FEBRUARY 2015 - AudioFile
The inexplicable death of an American woman in a German apartment summons her brother and father to retrieve her body. Narrator Kevin Stillwell captures the melancholy tone of the story in a deep baritone. This is a tale of loss and secrets, as well as the confusion of loved ones left behind after the untimely passing of a family member. Stillwell's narration evokes a feeling of deep empathy with the protagonist. The downside of his precise and evenly modulated tone is that his consistency can be monotonous for the listener. An unrelenting somberness throughout the narration, while appropriate for the story, makes it difficult to differentiate among the various plot points or to maintain interest. M.R. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
It's churlish (or insane) to complain that a writer isn't Franz Kafka. If he walks right up to a premise from the master and palms it for the central conceit of his second novel, however, one might be excused a moment of precipitate discontent. Maybe it's not such a great idea for a mortal, no matter how gifted a writer. As Greg Baxter, the author of Munich Airport, indisputably is. He's just not Kafka.
Reprising a tone of existential anxiety that seems otherwise inseparable from the Europe of the early twentieth century, Baxter implicitly raises the question of whether the conditions that gave rise to it then have now been duplicated in the contemporary world. It certainly appears that absurdism has made a big comeback. In "A Hunger Artist" Kafka pictured with customary lucidity the kind of messed-up society where an artist whose work consists of self-starvation and his lumpish audience will end mutually disillusioned; in Munich Airport, a woman named Miriam (now, alas, in a casket awaiting removal to her native America) is a hunger artist for a new age. Baxter wields a correspondingly spare pen on the dislocating circumstance in which father, brother, and a consular attaché bide their time before the body is released by the German authorities. Nearly a hundred years on from Kafka's story, it is hard not to read the occurrence of anorexia as a statement on the emptiness of an overstuffed world: at any rate, it is no longer a futurist impossibility. It is the central pivot on which Baxter's allegory of human relationship in the modern era turns. Or something like that.
Vagueness, too, is one of the author's trademark techniques.
It is used to create tension (what is going on here? Is anything going to go on here?) at the same time it provides commentary on the carefully arranged yet blank vistas we seem to prefer in the First World these days. The story's three characters all have different things to hide: they seem to know they look much neater wearing their doubt on the inside. As the narrator explains, "I'm a marketing consultant." Upon request for elaboration, he fills in the remaining detail: "I devise marketing strategies for clients." His elderly father, with whom he passes two weeks in Germany during which nothing and everything happens, is a professor of European history, and Baxter has similar fun deflating an already shrunken profession: the man had written two books, one parodically scholarly (a study of law codes in the time of Charlemagne) and the second a history of the Middle Ages for general readers that didn't do all that well. Between the time of his contract and turning in the manuscript, another book on the subject appeared, "with the title my father was originally going to use — The Middle Ages." The sudden release of laughter, after pages of controlled and ominously bleak exposition, makes you realize the author keeps a wonderful comic talent in his back pocket. As the book progresses toward an increasingly contrived end, tightening down like a slightly uncentered screw, you wish its unforced vitality would reappear. It doesn't.
Instead, Baxter gives with one hand and takes with the other. The inexplicabilities of the latter half of the book — the fact that we never learn what caused Miriam to negate her existence puts us at something of a disadvantage in understanding what possesses her mourning family to follow her example — are set against the first half's pleasantly startling observations of the made world. A burst of joy follows on encountering such sharp insight into the familiar: of that bizarrerie known as the airport VIP lounge, he writes:
It is like an airlock, in which the wealthy or well- traveled can spend a moment decontaminating their thoughts, preparing themselves to switch from chaos to luxury. Behind that door, the coffee-brown lounge is making noise.
In fact, in Munich Airport the terminal itself — that anonymous, hypersymbolic nexus of gobs of humanity, moving ceaselessly on conveyer belts toward shiny capsules that do not so much permit escape as merely transfer to another prison — is the book's most fully realized character. Even the bereaved must play out their life-altering crises against its backdrop of mercantile faux bonhomie. This represents the most meaningful of all that happens in these pages, though happens is the wrong word: unaccounted neurasthenia grips the characters, and our natural need to know why is brushed away as if we just aren't smart enough to comprehend the desiderata of the modernist work of art.
