Book Review Article
Charles Baxter, There’s Something I Want You To Do:
Stories, Penguin Random House, 2015. Vintage paperback, 2016, 221 pp.
The Short-Story Novel
There is probably a better term for this, but I don’t know
what it is. I refer to a book of short stories, so put together as to feature
similar themes and recurrent appearances of the same characters. The result
being, if not a novel, at least something resembling a novel. All of the
stories in this collection have titles featuring one aspect or another of human
character. Part One: bravery, loyalty, chastity, charity, forbearance; Part
Two: lust, sloth, avarice, gluttony, vanity. The stories are presented so that—with
one exception—each story in Part One has a companion story (same characters) in
Part Two.
America in the
Twenty-First Century: Full of Somethings Somebody Wants
Quotations from various stories in the collection:
“something has happened, I need to say something to you, something was about to
happen, something is out there, we’re going somewhere [or nowhere?], something
will happen to me, something wants something from me, there’s a thing that’s
come up.” And of course the line that provides the title of the book: “There’s
something I want you to do.” That line appears five times in various contexts.
In “Loyalty”: the narrator’s bipolar ex-wife shows up in his
life again out of the blue, tells him there’s something she wants him to do,
then won’t say what. In “Chastity” the protagonist Benny Takemitsu shows Dr.
Elijah Jones a hank of red hair he’s found on the street, where recently he has
heard a woman screaming. Elijah says, “There’s something I want you to do. I
want you to get rid of that.” In “Forbearance” a translator is having trouble
getting a poem into English. She dreams of the poet, who tells her to forget
trying to translate that poem. “‘There’s something I want you to do,’ he said.
He pointed at a page, where a poem entitled ‘Forbearance’ appeared. ‘This is
the poem you should be translating. It’s more compatible with you.’” In “Sloth”
a doctor (Jones again) on the verge of a nervous breakdown speaks to his
sleeping wife. “There’s something I want you to do . . . I want you to pray for
me.” In “Avarice” an old woman with breast cancer contemplates making a request
of that same bipolar woman from “Loyalty.” The old woman wants her as her
helpmeet as she makes her way out of life and into death. “There’s something I
want you to do [she thinks of asking her]. I want you to accompany me on this
journey as far as you can.” Note that not much concrete comes out of these
requests, except in the story “Forbearance,” in which the translator takes the
advice of the poet in the dream, successfully translates the poem he points
out.
Elijah Elliott Jones,
M.D.
The first story, “Bravery,” introduces the man who is to
feature as main character of the book as a whole, the pediatrician Elijah
Jones. Here he appears as a young man, meeting in San Francisco the woman whom
he soon marries, Susan. To her eyes “he gave off a blue-eyed air of
benevolence, but he also looked on guard, hypervigilant, as if he were an
ex-Marine.” Furthermore, “his smile was so kind. Kindness had always attracted
her.” She asks him about his name: “Elijah the prophet? Who answers all
questions at the end of time? That one?” She remarks that his parents must have
been religious, or something. He replies that yes, they were “or something.” In
a story much later in the collection his aversion to organized religion meets
up with formidable opponents.
In “Bravery” a few months after they are married Susan and
Elijah take a trip to Prague. “The plan was to get pregnant there amid the
European bric-a-brac.” The result is their son Raphael, who is featured as a
high-school boy much later in the book, in the companion story titled
“Gluttony.” Among other events described in Prague is their visit to the Loreto
chapels. When Susan asks him why he wants to go there, the pediatrician Elijah
replies, “‘Babies . . . Hundreds of babies.’ He gave her a smile. ‘Our baby is
in there.’” Here is a description of what they see when they arrive.
“Eli had been right: carved babies took up every available
space. Surrounding them on all sides—in the front, at the altar; in the back,
near the choir loft, where the carved cherubs played various musical
instruments; and on both walls—were plump winged infants in various postures of
angelic gladness. She’d never seen so many sculpted babies in one place:
cherubs not doing much of anything except engaging in a kind of abstract
giggling frolic, freed from both gravity and the Earth, the great play of Being
inviting worship. What bliss! God was in the babies.”
