Through the Safety Net.

Jeanne Palmer, mother of Wyatt, the protagonist of Charles Baxter's 1993 novel, Shadow Play, is what most people would call crazy. She lives in a halfway house, makes up words with an easy disregard for whether or not they are understood, and believes that she is drifting on an ocean liner far out at sea. Jeanne cannot be dismissed, however, as a mere eccentric; she makes too much sense for that. After a while, her made-up words don't seem so random and her thought patterns seem almost sensible - as when, for instance, she observes that "the world [is] larger than anyone thinking about it."

If Baxter comes bearing one gift, it is this central understanding: the world keeps proving itself bigger than the people who think about it. His characters mess up a lot; they stumble, sway, and sink as often as they stride or swim. They are weird, but quiet about it, daily about it. Many of them, in fact, bring to mind what Irish writer Frank O'Connor in his study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, called "the Little Man." They live in the flat Midwest. They sell insurance or make minor decisions in city bureaucracies. They don't finish their dissertations. They cut hair, teach high school, sell cars, get married, get dumped. They are small-town priests and ministers, foundlings and runts, recent college graduates waiting for the moment when they'll know what to do. They are full of wonder and violence, struggling to believe in all sorts of things. If they have resigned themselves to failure, as many of them have, they have done so without giving up their claims on grace.

Baxter's career took wing in 1984 with the publication of his first collection of short stories, Harmony of the World. Since that time, he has published reliably every two to three years: three more collections of stories (Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, Believers); two novels (First Light, Shadow Play); a poetry collection (Imaginary Paintings); and a collection of essays (Burning Dozen the House). A prize-winner whose stories have twice appeared in Best American Short Stories, a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim grants, director of the writing program at the University of Michigan, Baxter has still somehow remained a hidden treasure. He is a "writer's writer" - he has earned consistently glowing praise from critics and little popular name recognition. As Francine Prose announces in her recent review of Believers in the New York Times Book Review, "there are some writers so gifted that even their colleagues agree: really, they should be better known, their books should be best sellers."

Baxter is first and foremost a short-story writer; it is the perfect vehicle for what he does best, unveiling but not unraveling the tight knot of mystery that lies at the heart of every insight. "Strangeness of behavior," Frank O'Connor wrote, "is the very lifeblood of the short story." Baxter's fiction illustrates that true strangeness, the extra-ordinary, is arrived at only through the ordinary. In the story "Fenstad's Mother," for instance, a churchgoing son takes his irreverent, socially progressive mother to visit an extension class in English composition he teaches. The class revolves around Fenstad's unsuccessful attempts to show his students the faulty logic in the statement, "Most people have a unique problem." As his students do, his mother embraces the spirit of the thought while Fenstad hammers away at its technical illogic. It's a funny moment, but Baxter is interested in more than a humorous mother-son psychodrama here he's interested in the spiritual implications - and ironies - of sensibility. The churchgoing son is plugging away as if duty and reason were all he needed; he must learn the habit of mysticism from his atheist mother. At the end of the story, Fenstad goes to his mother's apartment to find a student of his, with whom his mother has struck up a friendship. The student is playing jazz records for her, and as Fenstad's mother sees her son enter, she says, "This is my unique problem, Harry. I never heard enough jazz. What glimpses!"

Baxter understands the importance of glimpses. His characters are constantly turning themselves - or finding themselves turned - toward mystery. Conclusive insight, Baxter maintains in the essay "Against Epiphanies," is the real illusion; a fiction writer's fealty should be to giving events the "dignity of their own complexity." As a writer, he is unfailingly true to this mission. In the story "Flood Show," a kindhearted family man discovers after fourteen years that he has never gotten over his first wife, who left him suddenly. In "A Relative Stranger" a man adopted as a baby gets a call from someone claiming to be his brother and receives the man with a rich mix of skepticism, anger, anxiety, and reluctant hope. "I don't like people watching me when they think they're going to get a skeleton key to my character," he explains. "I'm not a door and I won't be opened that easily."

