Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

A rule writers know: Never start something by having your character wake up in bed. The only thing worse would be to open with "It was a dark and stormy night."So here is Charles Baxter in the first line of "Feast of Love," his most acclaimed novel: "The Man - Me, this pale being, no one else, it seems - wakes in fright, tangled up in the sheets."Baxter teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, and he knows and probably teaches the cardinal rule about not beginning something with someone waking up in bed. So he does it in "Feast of Love" to show off and to demonstrate what he can get away with.In "Gryphon," his collection of 23 short stories, seven of them new, he's still thumbing his nose at convention, breaking the rules and managing to get away with it.I either like Baxter's work a lot or find reading him a slog through a literary swamp. "Feast of Love" and "Saul and Patsy" are two of the very best. But I think "Soul Thief," (2008) his semi-autobiographical novel dealing with identity theft is self-indulgent, and a 2010 ebook short story "November: The Lawrence Quint Interview" is as dense and impenetrable as anything I've read.This new collection fits on the shelf right next to "Feast of Love." The characters in all these stories bump into something unexpected or wacky in the extreme and are changed in ways as startling as they are affecting.In "Royal Blue," the story most relevant to today and I think the pick of the pile, the handsome art dealer Nicholas begins to hear words and certain phrases in the color blue. The blue words enter his head bringing a new sense of clarity and offer a new way to interpret the post-9/11 world.In "Horace and Margaret's Fifty-second" we get to sit beside Margaret on a bus ride to visit her demented husband Horace on their fifty-second wedding anniversary. We get an achingly precise and heartbreaking glimpse of what it's like to slip into a world without memory or meaning. "When did you stop kissing me?" her Horace asks.The title story "Gryphon" is the classic of the lot and it's an opportunity to meet Miss Ferenczi, the substitute teacher - the granddaughter of a Hungarian prince - who amazes and astounds her Five Oaks fourth-graders with her observations and predictions. To her young charges she seems to have landed from Mars and manages to change their world view in a way that's as profound as it is quirky.And "Gryphon" much like the others stories all seem to contain some reference to the color blue in a number of different hues. In "Gryphon" it's the "fine blue tint" reflected by the lenses of Miss Ferenczi's eyeglasses. It's the royal blue in the title of that story, and in "Horace and Margaret's Fifty-second" it's the sun, which seemed to Margaret more "grayish-blue than it had for years." A would-be suitor in the old age home where Horace has been parked has eyes that to Margaret seemed "angelic blue." What all the blue references mean is up to the reader to figure out.There's a lot to figure out in all these stories, most of which don't so much end as trail off. They tend to be messy in the amazing way life tends to be uncertain and difficult to define. But all the stories in this collection bear the unmistakable Baxter imprint.You'll find yourself asking how he manages to come up with some of his oddball images and character traits. For example there's Granny Westerby in "Royal Blue" who makes a living inscribing vaguely sexual aphorisms on weather beaten boards, old wine jugs and even the screens of discarded television sets.For all the surprises, literary flourishes and knack for telling an astonishing story simply, Baxter is at his best. And when that happens, he's very, very good.

In the hilarious LUCKY JIM, Kingsley Amis comes close to the perfect description of a hangover. "A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse... His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a secret cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."I reference Amis because Charles Baxter adds meaningfully to the literature of intoxication in two stories in the excellent GRYPHON: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES. In particular, "Winter Journey" shows the sozzled Harrelson, a perpetual Ph.D. student, driving in a night-time snowstorm to pick up his weather-marooned fiancé. "He is seeing two of everything: two sets of streetlights, two streets, two steering wheels, two dashboards. And two red lights, both of which he now runs, unable and unwilling to stop the car before entering the intersection. With scholarly interest he observes that he has missed hitting a blue parked car by perhaps two or three feet. For the first time he understands that it might be a moral offense against God and man to be out driving in a snowstorm, drunk. But it is more of an offense before women to be a nerd, a coward, a man who will not help. He accelerates."Meanwhile, "The Old Murderer" presents Ellickson, who has been sober for "forty-three and a half days, but he still had the shakes. Just filling the coffeepot required maximum concentration... Everything, even the drinking of tap water, called for discipline and tenacity... All day Ellickson endured. The sun rattled violently in the sky. After the passing hours had presented their trials by fire and ice, he would go to bed feeling that his skin was layered with sandpaper. The post-alcohol world contained no welcoming surfaces... He was in a permanent sulk."I mention these two terrific stories because Baxter gets pigeonholed as a writer who explores life in the Upper Midwest, where people are decent and contend constantly with boredom. But the stories in this collection really have no such geographic or emotional limitations. Instead, they are rich and diverse and never repeat. Besides "Winter Journey" and "The Old Murder", my favorites include:o The Next Building I Plan to Bomb: A man faces overwhelming guilt and a sense of insignificance after a reckless and irresponsible liaison at a motel.o Gryphon: An oddball substitute teacher brings strange but inspiring thoughts to a classroom before she implodes.o Ghosts: A single mother makes unnerving and risky choices as she tries to cope with her father's illness and the legacy of her own mother.Still, I do acknowledge that those who grew up in the Upper Midwest (yours truly) may find an extra level of pleasure in some of Baxter's work. In the excellent "Fenstad's Mother", for example, Baxter explores a lyrical connection between abstract academic issues and their ultimate and surprising personalization. At the same time, this story did remind this reader of a forgotten pleasure of Minnesota winters. "Passing a frozen pond in the city park, Fenstad slowed down to watch the skaters, many of whom he knew by name and skating style. From a distance, they were dots of color ready for flight, frictionless. To express grief on skates seemed almost impossible and Fenstad liked that. He parked his car on a residential block and took out his skates..."A terrific collection and highly recommended.

As described. Love this writer, arrived promptly