How appropriate that the pediatrician Eli (Elijah) goes to
this chapel, where he revels in all the babies born, unborn, about to be born,
never to be born. But the rest of this story, including their time in Prague as
well as what comes later—after the birth of Raphael—contains much that is
ominous. Out on the street in Prague they are accosted by “a madwoman with gray
snarled hair,” who appears to deliver a prophecy to Susan—that she will
conceive a child, a son, with her “good-hearted husband,” but will also be
“terribly jealous of your husband because of the woman in him!” Shortly
after that Susan is knocked over by a tram, barely escaping serious injury.
Back home in Minneapolis, after Raphael’s birth, in a burst
of irrationality, Susan suddenly decides that she does not want her husband
feeding, or even holding their baby—even though he is a pediatrician who holds
babies all the time. “You can’t be his mother. You can’t do this. I won’t let
you.” After an argument Elijah storms out of the house. When he returns he is
bruised and bleeding but “smilingly jubilant. The smile looked like one of the
smiles on the faces of the angels in the Loreto chapel.” He tells her that he
broke up a rape in Alta Plaza Park, fought with the assailants, even broke the
jaw of one of them. “So you were brave,” she says, and there we have the
bravery of the story’s title. But that bravery is called into question on the
same page, because “there was something about his story she didn’t believe, and
then for a moment she didn’t believe a word of it.” We, readers, never find out
what really happened, but the radiant image that we had of Elijah at his first
appearance is already besmirched.
That original image of Elijah in Susan’s eyes was near
ideal: “His intelligence, the concern for children, the quiet loving homage he
paid to her, the wit, the indifference to sports, the generosity, and then the
weird secret toughness—where could you find another guy like that?” But now,
before the story is over, something about that image is tainted. The whole
story has such ominous overtones that—were we to predict the future of the main
characters—divorce would be a likely event in that future.
Growing ever fatter, Elijah shows up in cameo roles in a
number of other stories—most prominently as Benny Takemitsu’s friend in
“Chastity.” Dr. Eli spends a lot of time hanging out in a Minneapolis coffee
shop, four blocks from the hospital where he works. Why not go home? Because he
wants first to wind down from all the stress of treating very sick, and
sometimes dying children. The story “Sloth,” describes some of the downside of
a pediatrician’s life. “The family had gathered in the ICU’s waiting area, and
one aunt had said loudly to the assembled relatives that her niece, lying
there, was unrecognizable, and the doctor could tell—from years of
similar scenes—that she, the aunt, was eager to assign blame to someone,
starting with the pediatrician (himself) and then advancing up the scale of
responsibility to the radiologist, the surgeon, and at last God.” The life of a
pediatrician: bereaved relatives, malpractice suits, arguments with insurance
companies that don’t want to pay. Stress.
By the time we get to “Sloth,” the second story of Part Two,
Elijah Elliott Jones, M.D. is afflicted with “visitations,” hearing voices and
having hallucinations. Wandering around near the Stone Arch Bridge—a place that
characters in this book frequently come upon—he is treated to a visit from the
ghost of Alfred Hitchcock, who tells him that his favorite line from all of his
films is this: “Do you know the world’s a foul sty?” Hitchcock also informs him
“that even now as we speak, your friend Benny Takemitsu is being mugged
elsewhere, nearby, down by the Federal Reserve Building.” Hitchcock narrates the
mugging in cinematic terms. This mugging shows up in two other stories, one
(“Chastity”) in which the victim describes it, and another (“Charity”) in which
the perpetrator—drug addict Matty Quinn—gives his version of the episode.
At the end of “Sloth,” back home, Dr. Jones gets into bed
with his wife Susan. The precariousness of his emotional state is reflected in
what he says to her—which she does not hear since she is asleep. “There’s
something I want you to do.” What he wants her to do is to pray for him, he who
has no apparent belief in God. The story ends as he drifts into sleep, “and as
he crossed the river and lost consciousness that night, he felt his own ghost
arriving to embrace his body.” The reader wonders at this point: will this guy
make it through Baxter’s short story collection alive? Spoiler alert: surprise—he
does.
