Charles Baxter’s novel, The Sun Collective, came of age in November of 2020. A Minneapolis author thoughtful of relationships, politics, and the mysteries of suburbia and small towns, talks about his process.
Baxter notes the novel is one of convergence. An older couple looking for their adult son on the streets and among the homeless, meet a young couple devoted to The Sun Collective. The point of view is shared between Harold and Alma of the older couple and the younger woman of the couple, Christina.
Mitzi: “How do you sit down everyday and bring those thoughts based in real things and put them into characters and a story?”
Charles: “I had to get inside the skins of these characters and I had to talk to them in effect and ask them, what do you want? What are you going to do? Then I had to say to myself, “What kind of interesting trouble are you going to get them into? How long do they have to get into trouble? How big a trouble can they get into?”
Charles: “You just keep working your way through what has to happen. What the characters want for themselves and want for others. If they want something bad, so much for the book. Bad news for the character is good news for the story.”
On reality and realism: “I wanted the novel to have a kind of realistic basis but also to give off the shimmer of the fantastical and the uncanny.”
When you start asking what is reality, you then start to ask a related question, “Whose reality is it? How much of us share that particular view of reality.
“Realism in fiction is meaningful as long as most everyone agrees what reality is. If there is no agreement, than realism for artists, for writers, can’t get a foothold, because everybody seems to have a conflicting view of how the world works, who’s in control of it, whether our actions can bring about real change, or whether mysterious invisible forces are at work, at the controls.”
What is a real world? “The sense that the older couple would like reality to be what it always has been: stable family, kids you can call up any day of the week, predictable things. That sense of realism, of the predictable, and how people behave and what they do has been lost to Christina. She doesn’t believe there’s a shared reality. It’s not available for her.”
As a 70 year old he remembers the feelings of desperation in the late 1960’s. His challenge was to “try to be fair to the feelings of desperation that many people have”, to articulate the way ecology, consumerism, anti-consumerism, anti-racism, impulses for local governments are converging.
On dreams in the novel: “Harry wakes from dreams feeling he has murdered somebody. When he wakes, he can’t remember who he’s murdered, but the feeling really torments him. Other moments in the novel are written as if they’re actually happening but they are dream-like. All writers to some degree bring the unconscious up to the surface when the going gets tough, when characters are at a crisis point. Readers are generally bored by dreams. So I try not to have too many dreams as dreams, but to have scenes as visual and concrete but to seem as if you, yourself are in a dream.”
In discussing why the son left and the sun collective formed, Mitzi asks, “How culpable are we for the feelings and reactions of others we interact with on a daily basis?”
Charles: “If you choose to allow that feeling (culpability) to enter your heart and your soul, if you walk down a city street, if you live in a city like the one I live in and there are homeless people on your route, what do you feel? How do you feel it?”
Charles relates what his civics teacher told him In 1963, “If you walk down the street and you see a poor person sitting on the sidewalk with his hand out and you have contempt, you are a Republican. If you see that person with his hand out and you feel bad about it and you should do something about it, you’re a Democrat.” He explains this is how you talked to high school students to try to explain what is what.
I, too, remember the difference between republicans and democrats being explained to me in this way. Along with conversations around the importance of hard work, of keeping what you own, of treating your neighbour the way you would treat yourself. I grew up confused and unsure about politics, my own safety, and my responsibility.
The Sun Collective, he says, is about this question: If we feel uneasy, what should we do?
My own response to unease has shifted over my lifetime. I remember one of my biggest life lessons came when my son was a teenager and he wanted to go to parties, house parties where parents were not on site. The requests would start on Thursday or Friday night. My instinct was to say, absolutely not. Instead, I learned to ask to speak to the parents who would be on site and I waited. When a phone call did not come, I would be faced with a teenager who told me I was ruining his life and ask me why I couldn’t be like other parents. My response was to tell him I loved him and didn’t want him to be unsupervised at a party where things could get out control. And, I asked a few times, “Why don’t the other parents love their kids as much as I love you?” I never told him that I had been at parties and bad things happened to me. I wonder if it might have made a difference.
Belief is powerful. Perhaps attempting to question where our beliefs come from, to try to make them transparent would be helpful for us all.