Greg Baxter is a writer of style, and he is conscious of style. This is his strength as well as the risk he runs. The rhetorical consistencies in his two fictional efforts — unnamed narrators; a Nicholsonian compressed timespan (his earlier novel The Apartment takes place in a day, Munich Airport in a couple of weeks); the lack of chapter breaks, meant to remind us of life's unsorted nature, its resistance to demarcation — show he has an early eye on posterity. His proven brand of philosophical literature bypasses current fiction's fad for recklessly baroque construction and aims straight for the higher shelves of the Western canon.
Every once in a while his ascent becomes audible when his foot lands too hard on a stair. Late in the book there is an extended digression on twelve-tone music. It was, the narrator believes, a "response to the dead end music had arrived at." Its radicalism was intended to be a new direction "when you have nowhere new to go, when there are no new ideas that aren't just upside-down old ideas, or old ideas dressed up like new ideas." This sounds just like a stirring manifesto for a new literature. Thing is, this one was already written in the previous century. It takes a supremely confident writer to claim a historical turning point for his own. It seems likely that Greg Baxter has nominated himself.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of three works of nonfiction: The Perfect Vehicle, Dark Horses and Black Beauties, andThe Place You Love Is Gone, all from Norton. She is writing a book on B. F. Skinner and the ethics of dog training. Reviewer: Melissa Holbrook Pierson
From the Publisher
ACCLAIM FOR MUNICH AIRPORT
"MUNICH AIRPORT confirms [Baxter] as a writer of courage and lucidity. His fluent and assured prose owes some debt to the Austro-Hungarian Franz Kafka and the Austrian Thomas Bernhard... Baxter is high literature."—New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
"A masterwork of minimalism."—Entertainment Weekly
"With expert undercurrents and subtext, Baxter can fill quiet scenes with the weight of a funeral...Baxter's realizations are artful, and give poignant images to a man's struggle for identity."—Austin American-Statesman
"MUNICH AIRPORT is a brilliant achievement."—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Greg Baxter is a writer of style...His proven brand of philosophical literature bypasses current fiction's fad for recklessly baroque construction and aims straight for the higher shelves of the Western canon."—Barnes & Noble Review
"[A] haunting and memorable work."—Hudson Valley News
"Powerful and poignant...The novel's tone, together with Baxter's limpid prose and his narrator's clear-eyed confessions, keep us riveted until the bittersweet climax, when the fog finally lifts and each broken character can take to the sky."—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Fascinating and sad, unfolding...profound philosophical and psychological insight...The developing themes range from family and life's meanings to the role of memory and the passage of time, all illuminated by some of the best writing appearing in fiction today."—San Antonio Express-News
"Stunning... Few novels so urgently and demandingly make themselves feel as necessary as MUNICH AIRPORT."—Tweed's
ACCLAIM FOR THE APARTMENT BY GREG BAXTER"Baxter has written a novel of subtle beauty and quiet grace; I found myself hanging on every simple word, as tense about the consequences of a man finding an apartment as if I were reading about a man defusing a bomb... It is one of the best novels I have read in a long time."—Stacey D'Erasmo, New York Times Sunday Book Review
"Absorbing, atmospheric and enigmatic... With its disorienting juxtaposition of the absolutely ordinary and the strange and vaguely threatening, the novel evokes the work of Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami, while its oblique explorations of memory suggest a debt to W.G. Sebald... Baxter's provocative, unsettling novel is, among other things, about the inexorability of identity and 'the immortality of violence.'"—Los Angeles Times
"It is precisely this sort of subversion, along with the author's shimmering prose, that makes THE APARTMENT such a surprisingly compelling read and so apropos; it captures the mood of the current moment and what seems to be a new "lost generation," one formed not so much by exposure to violence, as immunity to and alienation from it. Once upon a time, there was no place like home; in Mr. Baxter's world, home, it seems, is no place."—Adam Langer, The New York Times
"In this bleak but affecting novel, an unnamed American expat spends a day walking through a frigid, unidentified European city in search of an apartment...The details of his day are rendered with anaesthetized precision and achieve a cumulative force of grief, equanimity, and resolve."—The New Yorker
