: Much of your work is set in the fictional town of Five Oaks, Michigan. What does this setting?nd the cast of characters you weave in and out of your stories?rovide you? CB: It's the joy of creating a model-train layout. I know where everything is in that town. My son once made a map of it so that I wouldn't get confused about the location of various businesses in relation to the river that goes through it. Among the reasons for creating a setting is, first of all, the simple fact that as a Midwesterner I don't have the advantage, or the disadvantage, of calling upon areas that everybody knows about, such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles?nstantly recognizable places that have certain rules of their own that lots of people know. I also don't have some of the more recognizable features of Southern or Southwestern writing. As a young man, thinking of myself as quite an experimentalist, I decided to do something absolutely conventional and characteristic of Midwestern writers, which was to create a community and stay with it, in the way that Sherwood Anderson did. I hadn't expected to stay in Five Oaks as long as I have. It has as many disadvantages to me as it has advantages. But I do have this cast of characters, and I know where everything is. This is my world. I couldn't set The Feast of Love there because I needed a community where everybody talks all the time, and Ann Arbor is full of people who give lectures, go to therapy and sit around talking all day and evening. JL/KR: We even get glimpses of Five Oaks in The Feast of Love, when Bradley visits the town to retrieve his dog from his sister who lives there. CB: It's the ecology of character. Once you've created a character, you don't throw him away. You just save him or her for the next available opportunity, as Philip Roth does with Nathan Zuckerman. It saves wear and tear on the brain cells. I don't have to think of new people. I have a handful of people, including Saul and Patsy, whom I've written stories about. The truth is that you can say most of what you want to say about human beings and their behavior with a relatively limited number of characters if you send them through enough fiery hoops. JL/KR: In talking about character development in Burning Down the House, you write about the importance of not "overparenting" a character. What do you mean by this? How do you avoid it? CB: You have to give characters sufficient desires to get them to move in a particular direction, or sufficient fears to have them moving away from something they are not eager to confront. Richard Bausch likes to say, "I think up characters whom I love and then I visit trouble upon them." In order to visit trouble upon characters, you have to give them something to do, and you can't give them something to do unless they want something. In Burning Down the House, one of the ways I talked about this was to say that if you have "counterpointed characterization," you can usually give a character something to want. As long as you have one or two other people or circumstances on the stage as counterpoints, you'll have a story. I still think that's true, but what I've thought about lately is what I call "congested subtext." What people want on the surface is often not particularly interesting. What's more telling is the congested subtext, which is what they really want underneath what they say they want. It's congested in the sense that the more you unpack it, the less clear it gets. This can be both comic and tragic: you wanted love, but you got fame; you wanted fame, but you got money. In The Feast of Love, Harry wants his son back, but instead he gets Chloé. People don't always get what they want, but what they do get creates the story. I'm still trying to formulate this set of ideas about texts and subtexts. I see it in relation to a Parker Brothers board game from my youth called Careers. In that game, you had to get sixty points, and you had to decide ahead of time what you wanted and in what proportion. The points could be in fame, money or love. You could go for broke and say, "All I want is sixty points in love." The first person to get sixty points in the proportion he or she asks for wins. If you say at the beginning that you want sixty points in love and you get sixty points in fame, you don't win because you've gotten something you didn't want. This is a pretty good metaphor not only for life, but for narrative, as well. J.F. Powers's stories are good examples of this. His priest characters are often in a state of lifelong dramatic irony. They want spiritual lives, but they get worldly lives as priests?aising money, managing the parish day to day. Powers has very little interest in the spiritual lives of these characters. He's interested in priests who've gotten something they didn't expect. JL/KR: This day-to-day management of affairs goes back to what you said about wanting to create a place for the mundane in First Light. Why have you chosen to focus on everyday events in your fiction? CB: One of the blessings and curses of being a late 20th century, early 21st century white, middle-class American is that I'm not privy to a historical calamity unless I go somewhere and observe it. For better or worse, the lives that many Americans experience are incredibly blessed and privileged. As a writer, I have to come to terms with what that means. I can go to Bosnia and write a book about calamity, but then I would have to deal with the problem I call "historical tourism." I can search out metaphysical and historical disasters in the way that, say, Robert Stone does. Or I can try to make a smaller dramatic compass come alive through the attention that I pay to it, which is more or less what I do. My challenge as a writer is to turn the elements of fortune, blessedness and privilege into interesting fictional material. Click to continue