Regressions First Light

By Paul Gray

Hugh Welch is a Buick salesman in the small Michigan town where he was born and raised. One Fourth of July he, his wife and two small daughters have visitors: Hugh's younger sister Dorsey, an astrophysicist, arrives with her young son Noah, who is deaf, and her husband Simon, an actor. The day is hot. Hugh and Dorsey buy fireworks from a woman who remembers them both as children. Supper is served. The pyrotechnics go off without a hitch. Dorsey explains why Noah likes the cherry bombs: "He can feel their shock waves with his skin. It's as close as he ever gets to hearing." Late that night brother and sister have a desultory chat in Hugh's darkened house. Outside, clouds and sheet lightning raise the possibility of rain tomorrow.

If 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 of her"?

She, after all, with her Ph.D. and abstract scholarly work, seems to have done much better than he has. Dorsey's accomplishments are then recapitulated. First there is 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.

Reading a story end to beginning can be a vertiginous and sometimes irritating experience. Normal expectations that characters will become more understandable as they forge ahead into an unknown future are thwarted. Simon, for example, raises questions with his behavior in the first chapter. How long can this elfin man stay married to his serious, intense wife? Will he succeed as an actor? Answers are not forthcoming. Simon disappears from the book at the point where he enters Dorsey's life.

Yet Baxter's methods are ultimately less frustrating than beguiling. In rewinding his story, the author provides a fascinating illusion of consolidation. Hugh and Dorsey do not grow apart; they are put together again, reknit into their shared heritage of parents and the past. Life does not happen that way, of course, but First Light never seems implausible. Instead, the novel moves over everyday details with the inexorable, contrary tug of memory.