Flannery O'Connor, in her 1969 collection of essays, Mystery and Manners, wrote that "the sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him." Baxter is keenly aware of distortions, always mindful not to exaggerate them but to observe them with care and precision. His fictional worlds are perfectly familiar yet a little odd. His characters shoot at nuclear reactors, spend the night at the zoo, sit on benches in blizzards. In "Gryphon," probably Baxter's best-known story, a substitute fourth-grade teacher named Miss Ferenczi, a strange woman who carries a checkerboard lunch box and accuses a group of boys of forming a "cabal" before she has even introduced herself, announces to a class of slightly stunned students that sometimes six multiplied by eleven equals sixty-eight - a "substitute fact," as she calls it. Baxter finds first the humor then the eeriness in the moment, the creepy ease with which, as class proceeds, she manipulates the children's minds. Her secret is to find a strange truth around which to coil her elaborate, wild "facts." Venus flytraps lead her to the cloud cover around Venus, which houses angels, who sometimes travel to Earth to attend concerts, where they sit in the aisles and no one pays attention to them. Baxter has said in an interview that he thinks of Miss Ferenczi as "half miracle, half monster." We understand the miracle part of the equation through the story's unnamed narrator, who finds joy in the substitute teacher's hyper-reality and defends her against detractors; Miss Ferenczi's world, where the facts of science are mysterious enough to keep good company with zany inanities like angels in the aisles of concert halls, is a miracle.

But mystery can be monstrous as well; "the unexpected," writes Baxter elsewhere, "is seldom beautiful." When Miss Ferenczi, using Tarot cards, tells a boy named Wayne he will soon die, the story delivers a moment of shocking cruelty. But Baxter doesn't stop there. When Wayne tells the principal what Miss Ferenczi has done, the youthful narrator attacks him for a coward. Boyhood alliance against adults dissolves - the undertow of the fabulous has pulled the narrator out to sea.

Miss Ferenczi presents an extreme case - a mystic, a charlatan, a woman determined to be weird. Usually, Baxter's characters seem unlikely bearers of mystery, plunged into it by accident. Baxter's fiction is rife with accident; without ever seeming merely random, it manages to remain true to the way things happen to happen. In "Snow," a bored twelve-year-old tags along with his older brother and girlfriend to see the two-door Impala that went through the ice on the lake, and learns a lesson in the "desperate and beautiful." In "The Next Building I Plan to Bomb," a man comes upon those ominous words on a windblown scrap of paper, an accident which ultimately propels him into angry uncertainty about the worth of his life. In "Winter Journey," Harrelson, described with typical rueful acuity as a "perpetual Ph.D. student, poverty-stricken dissertation non-finisher, academic man of all work, gourmand," drives drunk in a snowstorm to rescue a soon-to-be-ex-fiancee and manages to hit two parked cars and run over a rat-sized dog without running it down. Accidents are dream-like curiosities to Harrelson, part of a universe run by "his familiars in the spirit world," a kind but bumbling crew.

Still, accident reveals mystery only to those willing to look. Some refuse, clinging to a false innocence. For Baxter, spiritual life demands a capacity for grace, a willingness to be open to what you don't understand. Baxter wrestles with innocence, that state we Americans romanticize so fervently. He sees innocence as complicated - as is the fall from it. The fall is not always one dramatic moment; characters fall and fall and fall from innocence, in moments that parcel themselves out over time. Wisdom, when it is to be had, lies not in the discovery of answers but in the will to struggle for them; to join what Flannery O'Connor calls "our slow participation in the Redemption." Wisdom relies on faith; and faith, as O'Connor insists, "is a walking in darkness and not a theological solution to mystery."

Some of Baxter's characters can walk this walk, and some cannot. In "Cataract," Walter Lundholme tries to retire from a career spent "developing real-estate properties along high intensity freeways" into a glorious life of art (he envisions himself painting like "Winston Churchill on the cliffs at Cornwall"), only to find he cannot stomach what he discovers in nature. He wants to see what he is "supposed" to see and paint it, but the world won't stand still for that. Walter's wife looks at his two artistic efforts and discovers a ghostly, "unpleasant figure" in one and a "horrible" screaming face in the other. Walter can't see anything but woods and water; but when she presents her ultimatum - "Don't paint until you can paint a picture that doesn't have this dreadfulness in it" - he concedes.