After the ominous notes sounded in the book’s first story
the reader (at least this reader) is surprised to see Susan and Eli still
married later on. Despite her prominence—in being the first character mentioned
in the first story—Susan never amounts to much in later appearances. She bears
a son Raphael and a daughter Theresa, but never seems to be much of a helpmeet
for the troubled physician. In the story “Gluttony”—another tale congruent with
“Bravery” and “Sloth”—we learn that she has joined an amateur writers’ group
and written a short story, in which her own family members, thinly disguised,
appear. Dr. Jones is depicted as the Raphael character’s father, “a balding and
overweight criminal lawyer given to pronouncements.” He “provides comic relief
and a regular income, but somehow is not sufficiently supportive of his wife
emotionally.” Susan finishes him off in the story, “struck down by a Prius
driven by an angry former client named Nancy, seeking revenge.” After the
lawyer’s “painful death from internal bleeding,” at the end of the story “the
boy and his mother engage in troubled speculation about their future.” Ha.
Naïve Elijah reacts favorably to his wife’s imagining him
away in a violent death. He “rather liked the story” and “felt flattered that
she would think of putting him into a piece of writing.” A couple of pages
earlier: “How he loved her [Susan]! He even loved her sadness. But loving your
wife’s sadness was a soul-error. Everyone said so.” So the foreshadowings of
“Bravery” prove reliable, but the good doctor goes out of his way not to look
at the “soul-error” of his marriage. Maybe that is how a lot of marriages
survive: the man and wife each go to great efforts not to look at the reality
of the thing.
“Gluttony” relates to “Bravery” especially in the way that
the theme of babies is developed. The son Raphael seems to have been conceived—on
that visit to Prague—almost as emblematic of one of the babies at the Loreto,
and the unsung hero of “Gluttony” turns out to be another baby, or rather
fetus, Raphael’s own, whom he and his girlfriend “Jupie” decide to abort. Jupie
is for Jupiter, but her real name is Donna. Susan and Eli have started calling
her Jupiter “not because she was godlike but because she resembled a gas
planet. You’d do down through the layers of gas with her, and you never got to
anything solid.” Furthermore, “Political platitudes and unsubstantiated
generalizations just came leaking out of her.”
Who is the glutton in “Gluttony”? Elijah the doctor, who by
this point is addicted to snack food and vastly overweight. By now all of the
promise that seemed self-evident at his first appearance, in “Bravery,” has
evaporated. The most compelling scene in “Gluttony” involves his visit to
Jupie’s parents, the Lundgrens, hardened evangelical Christians who want to
discuss the recent abortion—how both families, in their view, now have “blood
on their hands.” Although Raphael has spent all afternoon crying on the day of
the abortion, neither of his parents seems much taken aback, accepting sexual
license—and the consequent abortion—as something rather normal for young people
of the modern generation. We are not told whether Jupie also was upset over the
action she took.
In the dispute between parents—one set accepting abortion,
the other set horrified by abortion—I suppose that most readers of this book would
be thoroughly on Elijah’s side. After all, not many rightwing people who are
fanatically anti-abortion read collections of short stories. Oddly enough,
however, Jupie’s mother seems to have the upper hand in the argument. Despite
his position as a pediatrician, Elijah never seems to have even contemplated
the complexity of the issue of abortion. Under attack from people who consider
abortion tantamount to the murder of babies, he can do little more than mouth
the usual slogan, “A woman has a right to choose. We all know that.” If only it
were all that simple.
After alluding to the question of suffering children in
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Mrs. Lundgren says to Elijah, “You
opened a jar. The jar was full of pain. It was your jar.” He can find no better
way to reply than with an obscenity, “With all due respect, fuck you, ma’am,
and you, sir, and good night.” She answers that by laughing and saying, “What a
silly person you are . . . Obscenity is not an argument. It is
weak-minded. I had thought you would be more thoughtful. After all, you have a
medical degree. You have not thought any of this through, not any of it.
