Charles Baxter

            Novelist Charles Baxter read some of his work in the Second Writers series of the semester last Thursday. The event was held at Eben Holden at 7 PM. Baxter is currently an adjunct professor of English at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor after working at Wayne State University, Detroit, for several years. .
             Baxter has published four novels and an equal number of short story books along with three poetry collections and a collection of essays on fiction, and is the editor of a collection of essays concerning memory. Baxter's novel The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. .
             Baxter, on a book tour, read a chapter from his new novel, Saul and Patsy. The novel came out earlier this month. It is based on a short story about two newly weds that Baxter wrote about twenty years ago. Saul and Patsy continues from where the short story left. It is a book about Saul coping with the birth of his daughter and having to deal with the problems of sharing the affection of his wife with his daughter. The matters complicate further when a troubled student of Saul's becomes obsessed with his life and later commits suicide in Saul's front yard. .
             The Feast of Love, Baxter's most famous novel, is inspired, in part, by Kierkegaard's belief that that "everybody intuits what love is, and yet it cannot be spoken of directly. Or distinctly. It falls into the category of the unknown, where plain speech is inadequate to the obscurity of the subject." What makes this is a successful novel is that it draws on the love affairs of ordinary people transformed by love.
             Baxter is acknowledged as a brilliant craftsman whose greatest gift is "the compassion with which he reveals his characters, especially his women." He has received countless awards, including fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. His work has been selected for The Best American Short Stories five times.