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Believers: A novella and stories
n these eight stories, Charles Baxter displays once again "the ability to orchestrate the details of day-to-day reality into surprising patterns of revelation and the knack for describing the fleeting moments that indelibly define a life" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Believers powerfully reaffirms Baxter's standing as a true contemporary master of the short story.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published March 11, 1997
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996 people want to read
About the author
Charles Baxter
94 books428 followersCharles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Baxter is the author of 4 novels, 4 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction and is the editor of other works. His works of fiction include Believers , The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), Saul and Patsy , and Through the Safety Net . He lives in Minneapolis.
Baxter is the author of 4 novels, 4 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction and is the editor of other works. His works of fiction include Believers , The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), Saul and Patsy , and Through the Safety Net . He lives in Minneapolis.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
October 2, 2007
To continue my Charles Baxter love fest . . . at least read "Kiss Away" from this short story collection. The smart, totally non-sappy short story/love story is such a rare thing. This one is hard to shake off and I find myself re-reading it every year or so and find another amusing gem and touching layer to all.
May 29, 2011
Believers: A Novella and Stories is another brilliant collection of stories from writer Charles Baxter. I had not read Baxter in some time so when I started this book, I was struck again with Baxter's freshness of tone and command of craft. However, I not only love Baxter for his skill and talent and inventiveness but for the warmth of his tone. Here is an author that makes me feel a part of the human race with all our weaknesses but without feeling ashamed of it. Elsewhere, I have compared Baxter to Chekhov. This is one reason why: I feel he loves people in all our complexity and messiness.
I recommend this book to everyone who likes or even wants to like the human race as conveyed in fine writing & storytelling.
I recommend this book to everyone who likes or even wants to like the human race as conveyed in fine writing & storytelling.
August 9, 2010
I am over you, Charles Baxter. You're weird and creepy and totally contrived.
July 3, 2018
I sometimes enjoy short stories and took this slim volume of stories along to the beach one day. I'm giving it four stars for the novella, Believers, which was richly drawn, creepy and different. The rest of the stories are around 3 stars. There seems to be a trend with short stories lately, that they have no clear point of view, beginning or end, and that works if there is an overall message or theme or as character development. However, often it comes across as just a few pages of dialogue which seemed dropped off of a larger piece and I just don't get it.
These type of books always include a dinner party story which is about somewhat wealthy, smart city people arguing about random topics. This one was exactly the same as others I have read and I didn't understand it all. The romance story "Kiss" was anyone but romantic to me. Two lazy, dysfunctional people meet up and have a relationship for awhile. Ok. In contrast, the novella caught my interest because it was so different.
A man is writing a story about his father, a priest living in Michigan, who came from a German family. The priest is out foraging one day and meets a wealthy couple who are riding horses. He becomes sort of 'adopted' by the couple who really want to use him for their amusement more than anything else. When they insist on him accompanying them to Germany during the rise of the nazi regime, things get interesting and creepy.
These type of books always include a dinner party story which is about somewhat wealthy, smart city people arguing about random topics. This one was exactly the same as others I have read and I didn't understand it all. The romance story "Kiss" was anyone but romantic to me. Two lazy, dysfunctional people meet up and have a relationship for awhile. Ok. In contrast, the novella caught my interest because it was so different.
A man is writing a story about his father, a priest living in Michigan, who came from a German family. The priest is out foraging one day and meets a wealthy couple who are riding horses. He becomes sort of 'adopted' by the couple who really want to use him for their amusement more than anything else. When they insist on him accompanying them to Germany during the rise of the nazi regime, things get interesting and creepy.
March 16, 2019
Baxter’s work, to me at least, always displays tenderness and empathy for characters even as they do bad things or have bad things done to them. This collection is no different, and although it’s more than two decades old, it has aged fairly well because it is bookended by two incredible pieces of short fiction: “Kiss Away” at the beginning and the novella “Believers” for the closer. Personally, I was more intrigued throughout by Baxter’s newer collection, There’s Something I Want You to Do. But Believers possesses that same inventive spark, mastery of craft, and most importantly, surprise. While reading pieces like “The Next Building I Plan to Bomb,” it’s impossible not to experience the author’s joy and surprise as the stories lead wherever they want to go.
