Gryphon, by Charles Baxter (Vintage Books, 2011)
Ah, springtime. Finals are fast approaching for students everywhere, and in Minnesota, it seems we are all just waiting for a little relief from the stress—not to mention, the long-lasting winter weather has been a heavy burden this year. In the spirit of academia, I decided to take a look at a collection of short stories we have mentioned once before; one which was written by a professor of mine in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. And, in the spirit of springtime, I figured there was nothing better than to read a collection of stories which are all set in (and often add a little humor to) the Midwest. The collection is called Gryphon, and the author is Charles Baxter.
Charles Baxter—much like the legendary gryphon after which his collection is named—thrives in the surreal. Through his writing, he allows his audience to slip behind the curtain of reality; to stand backstage and watch life unfold from a perspective that is not quite fantastical, but not entirely real, either. Whether he is discussing the art of forgetting, as he does in his short story “Horace and Margaret’s Fifty-Second,” or the art of, well, art (see “Royal Blue”), Baxter always manages to approach his subjects from a unique standpoint; one that asks his audience to question the role of personal perception in our own realities. This theme rings true for all twenty-three short stories in his latest collection, including seven debut stories, which have not yet been published or anthologized elsewhere.
Most of the stories in Gryphon are set in the Midwest, which makes me feel right at home in his collection. From Minneapolis, to Detroit, to the fictional Five Oaks, Michigan, Baxter has established a strong, powerful sense of the Midwest throughout his writing. However, he still manages to add a somewhat surreal mood to his stories, making his writing endlessly engaging. Baxter’s stories often focus on disruptions of normality: the events that send the calm routine of Midwest life spiraling into a new realm of life.
Baxter’s title story, “Gryphon,” illustrates this idea quite accurately. “Gryphon” explores the ways in which a quirky fourth-grade substitute teacher alters her students’ perception of reality by giving them a constant jumble of facts, myths, and lies. This teacher—Miss Ferenczi—encourages her students to explore the powers of the imagination, and to think about reality as a fluid and ever-changing concept, rather than a concrete, definitive one. As Charles Baxter himself stated on his website,
[Miss Ferenczi] seems to feel that young people should be exposed to exotic facts and possibility of this sort… Ms. Ferenczi likes to expose the members of the class to these amazing facts (some of which are true, some of which are mythic, and some of which are simply untrue) as a way of expanding their sense of wonder.
—“Gryphon: Often Asked Questions”
charlesbaxter.com
In fact, even Baxter’s use of the gryphon as his title expresses his knack for the surreal. A gryphon, according to Egyptian and Mongolian myth, is a legendary creature with the body of a lion, but the head and wings of an eagle. In Baxter’s words, “…these parts are combined in order to create a new, imaginary thing that does not exist in the world until someone thinks of it.” His constant emphasis on imagination and its power in shaping reality shines through in his work—not only in “Gryphon,” where fictionalization is obvious, but in his other stories as well. “The Winner,” for example, details the experience of a young reporter who follows a reclusive millionaire to the woods of Lake Superior for an interview. The further into the trip the reporter gets, the more he loses touch with his own reality. In this story, as in many, Baxter weaves an eerie, surreal mood into seemingly normal descriptions:
In what appeared to be a sitting room close to the central hallway, he deposited himself onto a coal-black sofa. On the opposite wall another work of art had been installed, an enormous monochromatic study of what appeared to be human teeth reconsidered in a post-Cubist style…Krumholtz, turning his gaze away, looked down at the floor and noticed that he had tracked dirt in from the backyard… He felt tired and hungry. For a moment, he closed his eyes.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw Angus and Ping standing in front of him, staring at him. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
—“The Winner”
As a creative writing student at the University of Minnesota, I can now say that I have completed almost a full semester of class with Charles Baxter (pending my final paper) and have taken many classes from his former students. This concept—a writer’s ability to capture the space between fantasy and reality—has been the topic of many classroom discussions and in-depth literature analyses. What, in fact, gives a writer this ability? Charles Baxter has posed this question many times in the past sixteen weeks I’ve spent in his classroom. We’ve studied the ways in which authors set the mood for a story, and the techniques writers use to build characters and to establish settings. We’ve picked apart paragraphs for sentence structure, and sentences for word choice. However, never has Charles Baxter used his own work as an example (perhaps he’s too modest to present his own work, as we Midwesterners tend to be) and yet, he seems to be one of the best examples of the craft. From my studies, and from my journey through Gryphon, I’ve learned that walking the line between fantasy and reality is truly an art—the ability to help a reader connect to something that is just out of reach is one that very few authors have managed to master. And trust me, we’ve studied many authors over the course of the semester.
