His office doesn’t put on “much of a front” and his apartment is his personal, spartan sanctuary. By Nicole Cliffe June 14, 2012. I yelled with agony. Seriously though, as a person who was brought up with religious faith and then got out of it, I’m always looking for secular manifestations of the sacred. I was captain of the JCC men’s basketball league, thirty-five-and-older division. In a showdown with Lash Canino, Marlowe pretends to be mortally wounded:A darkened window slid open inch by inch, only some shifting of light on the glass showing it moved. Charles Baxter, Author Graywolf Press $22.95 (245p) ISBN 978-1-55597-256-1 It’s how I get through day-to-day life.
Grodstein’s ear is attuned to a narrative voice alternately contrite and self-justified, empathic and unresponsive, perceptive and benighted:“Sometimes it helps to sit inside a building and imagine what it would be like to wreckingball its walls, in order to make sense of one’s orientation.”“I was never as grateful as I should have been for everything I had … Until my recent troubles, I’d always had a pretty good idea of what good would come of things, and what bad, and I knew how to prepare … Where was I during that time?
And even though he is focused on fiction forms (he teaches creative writing to MFA students), there are parallels that exist in other art forms as well.I was also engaged by his description of his proclivities: “As a person who was brought up with religious faith and then got out of it, I’m always looking for secular manifestations of the sacred.” That is an impulse I know well.
Also, their wayward 30-year old daughter Laura, notorious in affluent Round Hill, New Jersey for having given birth to and killed her newborn in a library rest room while in her teens.In “Dysfunctional Narratives,” Baxter springs a stinging rebuke by quoting Mary Gaitskill: “Most of us have not been taught how to be responsible for our thoughts and feelings,” meaning both writers and readers who approach literature from a sense of embedded grievance:About the novel’s action, I’ll say only that Alec, Pete’s 20-year old son, and Laura Stern develop a relationship. The groan became a wet gurgle choked with blood. I like it. In “Against Epiphanies,” Charles Baxter makes a passing reference to narratives of eloquence (action-based) versus narratives of sensibility (the pursuit of insight and recognition). In a chapter called “Against Epiphanies,” for instance, Baxter discusses what a student I used to know called “stupid little realization stories.” Once upon a time, he says, as in Joyce’s “Araby,” the sudden rush of knowledge and/or self-knowledge was new, surprising, and effective.
Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Posted on May 13, 2011 by deborahbarlow. Glass starred the coupe. Novelist, short-story writer, self-described former poet, and creative writing teacher Charles Baxter … Absorbed in my work, I guess, making money, worrying over some stocks and daydreaming about renovating the kitchen. Looking at the chessboard, Marlowe tells us, “Knights had no meaning in this game. So sue me.