A Relative Stranger: Stories

This is a wonderful book of stories. Fenstad skates on his way home from church because he is happy. Harry Fenstad writes brochures for a computer company. He teaches an extension course on composition. His hopefulness and didacticism has been picked up from his mother. Fenstad invites his mother to attend the class. Harry likes skating in the dark with a pharmicist friend, Susan, and he likes having his mother in the back of the writing class. His mother appears at the skating rink and things change, her frailty is exposed.Detroit has four shopping centers at its cardinal points. The state of Michigan is like Holland. In another story a long lost brother finds a man whose monstrous behavior has just driven his wife and baby out of his house. He hits the brother in a bar following a baseball game. His hobby is building ships in bottles. It turns out that the men have nothing in common but they continue to see each other. One of the characters, Cooper, decides that he must do something for the street people. Bringing someone home he offends his wife who works as a prosecutor. When he is hit up for money on the street by an old man his young son is offended. The little boy starts to hide his money from his father. A woman of the street misunderstands his interest and believes that he seeks a romantic encounter. He is told to do sweeping at the shelter to overcome his sense of guilt. The collection includes the silence of an Ezra Pound-like poet.

Many of these brilliant, thoughtful stories are about people at unexpected moments of boiling over. Something is wrong in these characters' lives--a minister anchored in security who desperately needs his own sermon on fear; an adult ed. teacher questioning what he believes and teaches--their emotional well-being, as a whole, may not be in peril, but something is. And Baxter has the grace and patience to take us about as far as one could go into small yet poignant circumstances of recognizable characters. Baxter's prose is lilting yet potent: "He was ball-and-chained to his emotions. On some days the obsession weighed him down so heavily that he could not get out of bed to go to work without groaning and reaching for his hair, as if to drag himself up bodily for the working day." This passage from "Saul and Patsy are Pregnant" illustrates Baxter's gift for confusing the comic and tragic--should these be opposites, one thinks--after reading this stunning collection.

The author provides an excellent portrayal of ordinary people faced with frequently occurring dilemmas of comtemporary living. Each story is succinct and well-written. The author conveys a sympathetic tone to these often lonely people. I found the writting style subtle and open to interpretation but not distracting. I would recommend the book to those of a more literary nature.

My favorite story in this solid collection is "The Disappeared" -- a Swedish engineer comes to Detroit on business and tries to make sense of the world he finds himself in. It's one of the best stories I've read this decade, and a number of others in this collection rival it as well. (I liked this collection more than "Believers" and "Harmony of the World" -- but his essay collection Burning Down the House is great, too.) Baxter's not a flashy writer, but he's never simple -- more Edward Hopper than Norman Rockwell. Sample one story and you'll probably find the collection worth buying. These stories should last.

Why aren't more people reading Baxter? These wonderful stories are so moving they hold weight against writers like Cheever and Englander. Each is exquisitely wrought and powerful. A true master of craft...and (finally) suspense!