I can see that now. How shallow is the pool in which you swim.”
She’s right, his pool is shallow, although Dr. Elijah never
admits it to himself. He stumbles off, drives around at random in the
countryside, accompanied by a front seat full of potato chips and other snacky eatables.
Finally, overcome by narcolepsy, he wrecks his car and breaks his leg. The rest
of this story, in which Dr. Elijah Jones makes his final appearance, is taken
up with a description of how he crawls around in the cold, finds his cell
phone, and is, eventually, rescued. But going down that path takes us away from
the main issue in the story, something already foreshadowed in “Bravery”:
abortion in the modern American age.
Wesley, Corinne, Astrid
and Dolores
The second story in the collection, “Loyalty,” introduces a
new set of characters. Wesley Erickson, the narrator, is married, at first, to
a nurse, Corinne. They have a small baby, Jeremy. Wes is, so she complains,
“inattentive to her needs.” This recalls how in Susan’s short story (in
“Bravery”), the husband who stands in for Elijah is “not sufficiently
supportive of his wife emotionally.” Corinne complains about “her rickety
soiled unrecognizable life, her confusion, her panic over our baby, her fear of
being an inadequate mother.” A fellow nurse, Astrid, convinces Corrine that
“she could achieve happiness” if she left Wes. She leaves him, walks out of his
life and that of her infant son. Soon Astrid shows up, “the minute Corinne was
gone.” Wes marries Astrid. Jeremy grows into his teenage years with a new
mother, and then one day Corinne shows back up in Minneapolis, her life a train
wreck. She asks Wes to take her in, at least until she can get herself
straight. Such is the soap opera of this story.
The “loyalty” in the title is, apparently, Wes’ loyalty to
his ex-wife, who has no place to turn and no one to take care of her. Working
as an auto mechanic, Wesley faces the same unfocused anger that Elijah faces as
a pediatrician. As we all know if we have eyes and ears, America in our time is
angry. “If you tell someone that his car’s transmission is shot and will
require thousands of dollars of work, you see anger directed against the
automobile. Or against fate. Or against God for having a hand in bum
transmissions. Or against me for serving as messenger.”
Understandably, teenage Jeremy is not thrilled when his
wreck of a runaway mom reappears. Wes tries to talk to him. “‘I need to say
something to you,’ I say. ‘I just can’t think of what.’” But Jeremy proves a
gamer, a brave soul, comparing the relative minor pain of his situation to that
of someone undergoing torture in Paraguay. “My mother showing up and being
crazy? That is nothing. That’s not even waterboarding.” Jeremy “gives me this
lecture while staring at me with great bravery.” Here we have more overlap. One
story is titled “Bravery” but bravery of a different sort may appear in a
different story, as it does here in “Loyalty.”
This comic story concludes with nothing resolved. Corinne continues
living with Wes, Jeremy and two other women, Astrid and Wes’ mother Dolores. Jeremy
helps Corinne set up a blog, Runaway Mom. Wes ponders, “What will my
ex-wife do all day? My mother says that she will look after Corinne for now.
Perhaps they will go for walks, and my mother will expound about Jesus and how
He is coming again to gather us up.” This passage, so it turns out, is a
lead-in to another story, one hundred pages on into the book, “Avarice,” which
is set only a week after “Loyalty” and describes the same characters and situation.
This time the narrator is Wes’ mother Dolores, who is not a dolorous type at
all, but an upbeat old woman, quite religious, and still in control of her
faculties.
Dolores describes Corinne as “bipolar and a middle-aged
ruin” who “mutters to herself and gives off a smell of rancid cooking oil.” She
decides that “the more honest explanation for her arrival is that Jesus sent
her to me.” Corinne will be, so Dolores decides, someone to lean on as she,
Dolores, deals with the breast cancer that will take her out of this life. The title
of the tale comes in when Jeremy complains to Dolores about how elephants are
slaughtered in Africa for their ivory, and his grandmother chalks this up to
“the avarice.” The story, of course, is not really about avarice at all, or if
it is, it—like so many other stories in the collection—is also about a mixture
of other things, including bravery and loyalty and charity. Dolores and Corrine
take walks around the story, ending up at the ever-present Stone Arch Bridge,
while poor Wes stews at home, overwhelmed by the presence in his household of
so many women: “There are too many of them in the house.”
