However, there are times when the writing rather than the writer seems to be in control. We find this sentence, for example, in the middle of a description of Eudora Welty’s “A Visit of Charity” in “Inflection and the Breath of Life”:

The Art of Subtext collects a useful array of reflections not only on specific works of literature, but also on the social changes that contemporary writers must note and respond to in order to create dialogue and scenarios that continue
to ring true.

Here, Baxter observantly traces the shift in the behavior of one of the characters. However, he does not need the string of adjectives or even the parenthetical, and the other literary flourishes that stretch out the sentence and distract from his main point. Perhaps as a result of his insatiable curiosity and broad-ranging interests, Baxter seems to have a hard time avoiding the remark on the side. “When people are incapable of listening,” he writes in “Unheard Melodies, “when they are stone(d) deaf or blind to each other…” The consequent clause matters little, because the critic has already sacrificed focus for a laugh.

Still, The Art of Subtext collects a useful array of reflections not only on specific works of literature, but also on the social changes that contemporary writers must note and respond to in order to create dialogue and scenarios that continue to ring true. Charles Baxter’s contribution is in the variety of examples and approaches he draws into a probing examination of each. In the end, the book is not so much about what good poets, playwrights, and storytellers leave unsaid, but what they do convey through words about the nuances of individual human behavior and expression. It is where Baxter concludes after 173 pages, in the impassioned take-away that closes the final essay, “Loss of Face”: