Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext has a subtext: it feels like it’s really about how fiction might get the distinctive weirdness of contemporary life down on paper. It’s about the importance of listening to our narcissism, of noticing how the inarticulate create meaning, of locating the information actually conveyed by information overload, of decoding faces in a culture both politically correct and cosmetically intense.
Of course, Baxter acknowledges, “the topic I am dealing with is too large and too inclined to polemic, possibly, to be dealt with sensibly.” He is talking about the problem of describing faces in fiction in a time of photoshop and botox, but there is a similar ambition to his other concerns here.
There is also a similar humility to his strategies: he uses telling personal anecdotes to start most chapters and studies particular scenes to ground and focus what could become abstract. So it’s actually meaningful when he does generalize: “ … the great fallacy of most written dialog in our time is that all the characters are listening.
