Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Collections of short stories can be a complete joy to read, as they represent something like a Whitman Sampler of character, narrative, and locale. The stories contained within a single cover can comprise a multiplicity of elements far beyond those that can be squeezed into a single, longer work of fiction; they go more places, are more populated with characters, and give the author more opportunities for satisfying conclusions than any novel can. Thus collected stories, like individual bite-sized chocolates, may contain many fillings, have many textures: some nutty, some gooey, some dense or rich or just plain sweet.

While reading them, these collections leave the reader a bit overwhelmed. What to sample next? Leapfrog or simply keep turning the pages? Either way, on finishing the volume, these collections leave the reader fully sated: filled full by plot twists, flushed by turns of phrase, and drunk on imagery.

Other collections are more of a chore to read, with each story simply a variant of the others, and the whole more or less an assembly line of nouns, verbs, adjectives (if you are lucky), and a few well-chosen adverbs.

Here, with the stories more homogenous in texture and in theme, the reader is left more bloated than sated, and, weighty though the reading process might have been, still hungry for something in the way of ideas.

Such it is with Gryphon: New and Selected Stories by Charles Baxter, a collection of 23 stories, seven of which are collected here for the first time.

The fictional world that Baxter creates is a small one—geographically tight, emotionally constricted, and miserly in terms of plot. His is an unhappy world of scary car rides that take place drunkenly on dark, icy streets, or recklessly over Michigan’s frozen lakes, a world of dark or gray places in which the sight of a single lush tree lit by spotlight is enough to entrance.

It is a world populated by men who dress and act as overgrown boys, who drink too much, pity themselves too often, and forget to do the dinner dishes days after dinner is over. It is a world populated by women who willfully ask these drunken men to drive to get them and who wait until they have themselves gotten home safely to tell the men that the relationship isn’t working out. A world in which the women leave, with reason and malice, and the men are left behind, the dishes still in the sink. A world in which a good many things take place, but nothing happens . . .

Baxter has a finite number of fascinations and each is fully explored within the pages of Gryphon. He is fascinated with the classroom and with both the students and the teachers who fill it. He is fascinated with the occult, and, especially, with inappropriate uses of tools of the occult (horoscopes, Tarot decks) with children and within the aforementioned classroom. He is fascinated with the apparent fact that, when women marry, they inevitably marry down, in that they mostly marry men. And he is, more than anything else, fascinated with the homeless. And not just with the idea of homelessness or the plight of those without a home, but, specifically, with tramps, junkies, beggars and desolates (many of whom seem to have been the protagonists of earlier stories seen six months later), who populate his stories and intrude into the narratives.

In the story “Shelter,” they are the central topic: “‘What are we going to do about these characters? They’re on the street corners. Every month there are more of them. Kids, men, women, everybody. It’s a horde. They’re sleeping in the arcade, and they’re pushing those terrible grocery carts around with all their worldly belongings, and it makes me nuts to watch them. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Christine, but whatever it is, I have to do it.’ With his other hand, he rubbed his eyes. ‘I dream about them.’”

In the same vein, consider, from the story “The Old Murderer:” “His neighbor would live, but someday he might overdose, and everyone would feel contempt for him, and if he didn’t OD, there was a good chance he would end up in the gutter that beckoned toward all single men, the gutter that Ellickson believed in more strongly than he did in his God.”

Here Baxter combines two of his strongest narrative threads—the idea of women as saviors (and dishwashers who create an orderly world for men) and of men as disorderly fools (he uses the term “fool” in terms of the Tarot in at least one story) who, left single, are gutter-bound—into a single thought that resounds throughout both of these and all his other stories.

In the same way, the stories are filled with what are surely meant to be telling details and startling descriptions that are meant to enlighten, when, instead, they only remind the reader of his days in writing class, and of the eager students who read aloud, eyes blazing and spittle shooting.

An example comes from the titular story, “Gryphon,” in which the author the stage for what is to come with the description of a teacher who is coming down with the flu: “Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing.”

The reader plods along, finds the improbable plumb line simile and the “exploded himself” and finds his mind taken out of the story with a snigger at the overwrought image of a sneeze.

Which is not to say that Charles Baxter is a not a gifted writer—only that he is a writer who has made a particular choice.

The first indication of his choice comes from the stories themselves, their structures, and from the reader’s knowledge of a modern movement within the world of fiction that subscribes to the notion that the oblique and the artistic are one and the same.

The second indication comes from the impressive list of books that Baxter himself has authored. Among them is one entitled The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. This leads to an Aha! moment in which the reader realizes that if, in reading Baxter’s collection, the reader is searching for a story with a satisfying ending, he will be searching for a long, long time.

To put this collection of stories in Old Testament terms: It’s all Ark, no Covenant. In these 23 stories, we are given a great deal of observation of mannerisms, of idiosyncrasies, of failures and false hopes, without a dash of concomitant meaning. In short, we are given the ornate container in which a story might be placed, without being given the full-blown, meaty story itself.

Baxter reveals himself fully in the text of what might be his most successful story in this volume, “Fenstad’s Mother,” in which the mother, while ill, is visited by a friend who brings along a tape recorder to introduce her to the intricacies of jazz. Upon her son’s surprise arrival, the mother comments,

“‘This is my unique problem, Harry.’ Fenstad’s mother coughed and then waited to recover her breath. ‘I never heard enough jazz.’ She smiled. ‘What glimpses!’ she said at last.

“After she recovered, he often found her listening to the tape machine that York Follette had given her. She liked to hear the Oscar Peterson Trio as the sun set and the lights of evening came on. She now often mentioned glimpses.”

What Charles Baxter is giving us is glimpses. And the reader assumes that, for Baxter, as for Fenstad’s mother, they are enough. And so these stories are filled with them to overflowing. But whether or not these glimpses disguised as stories, these products of subtext if not of plot are sufficient, that is for each reader to decide.

For this reader, they are the stuff of the distant child or the withholding father, who dangle meaning and emotion just out of reach, and not native to the storyteller, whose work, even today, in the cold, cruel, post-modern, post-literary world, is still tangled up with catharsis. After all, at bedtime, when the pool of light illuminates the pages of an open book, the reader’s inner child still calls out, “Tell me a story,” never, “Tell me a subtext”—because surely, surely, subtext alone just won’t do.