Charles Baxter: Learning from Playwrights (July 2001)

“Writers must always be listening,” Charles Baxter remarks, “but their characters may not be able to listen at all.” Noting that this inability to listen often signals the presence of subtexts, what the characters can’t or won’t discuss, Baxter explores how dialogue can powerfully represent such distractedness—and, crucially, the subtexts causing it. He looks, for models, at evasive dialogue modes in a Eugene O’Neill play, and the use of similar techniques in fiction by William Trevor and Katherine Anne Porter.