November 12, 2014
This collection of stories, one of them novella-length, dates from early in the writing career of Charles Baxter, whose experimental storytelling style makes of him something of a writer’s writer. By experimental, I mean that he takes the conventional elements of short-form fiction and plays with them in unexpected ways.
In the title story, for instance, the narrator is the son of its central character, a Catholic priest who leaves the priesthood and marries after falling under the influence of a wealthy couple more than a little sympathetic to Adolph Hitler and National Socialism. There are mysteries of all kinds that the narrator never really solves for the reader, while ending on a note that makes you question your own reading of the whole story.
Baxter is especially adept at dialogue, describing so well how a character speaks a line that you can hear the exact register of their voice. He is especially good at capturing the tone of insincerity or thinly disguised impatience. He’s also a master in the use of metaphor to fix a precise image, as here when he describes a man observed at an airport:
A businessman carrying a laptop computer and whose face had a WASPy nondescript pudgy blankness fueled by liquor and avarice was raising his voice at the gate agent, an African-American woman. Men like that raised their voices and made demands as a way of life; it was as automatic and as thoughtless as cement turning and slopping around inside a cement mixer.
If you read strictly for plot, these stories may seem somewhat meandering and can leave you hanging at the end, as when a man pulled from the freezing waters of a flooding river is stopped en route to a hospital by a house being moved that blocks the street. But if you can enjoy connecting the dots of a narrative without a clear set of instructions, Baxter’s stories are enjoyable entertainments, full of surprises and odd turns.
In the title story, for instance, the narrator is the son of its central character, a Catholic priest who leaves the priesthood and marries after falling under the influence of a wealthy couple more than a little sympathetic to Adolph Hitler and National Socialism. There are mysteries of all kinds that the narrator never really solves for the reader, while ending on a note that makes you question your own reading of the whole story.
Baxter is especially adept at dialogue, describing so well how a character speaks a line that you can hear the exact register of their voice. He is especially good at capturing the tone of insincerity or thinly disguised impatience. He’s also a master in the use of metaphor to fix a precise image, as here when he describes a man observed at an airport:
A businessman carrying a laptop computer and whose face had a WASPy nondescript pudgy blankness fueled by liquor and avarice was raising his voice at the gate agent, an African-American woman. Men like that raised their voices and made demands as a way of life; it was as automatic and as thoughtless as cement turning and slopping around inside a cement mixer.
If you read strictly for plot, these stories may seem somewhat meandering and can leave you hanging at the end, as when a man pulled from the freezing waters of a flooding river is stopped en route to a hospital by a house being moved that blocks the street. But if you can enjoy connecting the dots of a narrative without a clear set of instructions, Baxter’s stories are enjoyable entertainments, full of surprises and odd turns.
January 5, 2008
Young love gone wrong. Love it.
February 13, 2008
I'm not a fan of Charles Baxter. Here's why.
March 26, 2021
Violence is somewhere lingering in the periphery of these stories, implied, imagined, absent; as one character reflects, "I keep forgetting that I'm in America...I keep forgetting about the necessities of violence in the U.S.A." When the literal violence is obscured, or uncertain as it is in "Kiss Away" or "The Next Building I Plan to Bomb," it becomes an inner-violence; a conflict of self and of choice—what to believe.
The collection is forthright with its thematic undertaking and yet each story manages to upset the careful balance first implied. In "Flood Show" a man holds onto a past that was only a projection—pictures and glances. In the novella "Believers" one is given the most literal interpretation of the book's theme—a priest's loss of faith in the face of fascism.
Baxter's prose is lithe and moving, and his characters are desperate and witty, and revelatory. One character remarks, "We're the missionaries they left behind when they took all the religion way." In another story, it's no coincidence that a character is a reader of Nietzsche—Baxter aims to reveal a new world of humanist belief that might still maintain a cosmic mystery.
