In Believers, a collection of seven stories and a novella, Charles Baxter continues his quietly groundbreaking researches into the ways that ordinary people—midwesterners, in towns with names like Five Oaks and Eurekaville—find their lives changed forever by unpredictable, near-magical, and utterly plausible turns of fate. These give the impression of being densely plotted, though when we try to summarize them, we may find that less has happened than we’d thought. What gives the work its density is not event so much as depth: the meticulous renderings of characters’ habits and longings, and of the exterior world that impinges on their private hopes and fears. Each narrative somehow manages to re-create that paradoxical process: the more we learn about anyone, the more mysterious that person seems.
Many of the stories guide their characters toward some sort of revelation, a glimpse of some intuited truth, “terrible and perplexing.” In “Time Exposure,” Irene Gladfelter visits a neighbor who may be a serial killer: “The room looked like a cell inside someone’s head . . . someone who had never thought of a pleasantry but who sat at the bottom of the ocean, feeling the crushing pressure of the water. An ocean god had thought this room and this man up. That was an odd idea, the sort of idea she had never had before.” In “Kiss Away,” a woman named Jodie is offered three wishes by a fat man in a diner (“He had a rare talent . . . for inspiring revulsion. The possible images of the Family of Humankind did not somehow include him”) and fails to ask for the certainty that can protect her from tormenting doubts about her lover. (“She tried to lean into the love she felt for Walton . . . but instead of solid ground and rock just underneath the soil, and rock cliffs that comprised a wall where a human being could prop herself, there was nothing: stone gave way to sand, and sand gave way to water, and the water drained away into darkness and emptiness. Into this emptiness, violence, like an ever-flowing stream, was poured.”) In “Flood Show” a photographer nearly drowns at the moment of realizing that time has failed to heal the wounds of love; in “The Next Building I Plan to Bomb,” a banker’s life is disrupted when he finds a note that may refer to a violent conspiracy.
Nearly all the narratives concern a Manichaean battle between the power of love and the forces of violence. In “The Cures for Love,” a teacher of Latin reflects on how this struggle permeates the classics: “The old guys told the truth, she believed, about love and warfare, the peculiar combination of attraction and hatred existing together. They had told the truth before Christianity put civilization into a dreamworld.” And in the novella, “Believers,” a lawyer speaks as if this ancient contest has already been decided: “Men like to hunt and to kill. Their aim is to dominate. They take considerable pleasure in it. . . . They enjoy the shedding of blood. Bloodshed never bores anyone, does it?”
In “Believers,” the conflict between love and bloodlust reaches an apotheosis large enough to include the political and the metaphysical. Its hero is a midwestern farm boy with a “genius for rapture” and an abiding interest in “the designs of God in nature, and the designs of God in man.” He becomes a Catholic priest, but loses his calling after touring Germany on the eve of World War II. There, he witnesses “evil in a relatively pure form . . . not only the infliction of suffering but its conversion into spectacle, an entertainment for others, a sideshow. That was what had enraged him and enlarged his heart’s knowledge of his own proper place in the world.”
Though these fictions are unrelated, each functions like one of those lenses the optometrist slips in front of our eyes, so that by the time we finish the book, we have a clear vision of the whole, of what the writer is doing. What’s striking here—and what the brilliant novella brings into focus—is how religious Baxter’s concerns are; he writes of reincarnation and the afterlife, of sin and redemption, faith and consolation. One feels he never doubts for a moment that his characters have souls. Yet, unlike the early theologians who proceeded by abstract speculation, sophistry, and logic, Baxter convinces us of the soul’s existence by precisely representing his characters’ inner lives, their imaginative sensibilities and acutely detailed perceptions. A woman is offered a job by “a man whose suit was so wrinkled that it was prideful and emblematic.” Another notes that her creepy neighbor, on crutches after an accident, looks like “a bat in splints.” Yet another reflects that “personality . . . is the consolation prize of middle age.” A tourist in Germany remarks that no one strolls casually through the streets there; instead, “these citizens advanced powerfully toward their destinations, looking like doctors on the way to emergency surgery . . . An insomniac consciousness seemed to animate the place.”
It’s the beauty of the language—the quirky intelligence, the humor, the lively, rhythmic assurance of sentences and paragraphs—that (along with their surprising plots) make these stories fun to read. We’re happy to eavesdrop as characters reveal themselves in speech. (When a man asks his wife what she was in a previous life, she sourly replies, “I didn’t have a previous life . . . Why don’t you ask Ryan over there. Maybe he had a previous life. He might know. Or else we could talk about things that really matter.”) We gladly travel with these men and women, mostly on public transportation. (“Normal people were sometimes hard to find on the bus. Frequently all you saw were people in various stages of medication. But today no lost souls were visible on either side of the aisle.”) We’re even content to watch TV in their peculiar company:
Tonight she checked the screen now and then to see, first, a roadster bursting off a cliff into a slow arc of explosive death, and then a teenager fitting a black shoe sensuously on a woman’s foot. Apparently this movie was some sort of violent update of Cinderella. Now a man dressed like an unsuccessful investment banker was inching his way down a back alley. The walls of the alley were coated with sinister drippings.
More often than not, these fictions end on a note of acceptance, with a character resolving to live bravely amid the contradictions of a painful, frightening, deeply flawed—and ineffably beautiful—world. On occasion, this comfort comes through the mediation of art, a descent of grace that seems like divine intercession. So an unemployed woman staves off panic when a recording of Enrique Granados’s Goyescas reassures her that “she could sit like this all morning, and no one would punish her. It was very Spanish.” In “The Cures for Love,” a Chicago woman, deserted by her boyfriend, seeks solace in a volume of Ovid and, following its advice to avoid solitude and “go where people are happy . . . witness the high visibility of joy,” she travels to O’Hare airport. On the bus back to the city, she has a dream in which Ovid speaks in chatty, aphoristic blank verse so amusing and consoling that she “forgot that she was supposed to be unhappy.”
Reading Believers reminds us that fiction can take us out of ourselves, can sharpen the outlines and colors of the visible world. It’s a book we can enjoy with admiration untainted by rancor or envy—though writers, of course, may secretly wish that they’d written these stories themselves.