The Apartment/Greg Baxter: Reflections and Instructions for Writers

When both Stacey D'Erasmo and Adam Langer review a debut novel in The New York Times and urge a reader toward the work, I pay attention. Stacey is one of the smartest critical minds around; I know this for a fact. Moreover, I learned about the art of book reviewing years ago while apprenticing (so to speak) under Adam at Book Magazine. More accurately, I watched him write great reviews while I wrote dozens upon dozens of the just so-so variety.

In any case, I bought Greg Baxter's debut novel The Apartment because it had tugged at both Stacey and Adam. Yesterday afternoon and evening, I read it.

It's the most electrifying bit of sustained stillness and near violence that I have held in my hands.

What happens? An ex-military man goes apartment hunting with a young woman in a blurry, probably European town during a snowy day. The details of the day are highly absorbed and precisely communicated. Here is the snow, here is the cold, here is the girl, here are they, together—not boyfriend and girlfriend, not father and daughter, not anything you might presume—and here is the bus they take, the roads they walk, the things they say. Descriptions with diamond points. Sentences that weather a world:

Here, in this city, intense joy and intense sorrow are extinct. The place is too old for that kind of naivete. Everyone here responds to these extinctions by opening doors for each other, or making room at tables—they are generous and polite. I admire this—to celebrate the extinction of hope with ritual and composure. To place coats on the shoulders of women. There isn't a thought left. There isn't a sentence. There isn't a human being. 

It's intense, surely, but it feels sequential, almost straightforward, except when the unnamed narrator tumbles back into the spaces he has left behind—a dirty war, a possibly selfish existence, unnamed crimes against.... Creatures like thoughts. Thoughts like creatures:

I was spending lots of time in museums, especially art museums, and one of the things I gradually became more and more aware of was a ludicrous but entirely spooky sense, which presumably no one else shared, that human beings are unwanted disturbances, that the various works hanging nakedly on walls, for instance, are desperate to evict the living, because to have to watch us plodding around them is torture, and that day it occurred to me that the same could be said for the Aeneid, doomed for eternity to be read by students, snobs, and imbeciles.

This Greg Baxter—how does he know what he knows? About violins. About the Iraq war. About the way a street light works? About mothers who mourn the death of their daughters? The Apartment is so incredibly grounded in the tactile and the known and so equally fantastical and strange that readers must submit to it; Baxter gives us no other choice. We want to know—desperately—if this man will get his apartment. We want to know if he'll be able to exist with his memories. We want to know if he knows more than we do about what it is to live with the truth.

I was not happy, initially, that no bookstore that I visited had a copy of The Apartment. I only reluctantly downloaded it to my iPad, for I'm still a real-book girl as much as possible. But at the end of my read, I found my e-book reward—a Q and A with the author, which is, my writer friends, as valuable as the novel itself.

Among the gems from that Q and A is this:

If an author resists the temptation to type his or her characters, those characters will usually contradict themselves and become vital. If the characters act consistently, they're useless or they're props. No character should fill space, and no character should have a defined role before they appear in a book—they should not serve a purpose. Janos could have been more or less important. Manuela too. They turned out how they turned out. Importantly, I think, a character is worth putting in a novel only if they are—or could be—worthy of being the main character of another novel. No character should ever be, by nature, minor.

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when the government can't work, smart book people do: Maiden Lane Press and Shorefast Editions

On a day in which the U.S. Government (should I capitalize that?) can't seem to find a way to move forward, to lead, I am celebrating two new presses—Maiden Lane and Shorefast Editions—both created by friends of mine, both emblematic of what can happen when smart people take matters into their own hands.

Maiden Lane is the creation of Marly Rusoff, an agent who has worked with some of the most interesting writers of our time: Pat Conroy, Patricia Hampl, Arthur Phillips, Adam Langer, Meg Waite, Robert Clarke, Thrity Umrigar, Lisa Tucker, and Ron Rash, among them. I met Marly years ago, when she helped support the launch of my first book. I've stayed in touch, marveled at her eye and ear, applauded her literary moxie.

And so, when Marly told me about her brand new press—her desire to produce beautiful books that fully reflect on the author's work—I felt the pride I feel when cool people do cool things. Marly once bound books in her father's bindery. She cares about the case, the jacket, the design, and (of course) the words. And for her first foray into this publication effort she chose Moonrise by bestselling author Cassandra King. Moonrise has received much notice across the country and in the south, for the quality of its writing and story (a fresh haunting of du Maurier's Rebecca) and for the beauty of the book itself. It is doing spectacularly well—distributed widely, reviewed by the major trade publications, celebrated by many honors, and selling like hotcakes. A new press is born.

Colleen Mondor is another woman—writer, advocate, reviewer, blogger—for whom I hold much respect. Her beat is Alaska. Her memoir, The Map of My Dead Pilots, is featured in Handling the Truth and continues to sell well long after its publication.

But Colleen is always thinking beyond herself, and, together with Katrina Pearson, a bookseller and publicist in Alaska, she has created Shorefast Editions to help restore to print books that Colleen and Katrina feel are critical to the history of the land they love.

Their first effort in this regard is a reproduction (gorgeous!) of The Flying North, a book written by Jean Potter and originally published in 1945. Potter was a researcher who traveled across that snowy region interviewing the pilots who first flew north of the Arctic Circle, first landed on Mt. McKinley, and pioneered equipment that facilitated takeoffs and landings on sandbars, glaciers, and mudflats. Shorefast isn't just reproducing these historic titles in beautiful packages. It is making sure that bookstores have copies, that magazines are telling the story, that the book itself is being featured prominently at book festivals. They are, in other words, going all the way to make sure that books they believe in find their public.

We can have faith in people when our institutions fail us. We can keep on believing in books, because cool people keep inventing ways to keep this treasured industry alive.

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