The collection is forthright with its thematic undertaking and yet each story manages to upset the careful balance first implied. In "Flood Show" a man holds onto a past that was only a projection—pictures and glances. In the novella "Believers" one is given the most literal interpretation of the book's theme—a priest's loss of faith in the face of fascism.
Baxter's prose is lithe and moving, and his characters are desperate and witty, and revelatory. One character remarks, "We're the missionaries they left behind when they took all the religion way." In another story, it's no coincidence that a character is a reader of Nietzsche—Baxter aims to reveal a new world of humanist belief that might still maintain a cosmic mystery.
October 27, 2017
I quit on the novella, but this is still five stars
Ethereal fiction-tip of the tongue type writing-the kind that sticks to the roof of your brain. Stories that sometimes you’re not exactly sure what just happened, but they float in your subconscious.
A writer’s writer. As the back jacket states, you’ll wish you’d written it.
Ethereal fiction-tip of the tongue type writing-the kind that sticks to the roof of your brain. Stories that sometimes you’re not exactly sure what just happened, but they float in your subconscious.
A writer’s writer. As the back jacket states, you’ll wish you’d written it.
April 24, 2019
Another great collection from Baxter. He has a knack for taking ordinary characters, putting them in ordinary situations, and somehow utterly surprising me. My favorite story in this collection is the weird and unsettling "Kiss Away," about a young woman who suspects that her boyfriend is an abuser. Unforgettable.
September 8, 2020
Loved it.
September 17, 2024
Read this for class.
December 5, 2011
The stories in this collection are much more interesting to me than the novella, though there is a twist to the novella I had no idea about and I have to give props to Baxter for his ability to be unpredictable in this day and age. The short stories themselves take place in the American midwest but the novella ventures into Nazi Germany so, as you can imagine, it gets pretty ugly.
The stories are what left a resonance on me...the charmer who really deep down loves to beat his girlfriends and the diner magi granting wishes to those who give him change, the man who may be a ruthless killer or may just not distinguish his own actions from the protagonists in stories/plots in movies, the bourgeois dinner party in which the guests imagine their past lives, the man who finds a paper and a nondescript drawing with the words "The Next Building I Plan to Bomb", the new anxious father who teaches students with Learning Disabilities and becomes obsessed with bees....the characters are all very vivid and there is some of Raymond Carver in this but, to be frank, these stories have more of an edge or a point where as his I find myself going "So what" when I reach the end.
In any case, I decided to read all of these stories twice and they were even better the second time. Some of the things that I overlooked earlier really grabbed me and made me pay attention to Baxter's insights about people and America. Baxter has the ability to write so that you actually do believe what he's written, at least in these short stories, so that the readers themselves, you and I, become Believers.
Memorable Quotes:
pg. 25 "Her speech was full of italics."
pg. 54-55 "Right there, right across from Walt Whitman's house, the man who wrote, well, Leaves of Grass, there's a new county prison. Yellow brick with slit windows. There's American ingenuity for you. Whitman on one side of the street, a prison on the other. It was as ugly as men can make it. Barbed wire and concertina wire were around it, like decorations. It was so ugly they didn't need barbed wire, but they had it anyway.
pg. 79 "The walls of the alley were coated with sinister drippings. She bathed in the movies more satisfactorily when they didn't may any sense."
pg. 81 "The guy'd already been drinking too much, and his voice got like a radio that was losing a station."
pg. 86 "The movies were getting into everything now. They spread over everybody like the flu."
pg. 92 "Men often puzzled her. A World War wasn't big enough for them. No, they had to have a universe war and give it a fancy name that most adults couldn't even spell. This end-of-the-world story they could recount until they were blue in the face, going onto strangers' front porches , all dressed up out of respect for the bloodshed to come.
