{"id":4484,"date":"2015-06-04T07:32:37","date_gmt":"2015-06-04T11:32:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4484"},"modified":"2015-06-04T07:32:37","modified_gmt":"2015-06-04T11:32:37","slug":"charles-baxters-careful-touch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4484","title":{"rendered":"Charles Baxter\u2019s Careful Touch"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(photo: Pa\u0161ko Tomi\u0107, Creative Commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n

Tin House\u2019s blog, The Open Bar, recently published a wide-ranging interview with Charles Baxter<\/a>, touching on such writers\u2019 dilemmas as including humor, narrative voice, and creating resonance. Baxter has written five novels and five short story collections and teaches at the University of Minnesota. He also created one of my most treasured \u201cwriting bibles\u201d\u2014The Art of Subtext<\/em>: Beyond Plot.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Tin House interviewer, Susan Tacent, starts by talking to him about humor in literary fiction and how difficult it is to achieve. \u201cIt has to look easy,\u201d Baxter says, \u201clight as a feather, effortless. . . . Trying to be funny is the death of comedy.\u201d The subtlety he goes for (in an era of the cheap one-liner) relies on characters\u2019 being unintentionally funny, especially those who usually are \u201cterribly serious: monomaniacs are hilarious.\u201d The Producers<\/em> has been playing in our CD mix, and I can\u2019t help but think of Dick Shawn as Hitler, never noticing how ridiculous he is. Such incongruities between characters\u2019 and readers\u2019 perceptions can be arranged by the author, he says, but must use \u201cinvisible wires.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, he tells Tacent, narrative voice \u201cshould arrive naturally and not be forced\u201d and writers develop their own unique voices, whether they are striving to or not. Some writers\u2019 voices are overbearingly strong, while others recede. Baxter\u2019s preference is the \u201cpale neutrality of Checkhov\u2019s prose.\u201d How different are these three contemporary literary voices, which seem apparent in even a sentence or two, picked at random:<\/p>\n