So while Walter has fantasized about a retirement into more spiritual pursuits, he is in fact immune to the actual life of the spirit. The figure and face in his paintings are part of an inner life that transcends real estate and business - but Walter won't let himself see these spirits, and his wife holds them in disdain. When Walter returns to the rented farmhouse where he did the paintings he meets the owner's son, a lonely boy obsessed with birds. (Grace often comes in on wings in Baxter's stories. Birds abound, a teasing presence, sometimes sprightly, sometimes predatory.) When Walter goes into the boy's room, he sees a huge collage of birds, photos scissored from magazines adorning the wall from floor to ceiling. In the midst of this collage, the boy has taped up a left-profile picture of Jesus: a simple, unrestrained expression of the life of the spirit. Walter rejects this boy completely, first with a brusque, "I don't know anything about birds," and then with a pat insincerity: "they are the most beautiful of God's creations." On his ride home he drives by a car accident, sees men bent over something he cannot see, and "keeps his eyes fixed ahead." Lundholme maintains innocence by force, but there is nothing innocent about him. He is responsible for his failings; the cataracts of the story's title are not suffered but self-imposed. Spiritual blindness should not be confused with "a walking in darkness."

It is easy to discuss Baxter's stories in theological terms - innocence, faith, evil, mystery, redemption - and the stories themselves often speak explicitly in those categories. Characters contemplate reincarnation, attempt to rewrite the Bible, sit down to compose their sermons for Sunday. Nowhere do theology and the struggle with innocence combine more brilliantly, however, than in Believers, Baxter's recent novella. The story revolves around Franz Pielke, a Catholic priest who loses his faith, leaves the church, marries, and raises a family. It is Franz Pielke's son, in fact, who narrates the story; Jack Pielke tells his father's story out of a "desperate" need to understand his father's life. "This is a story about Goebbels, my father, my mother, and two Americans...a story about fascism, and believers, a story of the American Midwest, and of how I came to be conceived and brought into the world by a priest."

Jack Pielke's tone is urgent, his devotion to his father fervent. Franz Pielke was an honorable man, Jack tells us, a man childlike in his goodness, who possessed a "gift for rapture." The son of immigrant German farmers, Franz grew up in Michigan, a nature-loving innocent, a daydreamer in a land of industry. But even as a young boy, Franz was a complicated sort of innocent. Jack gazes at the drawings his father made in his childhood notebooks and sees predatory birds, "eating machines, feathered bundles of blind appetite," and their prey, "waiting for a slaughtering and devouring attention to descend upon them."

Baxter knows that innocence and an understanding of nature's inherent violence can coexist; he never confounds innocence and naivete. Franz Pielke looks at the world without sanitizing it - he sees predators, experiences severe pain (his leg is crushed by a falling tree), and he remains an innocent.

It is not until he meets Burton and Mary Ellen Jordan that his innocence is truly tested. They are a bored pair of aristocrats who move into a lavish estate in Franz Pielke's, now Father Pielke's, parish. The Jordans decide to befriend the young priest. Mary Ellen is a hard-eyed woman with a wolf's smile; Burton is a sportsman with a Hobbesian social view and an admiration for Hitler's Germany. Father Pielke baffles them with his stillness, his rapture, his insistence that "it's not our destiny to behave like brutes," and they cannot leave him alone. They seem intent on debunking his innocence. In the summer of 1938, the Jordans arrange a trip to Germany and persuade Father Pielke, by means of a generous donation to the archdiocese, to accompany them. God is "a corpse" in this Germany; it is a country where cries for help go unanswered, and laughter sounds like "dogs barking." Father Pielke, deeply unsettled, simply cannot survive the moment when he sees Mary Ellen, "like a spectator at a sporting event," take pleasure in the torture of a Jew, as Burton, the loving husband, gives her an indulgent wink. When Father Pielke leaps into the crowd to help the victim, he feels the "dove flutter" in his heart - the same dove he drew as a boy, always waiting for slaughter.

The scene shows Baxter to be the kind of writer Flannery O'Connor praises in Mystery and Manners, one who is "interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves - whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not." Faith cannot depend on innocence and survive. Father Pielke's innocence is large enough, strong enough, to hold the knowledge that his own father couldn't save him from falling trees, that predators among animals and men have their day, even that violence can bring joy. But his innocence cannot hold, his faith cannot survive Burton's wink, suffering's "conversion into spectacle," a man's smug, superior, joking pleasure in evil. Franz finally loses his "boyishness and his assistant-to-the-angels look" forever, loses his soul and his God. The inner story of the novella ends when Father Pielke returns to America. Leaving the church, he marries and raises two children. In the outer story, Jack's search takes him to a now-ancient Burton Jordan, who discloses in a rambling monologue that Mary Ellen herself was a Jew. Jack, "hopelessly tangled," takes in this complication without understanding it, and returns to his father less innocent but willing to live with those things that make the world bigger than his capacity to think about it.