A strange appetite, like something in the Weekly World News, and she had once shared it. You certainly had to believe a lot of things to get through a lifetime."
pg. 103 Clouds, mud , wind, Joy and despair live side by side in Saul with very few emotions in between. Even his depressions are this with lyric intensity. In the spiritual mildew of the Midwest all winter he lives stranded in an ink drawing. He himself is the suggested figure in the lower righthand corner."
pg. 119 "Well maybe we're missionaries, Patsy thinks, as she stumbles and Saul holds her up. We're the missionaries they left behind when they took all the religion away."
pg. 130 "Five days before Merilyn left, fourteen years ago, Conor found a grocery list in green ink under the phone in the kitchen, "Grapefruit, yogurt," the list began, the followed with, "cereal, diapers, baby wipes, wheat germ, sadness." And then, the next line:n"Sadness, sadness, sadness"
pg. 147 "Funny how books put themselves into your hands when they wanted you to read them."
pg. 151 (About O'Hare) "This airport is really manmande, she thought, they don't get more manmade than this."
pg. 231 (About Nazi Germany) "Prayer was useless in Germany. He noticed this the minute he had stepped off the boat. Prayers fell as dead as stones here as soon as they were uttered, were inwardly unanswered, and the fact was so obvious to him that he had been spiritually perplexed since he had arrived. In this place, speaking to God was like trying to carry on a conversation with a fully dressed corpse."
232 (About Nazi Germany) "An insomniac consciousness seemed to animate the place."
The stories are what left a resonance on me...the charmer who really deep down loves to beat his girlfriends and the diner magi granting wishes to those who give him change, the man who may be a ruthless killer or may just not distinguish his own actions from the protagonists in stories/plots in movies, the bourgeois dinner party in which the guests imagine their past lives, the man who finds a paper and a nondescript drawing with the words "The Next Building I Plan to Bomb", the new anxious father who teaches students with Learning Disabilities and becomes obsessed with bees....the characters are all very vivid and there is some of Raymond Carver in this but, to be frank, these stories have more of an edge or a point where as his I find myself going "So what" when I reach the end.
In any case, I decided to read all of these stories twice and they were even better the second time. Some of the things that I overlooked earlier really grabbed me and made me pay attention to Baxter's insights about people and America. Baxter has the ability to write so that you actually do believe what he's written, at least in these short stories, so that the readers themselves, you and I, become Believers.
Memorable Quotes:
pg. 25 "Her speech was full of italics."
pg. 54-55 "Right there, right across from Walt Whitman's house, the man who wrote, well, Leaves of Grass, there's a new county prison. Yellow brick with slit windows. There's American ingenuity for you. Whitman on one side of the street, a prison on the other. It was as ugly as men can make it. Barbed wire and concertina wire were around it, like decorations. It was so ugly they didn't need barbed wire, but they had it anyway.
pg. 79 "The walls of the alley were coated with sinister drippings. She bathed in the movies more satisfactorily when they didn't may any sense."
pg. 81 "The guy'd already been drinking too much, and his voice got like a radio that was losing a station."
pg. 86 "The movies were getting into everything now. They spread over everybody like the flu."
pg. 92 "Men often puzzled her. A World War wasn't big enough for them. No, they had to have a universe war and give it a fancy name that most adults couldn't even spell. This end-of-the-world story they could recount until they were blue in the face, going onto strangers' front porches , all dressed up out of respect for the bloodshed to come.
A strange appetite, like something in the Weekly World News, and she had once shared it. You certainly had to believe a lot of things to get through a lifetime."
pg. 103 Clouds, mud , wind, Joy and despair live side by side in Saul with very few emotions in between. Even his depressions are this with lyric intensity. In the spiritual mildew of the Midwest all winter he lives stranded in an ink drawing. He himself is the suggested figure in the lower righthand corner."
pg. 119 "Well maybe we're missionaries, Patsy thinks, as she stumbles and Saul holds her up. We're the missionaries they left behind when they took all the religion away."
pg. 130 "Five days before Merilyn left, fourteen years ago, Conor found a grocery list in green ink under the phone in the kitchen, "Grapefruit, yogurt," the list began, the followed with, "cereal, diapers, baby wipes, wheat germ, sadness." And then, the next line:n"Sadness, sadness, sadness"
pg. 147 "Funny how books put themselves into your hands when they wanted you to read them."
pg. 151 (About O'Hare) "This airport is really manmande, she thought, they don't get more manmade than this."
pg. 231 (About Nazi Germany) "Prayer was useless in Germany. He noticed this the minute he had stepped off the boat. Prayers fell as dead as stones here as soon as they were uttered, were inwardly unanswered, and the fact was so obvious to him that he had been spiritually perplexed since he had arrived. In this place, speaking to God was like trying to carry on a conversation with a fully dressed corpse."
