There's Something I Want You to Do is another characteristically elegant collection of 10 short stories from National Book Award nominee Charles Baxter (Gryphon; The Feast of Love). Organized symmetrically into two parts--the first stories bear the labels of classic virtues ("Forbearance" and "Charity") and the second have titles that evoke some of the seven deadly sins ("Avarice" and "Gluttony")--the stories weave together ingeniously through the device of recurring characters whose strengths (or more often weaknesses) become clear only over the course of two or three tales.
Despite brief departures for more exotic settings like Tuscany and Prague, the action of most of the stories takes place in Minneapolis, where Baxter teaches creative writing and literature. In the first story, "Bravery," he introduces Elijah Jones, a pediatrician whose rejection by his wife when he tries to feed their newborn son drives him out of the house, where he performs a courageous rescue. But Dr. Jones's halo is tarnished in "Gluttony," when his inability to control a voracious appetite impels him to resort to a dubious weight-loss program.
Dr. Jones's friend, architect Benny Takemitsu, likewise appears in several stories, from "Chastity," in which he carries out his own act of rescue, to "Lust," the account of his attempt to gamble away his life savings out of desperation over the end of a relationship. The most evocative linkage involves a minor character in "Loyalty" who assumes the role of narrator in "Avarice," when the return of her former daughter-in-law (whose departure was the centerpiece of the earlier story) becomes the instrument for the working out of what she perceives as a divine plan.
Baxter's precise, economical style, demonstrated in his skill for characterization, heightens the pleasure of these stories. The narrator of "Loyalty" describes how his teenage son "looks past me as if I were a footnote." A female character in "Chastity" has a posture "like an apology of sorts for her prettiness." Elijah Jones's wife accuses him of acting like an "oscillating fan" when he sets out to discipline their son: "Wisdom spews out of you in all directions," she says.
Though hints of the surreal hover over these stories, Baxter never allows his work to lose its grounding in a perceptible reality. Most pieces conclude on an enigmatic note, and in that sense they effectively evoke the quality of real life, where endings are more often tangled than carefully stitched together. Though virtue and vice at first appear here to be neatly segregated, with consummate skill Baxter shows us how often they are, in truth, inseparable. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Focusing on virtues and vices, Charles Baxter's new collection of 10 stories illuminates a broad spectrum of human behavior among a small group of Minneapolis residents.