This same preoccupation with innocence and evil moves through Shadow Play, Baxter's 1993 novel chronicling dire doings in a small Midwestern town. Shadow Play, which tells the allegorical tale of a deal with a modern-day devil, offers as its protagonist Wyatt Palmer, a man "so normal it's strange." Wyatt is a failed artist who, stuck in Plato's cave, draws only shadows, can't render the objects that cast them. Having returned to his tiny Midwestern home, he toils away as assistant to the city manager, defying his parents' eccentricities - his mother's craziness and the secretive sorrow of his long-dead father.

This soulless normalcy calls the devil up in the guise of an old high school acquaintance named Jerry Schwartzwalder. Jerry has a deal. He wants Wyatt to play middleman for him, bringing a chemical plant to economically depressed Five Oaks. Wyatt makes the deal out of a self-indulgent sense of responsibility, both to the town generally and specifically to his cousin Cyril, a jobless, kind, good-for-nothing drifter. The chemical plant is Cyril's chance at a future, but what it means for the town is less clear: Wyatt's sacrifice is extracted in a promise not to whine if a little "hoohah" gets spilled. "We've got some VOCs," Jerry informs him over lunch, "some volatile organic compounds they call them, and they can be pesky and produce airborne toxins now and then."

Wyatt's innocence is a sham. His naivete both protects him from the world and allows him to fool it. And false innocence given responsibility proves dangerous. When Wyatt shakes Jerry Schwartzwalder's hand, he does so knowingly - even if that knowingness is dim, a sensation "part idea, part pure feeling" that "large gears [are] about to mesh and turn ... souls [be] given and exchanged." In allegory, such action demands punishment. When Cyril falls ill - the first victim of the chemical "hoohah" - Wyatt is forced to face not the easy martyrdom of supporting Cyril financially but actual sacrifice. Cyril demands two things of him: first that he confront the town's tight-lipped, we-need-the-jobs passivity and do something about the plant; second that he help Cyril, ravaged by cancer, commit suicide.

Driven out of his complacency, Wyatt turns toward violence; he has met evil and he thinks he can burn it away. But even here he bumbles it; trying to set fire to Scwartzwalder's house, he only succeeds in burning to death a friendly, curious, stray dog. His attempts to bring down the chemical plant are similarly ineffective; the judge and jury yawn, and Wyatt comes to the sobering realization that in Five Oaks, "God had died and taken evil with him, and without evil, there was nothing to fight, no place to set your foot. Nothing was wrong anymore. Even child molesters had a point of view, a position, a claim for conscious attention. Instead of evil, there were potato chips and dip and therapy."

Baxter takes on big subjects in this novel - environmental politics, mental health, organized religion, capitalism, materialism, monogamy, assisted suicide - but those subjects serve as a lens to focus his central concern, the life of the soul. Wyatt manages to emerge somewhat wiser from the harrowing events in Five Oaks, in part by realizing that he was no victim or pawn: he caused things. Ultimately Wyatt moves to "ungovernable" New York City, city of "sins and noises"; there he finds that it is "a relief to live in the fallen world." Facing evil finally is what saves him.

Baxter believes in evil, in the need for villains and the accompanying "trust beyond ourselves" it takes to face them. Without such antagonists, stories get sucked into the realms of privacy and self-pity. If a writer's job is to take on the "God viewpoint," Baxter argues in his essay "Maps and Legends of Hell: Notes on Melodrama," it is important to remember that "the history of Christianity is nagged by the story of God's refusal to forgive everybody." The existence of evil is "one of Christianity's central mysteries and articles of faith." It is equally central to the stories we are compelled to tell in the hope of making sense of our lives.

Not that Baxter is mainly unforgiving. His view of life is full of gentleness and humor; in his fiction, forgiveness, acceptance, redemption give defeat its density, failure its grace. His characters find relief to the extent to which they let themselves face the mystery - and Baxter's faith as a writer rests in watching them, rapt, while they walk on in darkness.

Molly Winans teaches English and is director of publications at the Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Connecticut.