Word: chapter
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...that storm arrives, readers of First Light will never hear of it. For the quiet, almost humdrum opening chapter of this first novel is also, in a traditional sense, the conclusion of the tale. Charles Baxter, 40, the author of two fine collections of short stories, has not only come across an interesting idea for an experimental narrative but has managed to translate it into convincing fiction. The book's epigraph, from Kierkegaard, provides the key: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards...
What this means, in Baxter's practice, is that each succeeding chapter of First Light is a regression in time. Hence the Fourth of July celebration is followed by the drive that Dorsey, Noah and Simon make to get to Michigan from Buffalo, where Dorsey teaches, and by Hugh's nervousness before they arrive. What to say to his brilliant sister? How well has he lived up to his father's injunction "to watch after her, to take care...
...graduate school and the brief affair with her dissertation director that produces her son. Then back to high school, where Dorsey gives the valedictory speech at her graduation. Before long she is a growing girl, fascinated by stars and the mechanics of household objects. In the novel's last chapter, Hugh, age five, is escorted by his father into a hospital room to see his newborn baby sister...
...years ago, Truman Capote angered his friends in the Concorde set by serving gossip from their private stock to hoi polloi. Anyone with the price of four issues of Esquire magazine could oink over the deviances of their social betters. Each issue carried a "chapter" of what Capote promised would be his most important work. He called it Answered Prayers and described it as a novel-in-progress about New York and European high society...
Prayers could have easily been wrapped into the Reader. But only the chapter titled "Mojave" is included, because Capote decided it did not fit the novel's scheme. Had he lived, he would have probably dropped "La Cote Basque" from Prayers as well. It is an independent contrivance stuck to the end of the book, where it pads about 40 pages onto an already slim offering...