Book Report: Burning Down the House

16. Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction (1997, 2d ed. 2008) (7/6/18)

I picked up this book because on July 1 I started participating in a six-month-long online writing workshop, and this month the directive is, simply, to read—and write, of course. I thought, "Okay, I'll read about writing." I scanned my shelves, and this book jumped out at me. I have enjoyed Charles Baxter's fiction, and his short book The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story (which I might just have to reread), so I figured this book of eleven essays on various aspects of the craft of fiction would be illuminating.

Boy, and how. Baxter is amazing! He's super smart, extremely well read, incredibly perceptive, and funny. I feel not only enlightened from having read this book, but enlivened as well. Cheered up! Dare I say, happy!

I started out flagging passages I enjoyed (as is my habit), but halfway through I realized that to do the text justice I'd have to flag pretty much every page, sometimes every paragraph, so I broke out the pen and (this is something I typically do not do) started underlining. There's just so much juicy stuff.

Of the book, Baxter says in his preface:

We often pretend, these days, that public lying by politicians has no effect on the stories we tell each other, but it does; or that our obsession with data processing has no relevance to violence in movies, but it might. In almost every essay in this book I have tried to set forth a widespread belief or practice—the belief in Hell, for example, or the recent mania for happy endings and insight—as a precondition to the way in which storytellers (and that means almost all of us) come up with narratives and then tell them. Most of the topics arose from questions that seemed to me both social and literary, both obvious and in some sense unanswerable. Why have we come to think that most of our important memories must be traumatic? What has happened, in this century, to the way in which we think about inanimate objects?

What he is taking on, he says, is nothing less than "the storytelling of everyday life." And he does so by means of "the wild claim." As he puts it, "There are a number of wild claims here, an occasional manic swing toward the large statement. Most of them are meant to be playful rather than ponderous, but they were intended to set fire to the house. Gertrude Stein talks about 'the excitement of unsubstantiated generalities.' Yes, exactly."

The "generalities" that he takes on are these: dysfunctional narratives ("mistakes were made": the art of taking responsibility for our failures; avoiding the "fiction of finger-pointing"); defamiliarization (juicy, contradictory, paradoxical detail and emotion: the opposite of the obituary write-up; "the way in which we recognize ourselves in an action and simultaneously see someone we don't recognize"); epiphanies (against the therapeutic model); the inner life of objects (the estrangement, or solace, of the familiar); counterpointed characterization (parallel visions, as opposed to protagonist-antagonist story lines); rhyming action (dramatic repetition; echo effects); melodrama ("the invisibilities of power"; "the recognition, dramatically, that understanding sometimes fails, articulation fails, and enlightenment fails": the dramatization of villainy); Donald Barthelme (the poetry of inappropriate longings; the yoking of the "virtuosic-articulate with the flat banal"); stillness (as an intensifier, as a mood creator; the importance of wonder); happiness (and the twin problems of innocence and blindness); and double-voicing (saying what one would like to be true as if it were true, even though one knows that it probably isn't).

And now I'm going to mine the New York Review of Books for more of Baxter's essays. His approach to the world gives me hope.