232 (About Nazi Germany) "An insomniac consciousness seemed to animate the place."
September 13, 2011
"What she loves is the extravagance of feeling that focuses itself into the tiniest actions of human attention, like the tying of this pink shoe...
So says the young mother Patsy in the story "Saul and Patsy are in Labor." I think this "tiny" description offers an appropriate insight into the writing style of Charles Baxter. Never before (save Chekov?) have I encountered a writer who expertly submerses himself in the small things - the little looks, expressions and emotions - that make up the tickings in the day in the life of a human being. The result - as it is with his other collections - is the breaking down of characters and scenes into the most tender of astute observations.
"Kiss Away" tells the story of a young woman embracing her hopes and fears as she uncovers portions of her new boyfriend's past. Jarring pre-climactic scenes add weight to this modern, romantic tale. Another gem, "Time Exposure" finds a middle-aged married couple in a situation where they must choose whether or not to trust their neighbor's character at the risk of alienating each other and "Saul and Patsy" explores the depression that follows the birth of Saul's child. In each instance, the choice to believe is weighed and the lengths one goes to restore trust in another is revealed beautifully.
Even though I loved the title novella, I think my favorite was "Flood Show," a story of a simple man, Conor, looking to reconcile with his ex-wife. This sort of description, flowing from physical to emotional and back again, to me, requires the deftest of touch:
"Despite his size, however, Conor is mild and kindhearted - the sort of man who believes that love and caresses are probably the answer for everything - but you wouldn't know that about him unless you saw his eyes, which are placidly sensual, curious - a photographer's eyes, just this side of sentimental, belonging to someone who quite possibly thinks too much about love for his own good."
Learning about Conor from the inside out helped me to understand why he might take such a risk near the end of the story to be re-united with his wife and I appreciated this from the author.
Though often sad, I never felt like Charles Baxter over-stepped his boundaries as an writer/observer by being overly sentimental in this collection. Rather, I felt compelled to "listen" ever so closely so that I wouldn't miss a word, or a moment, illuminated on a page. Thank you, Charles Baxter, for taking the time to construct such an eloquent collection of fiction.
So says the young mother Patsy in the story "Saul and Patsy are in Labor." I think this "tiny" description offers an appropriate insight into the writing style of Charles Baxter. Never before (save Chekov?) have I encountered a writer who expertly submerses himself in the small things - the little looks, expressions and emotions - that make up the tickings in the day in the life of a human being. The result - as it is with his other collections - is the breaking down of characters and scenes into the most tender of astute observations.
"Kiss Away" tells the story of a young woman embracing her hopes and fears as she uncovers portions of her new boyfriend's past. Jarring pre-climactic scenes add weight to this modern, romantic tale. Another gem, "Time Exposure" finds a middle-aged married couple in a situation where they must choose whether or not to trust their neighbor's character at the risk of alienating each other and "Saul and Patsy" explores the depression that follows the birth of Saul's child. In each instance, the choice to believe is weighed and the lengths one goes to restore trust in another is revealed beautifully.
Even though I loved the title novella, I think my favorite was "Flood Show," a story of a simple man, Conor, looking to reconcile with his ex-wife. This sort of description, flowing from physical to emotional and back again, to me, requires the deftest of touch:
"Despite his size, however, Conor is mild and kindhearted - the sort of man who believes that love and caresses are probably the answer for everything - but you wouldn't know that about him unless you saw his eyes, which are placidly sensual, curious - a photographer's eyes, just this side of sentimental, belonging to someone who quite possibly thinks too much about love for his own good."
Learning about Conor from the inside out helped me to understand why he might take such a risk near the end of the story to be re-united with his wife and I appreciated this from the author.