Benny Takemitsu and
Romantic Love
The story “Chastity,” which is not really about chastity,
features another recurrent character, Benny, a Japanese-American, living, as
are all the characters, in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. In this story, as in
“Lust,” which comes some hundred pages later and features Benny as a younger
man, the main complication of the plot is what they call “relationships.”
Charles Baxter is big on the theme of romantic love, having, e.g., devoted a
whole novel, his excellent Feast of Love, to that theme. That novel is set
in Ann Arbor, where the author was living at the time. Upon making his move to
the Twin Cities and taking up a job teaching at the University of Minnesota,
Baxter moved his fictional production and his characters there.
Within the collection There’s Something I Want You To Do
characters move around between stories, sometimes crossing paths with one
another. In fact, since they all seem to wander around in parks down by the
Mississippi River, they probably all, unbeknownst to them, cross paths. Baxter
misses his chance to create the same mix of characters across different books.
For example, “Chastity” features scenes set in a coffee shop. Here Benny
encounters Dr. Elijah Jones, his friend, whom we recognize from other stories
and who makes it a habit of hanging out at this particular spot. Baxter could
have named the place “Jitters,” having moved it lock stock and barrel from Ann
Arbor, along with its proprietor, Bradley W. Smith—who, let’s say, has vacated
Ann Arbor (and The Feast of Love) after the failure of his third
marriage, along with his friend, good ole Bradley the dog. Baxter chose,
however, not to engage in this sort of interbreeding.
At any rate, here in “Chastity,” as in the later story
“Lust,” the main character Benny’s troubles involve, largely, romantic love. In
“Chastity” Benny comes upon a young woman who appears about to jump from the
Washington Avenue Bridge on the Mississippi. Much given to joking, the woman,
Sarah, tells him that she is out bungee jumping without a bungee cord. “Irony
was the new form of chastity and was everywhere these days. You never knew
whether people meant what they said or whether it was all a goof.” Aha. Had
Baxter published this collection five years later he probably would have
pointed out how irony—along with practically any expression of humor—is now
under assault in the U.S.A., pilloried by the tight-assed purveyors of “woke.”
As for chastity, well that went out of style ages ago.
Anyway. The story “Chastity” is about irony and a rather
peculiar type of person whose life revolves around dabbling in irony. Benny, in
a word, falls in love and marries this ironic young woman, a musician who moonlights
in standup comedy performance. He marries her despite Elijah’s warning: “She’s
going to get up onstage and tell everybody you have a small dick, and they’ll
all laugh.” Sarah doesn’t do that. Instead, she gets up on stage—with Benny in
the front row—and tells everybody that Benny has “a big friendly dick.” She also
takes this occasion to announce to the world, and to Benny, that she is
pregnant.
After they are married Sarah gives birth to a child,
laughing and groaning her way through the birth. Then she dies in a traffic
accident, one of two characters in the book who neglect to fasten seatbelts.
Benny ends up with a new wife, Jane, an architect like himself. In the story
“Lust” we meet him years previous to the events in “Chastity.” Here too he is
in the throes of romantic agony, having just broken up with a girlfriend, Nan, and
intent on recklessly gambling away all his money. At one point he returns
nostalgically to a scene featuring himself and Nan eating breakfast after a
night of love. He concludes that “Wilhelm Reich was correct: orgasms
constituted the meaning of life.” Don’t know where Reich was quoted as saying
that, but he is probably also the author of this truism: “Life can little else
supply but a few good fucks, and then you die.”
