WONDERLANDS

A veteran author of the craft extolls the many rewards of literature.

In his third nonfiction book, novelist and short story writer Baxter unites the “personal and impersonal, the subjective and the objective.” He describes “Wonderland” as a “small but important subcontinent of Literature” where the “setting is as alive as the characters are, if not more so….The House of Usher looks out at you as you approach it. When you think of Stephen King’s or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, you think of the Overlook Hotel, which has a mind of its own, as does Poe’s House of Usher.” In the first essays, Baxter gently delves into the intriguing technique of how requests, like Lady Macbeth’s request that Macbeth kill Duncan, often set “stories with a particular urgency into motion.” The author ponders how some characters’ strange names—Ahab, Flem Snopes, Bathsheba Everdene—“are their story.” After “being used, the name has been retired.” He notes that “something in the nature of fiction loves inventories and lists,” as he works his way through works by Ayad Akhtar, Thomas Hardy, and William Maxwell. In a nostalgic piece about the author “curator,” Baxter champions writers who preserve “what everyone else is discarding” or forgetting. Rather than just letting a narrative simmer, some writers like to heat it up “in order to cook properly.” Even Chekhov, a master of the “low-temperature situation,” sometimes lets things “boil over,” as in Uncle Vanya. Baxter also probes Under the Volcano’s use of a “hot and often extravagant style” in a postmodernist age that encourages the “cooler end of the emotional spectrum.” In a lengthy, incisive piece on charisma, Baxter writes that in “our literature, America is a breeding ground of confidence men,” pointing to Muriel Spark’s “female Ahab” in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (“reading it is a bit like watching laboratory mice jumping around after being given periodic shocks”) and James McBride’s John Brown in The Good Lord Bird.

Cozy, writerly advice and analysis delivered in a restrained, welcoming manner.