A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Three Things at Once: Charles Baxter’s Character Descriptions

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a relative stranger charles baxter

In the stories in A Relative Stranger, Charles Baxter allows his characters to be seen through the eyes of other characters and what the observing character notices often tells as much about them as about the observed. All of this is brought together with brightly active language with connotations far beyond the few words spelled out on the page.

Prowlers

In “Prowlers,” Robinson, observes of his daughter: “[b]ehind her brown-rimmed glasses, her eyes are fierce. She looks like a twelve-year-old district attorney with a good case and witnesses.” He feels as though his daughter has put him on the defensive. She is young, “twelve,” but she is also insistent and he knows she has a point. She goes on to push him with questions about his wife who is downstairs flirting with his best friend. She is “fierce” in confronting the truth that he would rather avoid as he sits in his room writing about faith rather than insisting on faithfulness.

Westland

In “Westland,” Warren observes Earl’s new woman, Jody. He says: “she was pretty in the details, and when she looked at Earl, the lenses enlarged those eyes, so that their love was large and naked and obvious.” He doesn’t describe her eyes as doe-like, but the image is there all the same. Warren sees Jody as innocent, more innocent than Jaynee. Jody is not a classic beauty, but Warren finds her “obvious” devotion to Earl attractive but also simple. Warren with his background in therapy is observing a messy family dynamic between Earl, Jody, and Jaynee and he is simultaneously pulled in by the bareness of their relationships to one another and also repelled by the obvious dysfunction.

The Old Fascist in Retirement

When the old fascist in “The Old Fascist in Retirement” observes “that rare green scent of oak leaves that American women sometimes carried with them: the odor of innocence, the odor of what-if-everybody,” he is reacting as much to the woman’s culture as to her. The word “green” connotes freshness and his repetition of the word “odor” implies stench more than other words he could have used like “aroma” or “smell.”  And his reference to “what if everybody” is a direct rebuke of the openness of American culture in contrast to his own. He later goes on to talk about the sense of history of the long-living oak tree.

The implication of meaning is also something I enjoyed in Grace Paley’s writing. I like the unexpectedness of some of Baxter’s phraseology. The viewing of one character through the eyes of another is something I enjoyed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing. This colorful observation of one character by another gives the reader a rich view of both characters. I can learn from the economy of describing two characters at one time. One is described explicitly and the other implicitly through the author’s careful portrayal of what is important to that character. It allows a deeper understanding of the character. The grace with which Baxter introduces an abstract idea and then elucidates it just enough to get the reader’s mind moving around the possibilities implied by the words he has chosen is enviable.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of A Relative Stranger from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Characterizing Chekhov’s “The Darling”

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In Anton Chekhov’s “The Darling” from the collection Stories, Olenka is a caregiver to the point that she subsumes her identity to mimic that of the one she cares for. By approaching the topic through description and explanatory sentences, Chekhov fully immerses the reader in the story.

stories anton chekhovChekhov names the nature of Olenka’s character early in the story in the following passage: “She was always fond of some one [sic], and could not exist without loving.” He then mentions some of the family members she has loved. But prior to this, her husband, Ivan Petrovitch Kukin, (aka Vanitchka) has had a large blowup about the vulgarity of the patrons of the story. I was drawn into the drama of Kukin and didn’t see this first clue, the subtle unfurling of Olenka’s personality. When she first parrots his opinion, “‘But do you suppose the public understands that?’” I thought we were seeing an action she would habitually take, but I didn’t yet realize this was the key to her nature. It isn’t until Chekhov revealed that the actors referred to her as “Vanitchka and I” that I got the point.

All of the details of the story point to the revelation about Olenka that she becomes a mirror of the one she loves; and Chekhov says it plainly several times. But because he says it plainly and also demonstrates through the action of the characters (I would argue that he never goes into full-blown scenes), the reader is enveloped by Olenka and her nature, rather than being assaulted from one direction. If, for example, Chekhov had simply told the reader over and over what Olenka was like, it would have felt hollow. If he had shown us her nature through action only, we might not have gotten the point. It is precisely this marriage of exposition and explanation that makes the story so rich. And because his explanatory sentences are so simple and direct, they don’t feel like an assault to the reader’s understanding of the story. They feel like an insight not a direction.

Regarding Olenka’s second husband, Chekhov shows her consumed by his lumber business as she “dreamed of perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber far away.” He then goes on the say, “Her husband’s ideas were hers.” The entire story is woven with the warp of exposition and the weft of explanation. When Olenka is alone and she fails to muster opinions, Chekhov gives a beautiful description of her wasting away. He also tells us, “she had no opinions of any sort.”

When she begins caring for the veterinarian’s son, Chekhov writes, “Now she had opinions of her own.” What is interesting is the opinions are still not on matters that pertain to her daily life, but rather to the boy’s schooling. Her devotion continues, even when the object is less willing.

It is a short story, eleven pages in the collection I read, but it is a full story. Because Chekhov focuses on this one aspect of Olenka’s character and because he approaches it from more than one angle, the reader is enveloped in a world that is all about Olenka’s assumption of her loved ones’ worries and opinions.

I often worry that I am over-explaining things, but this story showed me that it is possible to go into minute detail about something as long as it is fully explored and done through more than one method. Olenka’s nature was evidently important to express, Chekhov based an entire story on it. It will be important for me to selective about the things I highlight in this way (although I can choose to highlight more because I am working on a novel and not a short story), but if I don’t explain them and expose them, they may not be in the story in the way I want them to. Storytelling is seduction.

A note on the [sic]: obviously I am reading a work in translation, but the use of “some one” versus “someone” more than once in the story made me want to know if this would be as peculiar in Russian or if the translation was somewhat outdated. I couldn’t help but think that the translator was trying to convey the nuance of Chekhov’s phraseology by stressing the individual “one.”  Of course, I have no evidence either direction, but it certainly enhanced my understanding of the story.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Chekhov’s Short Stories from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.