Commiserating with Benny in this tale is a friend, Dennis,
once a big hit with women, now dying of cancer. Their interactions form the
basic structure of the story. Here we have a little touch of Eros-Thanatos. In The
Feast of Love Baxter covered almost all incidences of romantic love, all
possibilities. Here, in this short-story collection, we have a bit of
repetition. One new departure is the treatment of Elijah’s love for his wife
Susan, which, to his mind, seems ideal, but is, manifestly, far from that. For
another look at a type of romantic love, see Baxter’s recent novel, The Sun
Collective, which features, among other things, a relationship between a
long-married elderly couple—based largely on mutual bickering.
Matty Quinn and Harry
Albert
The fourth story in Part One, “Charity,” treats the theme of
homosexual love. Matty Quinn, a young man who has worked in Ethiopia as a
teacher and helper at a medical clinic, returns home to Minneapolis afflicted
with some sort of virus infection: “the inflammation in his knees and his back
and his shoulders was so bad that sometimes he could hardly stand up.”
The story is an oblique commentary of the travails of the
U.S. medical system. Limited in funds and without medical insurance, Quinn is
soon brought to his knees, both physically and financially. He becomes addicted
to prescription painkillers, and ends up buying them illegally, from a man
called Black Bird, who sits in a bar reading Shakespeare and advocates for the
reading of books.
“Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down
into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in forever.
Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist.”
Needing money for drugs, Quinn is driven to desperation. “In
the basement room where he slept [crashing temporarily with a friend], there
was, leaning against the wall, a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger, and one
night after dark, in a dreamlike hallucinatory fever, he took it across the
Hennepin Avenue Bridge to a park along the Mississippi, where he hid hotly
shivering behind a tree until the right sort of prosperous person walked by.”
The person is one we have already met in an earlier story, well-meaning and
innocuous Benny Takemitsu. In fact, we get three different descriptions of the
mugging: one from Benny’s point of view (in “Chastity”), one from Quinn’s (in
“Charity”), and one from the point of view of the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock—as
related to Dr. Elijah Jones—(in “Sloth”).
The most interesting character in “Charity” is Harry Albert,
“a field rep for a medical supply company” and Quinn’s boyfriend, whom he calls
“my soul mate, my future life.” They met while both were working in Ethiopia.
Half of the story describes Harry’s coming to Minneapolis from Seattle, to
rescue Quinn, who has now descended into desperate homelessness. In tune with
the book’s practice of presenting companion stories in Part Two to the stories
in Part One, the final story in the collection, “Vanity,” complements
“Charity.” It describes how Harry, on a plane to Las Vegas, encounters “one of
Schindler ’s Jews,” a survivor of the holocaust named, apparently, David Lowie.
Who in this story is vain? Well, Harry, who revels in his homosexuality and
appreciates his own good looks, certainly is. But then, Lowie, an ugly and gratuitously
rude old man, is vain as well.
Among other things Harry learns about his seatmate on the
plane is that Lowie, who claims to be open-minded, has little tolerance for
queers. His experience with almost being gassed by the Nazis, in fact, has
apparently not left him with much tolerance for anything or anyone. At the end
of the story Harry, luxuriating in a hotel room with a gay prostitute, sends
his new friend an email, describing how satisfied he is with his life. A week
later he receives an unsigned reply, only three words: “Don’t kid yourself.”
Amelia and
Forbearance
The final story in Part One, “Forbearance,” stands somewhat
alone, in that it has no perfect counterpart story in Part Two. “Bravery” goes
with “Sloth” and with “Gluttony.” “Loyalty” goes with “Avarice.” “Chastity”
goes with “Lust.” “Charity” goes with “Vanity.” “Forbearance” goes with
nothing, in that the translator Amelia does not show up again in a later story,
except in a cameo appearance at the very end of the book.
Of all the human traits featured in the titles of stories in
this collection, forbearance may be most out of date. That is, at least the
word is. I had trouble even recalling what, exactly, it meant, had to look it
up. “Forbearance: (1) the act of refraining from something;
abstinence; (2) tolerance and restraint in the face of provocation; patience;
(3) LAW the act of a creditor who refrains from enforcing a debt when it falls
due.”