Though often sad, I never felt like Charles Baxter over-stepped his boundaries as an writer/observer by being overly sentimental in this collection. Rather, I felt compelled to "listen" ever so closely so that I wouldn't miss a word, or a moment, illuminated on a page. Thank you, Charles Baxter, for taking the time to construct such an eloquent collection of fiction.
March 6, 2008
My least favorite Baxter so far. But still beautifully written. Most stories seemed to be about a middle aged man in one way or another. Just didn't really connect with me.
(103)It is no easy thing to be a Jew in the Midwest, Saul thinks, where all the trees and shrubs are miserly and soul-shriveled, and where fate beats on your heart like a baseball bat, but he has mastered it. He is suited for brush and lowland under-growth and the antipicturesque. The fungal smell of wood rot in the culverts strengthens him, he believes.
Clouds, mud, wind. Joy and despair live side by side in Saul with very few emotions in between. Even his depressions are thick with lyric intensity. In the spiritual mildew of the Midwest all winter he lives stranded in an ink drawing. He himself is the suggested figure in the lower righthand corner.
(240) In the dark Mary Ellen Jordan turned her head. She was wearing a hat, with a veil turned back up hear her forehead. The look she gave him altered slowly, as if thoughts were being rearranged or destroyed below the immediate surface of consciousness. And then what she wanted to show him rose up to her eyes, brightening them, and her expression took on its feeling and fastened it there. Her face actually began to redden in a blush. The intensity of it struck him so hard that he felt it in his stomach. Mo woman, no one at all, had ever looked at him that way, with such an arrogant aggressive longing, and she held it, and he wondered why he had never caught her before this moment gazing at him with this nakedness of feeling. She had been careful, she had been watchful: That was why. No, he hadn't been paying attention, and he had been oblivious, gazing at his birds and his plants.
(103)It is no easy thing to be a Jew in the Midwest, Saul thinks, where all the trees and shrubs are miserly and soul-shriveled, and where fate beats on your heart like a baseball bat, but he has mastered it. He is suited for brush and lowland under-growth and the antipicturesque. The fungal smell of wood rot in the culverts strengthens him, he believes.
Clouds, mud, wind. Joy and despair live side by side in Saul with very few emotions in between. Even his depressions are thick with lyric intensity. In the spiritual mildew of the Midwest all winter he lives stranded in an ink drawing. He himself is the suggested figure in the lower righthand corner.
(240) In the dark Mary Ellen Jordan turned her head. She was wearing a hat, with a veil turned back up hear her forehead. The look she gave him altered slowly, as if thoughts were being rearranged or destroyed below the immediate surface of consciousness. And then what she wanted to show him rose up to her eyes, brightening them, and her expression took on its feeling and fastened it there. Her face actually began to redden in a blush. The intensity of it struck him so hard that he felt it in his stomach. Mo woman, no one at all, had ever looked at him that way, with such an arrogant aggressive longing, and she held it, and he wondered why he had never caught her before this moment gazing at him with this nakedness of feeling. She had been careful, she had been watchful: That was why. No, he hadn't been paying attention, and he had been oblivious, gazing at his birds and his plants.
July 23, 2011
From an email to the friend who recommended this book to me: I think I was having difficulty with some of the short stories because I felt like I never got invested. "Kiss Away", "Saul and Patsy are in Labor" and "The Cures for Love" I liked, especially "Saul and Patsy." The others, well, reading them felt to me like glancing at someone just long enough to find them interesting, but then looking away before what they're doing or who they are is ever revealed. This might just be issues I have with the short story format. But it wasn't like that with the three stories I just mentioned. They had soul.
So did the title novella. I actually really liked "Believers." I suspect I'd probably like Baxter more in long form generally. "Believers" was easier for me to latch on to, though, because it was mostly set in the past. I like the distance of non-contemporary stories. It feels easier to conjure empathy, or an empathy-for-the-sake-of-fiction. Maybe because then it's incumbent on the author to hand the context to me, rather than he or she relying on me to bring the context to the story with my real lived experience. I also like spiritual themes, and "Believers" had loads of that.