"A true gem... Lucid, often hypnotic and, at times, even transporting. [Baxter] keeps his sentences short, his adjectives limited, his pacing leisurely. The paragraphs are long and there are no chapter breaks, yet his acute observation means this is no mere minimalist undertaking... The Iraq sections are astonishingly well done, and the man's history as a Naval officer feels almost exactly right to the former Naval officer who happens to be writing this review."—Los Angeles Review of Books
"In a year marked by epics, it's a relief to delve into this quiet, surprisingly tense debut novel - small enough to fit into a stocking but packing a huge emotional punch."—Entertainment Weekly
"In just over 200 pages, The Apartment impressively and tactfully covers everything from the effects of American interventionism on its relationship with Europe to questions of personal identity."—Esquire
"'I was born to hate the place I came from.' Greg Baxter's first novel THE APARTMENT is a short but powerful exploration of that sentiment, uttered halfway through the novel by its narrator, a 41-year-old American ex-Navy officer and Iraq War veteran."—Chicago Tribune
"A beautiful meditation on brutality and culture, which are sometimes one and the same."—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"An elegant portrait of a man half-fractured, half-intact-a post-war somebody caught between repair and capitulation, controlling his own fate and imprisoned by regret."—The Texas Observer
"In the layered narratives of Baxter's piercing first novel, a young American returned from Iraq struggles to find a new life in Europe."—New York Times, Sunday Book Review, Editor's Choice
"Greg Baxter deserves to be included with Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk in the current conversation about what fiction can do and where it is going."—Brooklyn Magazine
"Baxter has written another profound yet immensely relatable book."—The Acadiana Advocate
FEBRUARY 2015 - AudioFile
The inexplicable death of an American woman in a German apartment summons her brother and father to retrieve her body. Narrator Kevin Stillwell captures the melancholy tone of the story in a deep baritone. This is a tale of loss and secrets, as well as the confusion of loved ones left behind after the untimely passing of a family member. Stillwell's narration evokes a feeling of deep empathy with the protagonist. The downside of his precise and evenly modulated tone is that his consistency can be monotonous for the listener. An unrelenting somberness throughout the narration, while appropriate for the story, makes it difficult to differentiate among the various plot points or to maintain interest. M.R. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2014-12-06
A grim parable of familial disconnect and purposeless existence set in a fog-bound German airport over one very long day. After his critically acclaimed fiction debut (The Apartment, 2012), Baxter has raised the level of difficulty with his second novel—for himself and for the reader. There are no chapter breaks, and a paragraph can go on for pages. The entire novel takes place inside the head of an unnamed narrator who seems matter-of-fact at first but who descends through levels of emotional disturbance (recurring nightmares, panic attacks, self-laceration and other compulsions) as the tale progresses. And yet the tale never really progresses but keeps circling through memory and projection as the narrator spends a day's eternity in the titular airport with his father, waiting to accompany his younger sister's corpse back to America. The sister, who had had little contact with either her brother or father since moving to Berlin, died of starvation. The narrator has also had little contact with his father since moving to London, where he had a brief, unhappy marriage with a woman he never names (other memories involve characters whose names he says he has forgotten) and left corporate employment for his own marketing consultancy business. Father and son have very little to say to each other, but a third character, Trish from the American Consulate, serves as a connection between the two and adds what little plot development there is. Mostly, the narrator suffers: "The light turns sickly. I start to shake. My mouth starts to water. A sickness that feels a little like nostalgia sets in. Then I begin to see the words I am thinking, individual words, and they become repulsive. A word like blue becomes repulsive. A word like airport. Their existence is depressing." This novel is depressing too; the reader is trapped within the consciousness of the narrator just as the narrator is trapped within his life.