As the story begins, the American translator Amelia—having
rented a villa in Tuscany—struggles to translate a poem titled “Impossibility,”
which is such an impossible piece of literature that “getting these lines into
English was like trying to paint the sun blue.” The poem is written in “an
obscure Botho-Ugaric dialect” by an obscure poet. Amelia is “one of the few
Americans who had any command of this dialect.” Baxter has some fun playing
around with made-up words in this made-up language, then describing the Italian
villagers, but soon the plot shifts to Minneapolis, where a child, Amelia’s
niece Catherine, is dying.
Back home to console her brother, Amelia meets at the
hospital the pediatrician, Dr. Elijah Jones—the one character who links this
story to others. Elijah is shown in his role as commiseration specialist and
comforter: “The pediatrician, after a few pleasantries, took Amelia down the
hall and told her that her brother needed as much comfort and solace as she
could give him, and that it was a good thing she was there.”
The issue of suffering children comes up again, and
Dostoevsky is invoked for the second time in the book—Ivan Karamazov’s words.
We recall the angry aunt from a different story, vociferating in the hospital
and looking for someone—the pediatrician, even God—to blame. Amelia, who “had
always desperately loved pediatricians,” does not prove to be such an aunt.
Jet-lagged and grieving after Catherine’s death, she has a confused dream in
which she meets the poet she is trying to translate. He tells her to forget
translating “Impossibility.” “‘There’s something I want you to do,’ he said. He
pointed at a page, where a poem entitled ‘Forbearance’ appeared. ‘This is the
poem you should be translating.’”
She awakens, immediately translates that poem, then reads it
at Catherine’s funeral. The story concludes with a sort of joke. Attending a
translator’s conference in Baltimore, Amelia tells of her miraculous dream to a
famous old translator, who is astonished, not by her story but by the fact that
this visitation in a dream—old-hat, apparently, to him—had never happened to
her before.
Coda
Beginning lines: “The Stone Arch Bridge crosses the
Mississippi River between Father Hennepin Bluffs Park on the east bank and Mill
Ruins Park on the west in the heart of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This bridge,
which once supported railroad traffic in and out of the city, has twenty-one
stone arch spans. Wikipedia tells us that James J. Hill, the Empire Builder,
had the bridge constructed in 1883, and in the early 1990s it was converted to
a pedestrian and bicycle bridge.
“On warm days in late spring or summer, the bridge serves as
a kind of promenade, or gallery, for pedestrians, and on such days you are
likely to see both visitors and city dwellers walking across it with no
particular destination in view. That obese man, for example . . .”
Baxter wraps up his collection by parading some of the main
characters across the Stone Arch Bridge. The obese man, wearing rainbow
suspenders and walking with his wife—who “might be a doctor, a
pediatrician?”—is, of course, Dr. Elijah Jones. The woman mumbling to herself
behind him—“you might imagine that she’s translating a poem in her head out of
an Eastern European language into English”—is Amelia. Also identifiable amidst
the strollers and bicycle riders are Benny Takemitsu and his wife, along with
Harry Albert. Missing are several other main characters, such as Wesley,
Corinne, Astrid and Dolores. You wonder what has happened to account for their
absence. Have they have fallen out of favor with their creator Baxter, at the
very moment that they are dissolving into fictional air, like all the other
characters in the book as its final pages open and close.
In his last appearance the main character, Dr. Elijah Jones,
somewhat resembles the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock, who appeared to him in
“Sloth.” He is no longer a pediatrician; he is someone who “might be” a
pediatrician. As he fades away little is left of his corporeal self except his
rainbow suspenders. More substantial than the characters—who, like all of us,
are trapped in ephemeral flesh—are the bridges and falls that receive such
prominent mention throughout the collection. It is appropriate that in Charles
Baxter’s latest novel, The Sun Collective—set once more in the Twin
Cities—one of the main characters is a retired structural engineer, a builder
of bridges.
Minneapolis: Stone Arch Bridge at Night