Charles Baxter’s clear and concise prose carries the reader seamlessly through each of his stories. His characters are interesting and relatable, and his plots are extremely enticing. Not to mention, he brings his sense of humor from the classroom into his stories.
I’ve learned a lot from Charles Baxter over the past few weeks. Not only has his University course taught me invaluable lessons about the art of writing, but his collection of short stories, Gryphon, has given me incredible insight into the relationships between perspective and reality, and the incredible power of the imagination. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Baxter’s class to non-university students (though I would love to) I can—and do—recommend this collection of short stories. It’s the perfect, light read to carry you into the summer.
The Curfew by Jesse Ball (Vintage Books, 2011)
Jesse Ball’s novel The Curfew is a beautifully echoing story of survival of a father and daughter in a time of an eerily violent regime. The main character, William Drysdale, is an epitaphorist (who used to be an excellent violinist) who lives with his eight-year-old mute and starkly intelligent, riddle-loving daughter Molly in a city that has been overthrown and fallen under strict, authoritarian, violent times which are only talked about in hushed, under-the-breath tones. Mysterious deaths and an always-watchful eye of the government keeps the population fearful and in check, until an almost undetectable resurgence turns the tables. It is one of these revolutionaries, an old friend that William runs into after many years, who draws William to their dangerous cause with the promise of knowing information about William’s wife’s disappearance years before when the regime came to power through violence and many dead, missing bodies. William leaves Molly with the next-door neighbors to go out after curfew in search of answers, and both embark on their own dangerous journeys of cat and mouse.
Experimental in form, the novel doesn’t look like your typical novel; some pages have text blown up to huge font sizes, and others have wide blank spaces that allow the heaviness to settle. Dialogue is marked by an em dash instead of quotation marks, and run-on, overly flowery sentences have no place in this novel.
Ball tells the story in sparse, clipped language throughout, but still manages to achieve great depths of character, background story, and complex emotional turbulence. With a background in poetry and prose, Ball calls upon both genres in this novel to carry the reader between the white spaces. His poetic, deliberate word choices and dialogue carry immense, sage weight, yet also maintain a surface-level lightness that prevents the reader from getting bogged down. For example, while her father is off searching after curfew, Molly goes over to her kind, elderly neighbors, and puts on a puppet show with Mr. Gibbons, who used to be a puppeteer. Using this child-like metaphor, Molly explores the dark realities of the world she lives in. This is made especially clear in one particular conversation when Molly asks (she communicates through writing and sign language) Mr. Gibbons why, of his mountains of puppets (animals, kings, queens, etc), he has no child-puppets:
—There are never child-puppets in puppet shows, said Mr. Gibbons. Children must imagine thmeselves to be all the puppets, and can’t afford to just feel they are the child-puppets. Besides, when disastrous things happen to the other puppets, it is all right, but it is very difficult for children to see disastrous things befall children.
*And animals.
—That’s true, but at least then it stays in the imagination and doesn’t stick in the heart as fear.
Mr. Gibbons had the talent that many puppeteers have of speaking to children as though he believed they were intelligent and could understand a thing or two.
Each moment is important, and picking up on subtleties is key to understanding the underlying action in this novel. I’ve heard from others that The Curfew is not Ball’s best efforts, but as the first piece of Ball’s writing that I’ve read, I have to say that it pushed me to go looking for more of his work. The style of writing and the story itself are refreshing, mesmerizing, and beautifully crafted; it’s a story that followed me around long after putting it back on the shelf.
Have you read other works by Ball (either prose or poetry)? If so, how does The Curfew compare or contrast? What other authors can you think of who command such large, aching presence with spartan language?