But none of that is really important. It doesn't say anything about Baxter so much as my own preferences for digesting stories. As far as Baxter goes, I really enjoyed his language. I liked the unexpected details he would provide - gestures, or thoughts and happenings that seem irrelevant at first glance until you realize they're suggestive of something, or lightly metaphorical.
So did the title novella. I actually really liked "Believers." I suspect I'd probably like Baxter more in long form generally. "Believers" was easier for me to latch on to, though, because it was mostly set in the past. I like the distance of non-contemporary stories. It feels easier to conjure empathy, or an empathy-for-the-sake-of-fiction. Maybe because then it's incumbent on the author to hand the context to me, rather than he or she relying on me to bring the context to the story with my real lived experience. I also like spiritual themes, and "Believers" had loads of that.
But none of that is really important. It doesn't say anything about Baxter so much as my own preferences for digesting stories. As far as Baxter goes, I really enjoyed his language. I liked the unexpected details he would provide - gestures, or thoughts and happenings that seem irrelevant at first glance until you realize they're suggestive of something, or lightly metaphorical.
May 9, 2008
I didn’t like these stories as much as the stories in his Harmony of the World collection. My least favorite was the title novella, which just seemed to go on and on until, finally, it becomes clear that the first 100 pages are there only to set up the ending. He could have done that in much less space. I really liked “Flood Show,” although I thought the wife’s speech was a bit too on the nose, particularly given that that is her only appearance in the story. “Reincarnation” was interesting; it sounded like a story from one of his essays. But the whole time I was reading it I had the feeling that I was being set up, and sure enough, I was. “Kiss Away” is more in line with the dissonance that Baxter lobbies for in his book of essays. “The Cure for Love” was pretty good. I especially liked the airport scene when she denies knowing the other woman. The Ovid translations, while in character, might have been a bit much. “Time Exposure” is another one that moves at odd angles, in keeping with the ideas in his essays.
February 4, 2008
The strength of Baxter's writing is that he seems a bit like Alice Munro or Marilynne Robinson, but he's not. His subjects are extensive and on the surface, mutually exclusive, but they all move in very ordinary, intriguing worlds.
March 27, 2008
Excellent short story collection including "The Next Building I Plan to Bomb." Most stories explore the subjectivity of human experience. Especially liked the novella (title story) at the end. Defies expectation.
April 17, 2008
A good collection of short stories dealing with belief and disbelief. I was especially impressed with the title short story about a priest who meets a sinister married couple and goes with them to 1938 Germany, returning greatly changed.
December 16, 2008
Read the novella and loved it. Steady, seemingly simple; then surprise after surprise, not only in the plot but in the structure and layering of the narrative, the past and the present, the "real" and the speculative. Clever, entertaining, and moving. Baxter at his best.
February 14, 2013
The stories can be found elsewhere, but the reason to read this book is for the novella that gives it its title. A meditation on family, faith, and the impossibility of knowing who anybody really is, the novella cuts directly to the heart of its characters and its reader.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
April 15, 2015
Having just finished Baxter's new book of stories, I was intrigued when I happened onto this earlier collection but they are not nearly as appealing. Not sure exactly why but few characters to care about and the novella did not hold my interest at all. (still a 3 because he writes so well.)
November 5, 2016
Baxter is a master of fiction-writing. His word choice is often stunning. He sometimes writers against epiphany which may be baffling to some readers. The novella "Believers" was at times slow-going but definitely worth it. Fiction writers: study this dude.
November 4, 2007
A book of short stories - it is wonderful, warm and touching. Easy read.
November 25, 2007
Mr. Baxter is a remarkable author. It is hard to believe he wrote all of the stories in this book because their voices and themes are so diverse.
March 21, 2008
I love his short stories and his covers ...
March 21, 2008
I don't read a lot of short stories, and for me to really like one is unusual. Baxter is one of my favorites, and this collection is haunting and lovely.
July 5, 2009
Very smart novella and if you ever have a chance to hear him read, do it.
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