High Flying Words

“This book really took a lot out of me,” Greg Baxter says with a weary sigh.
“I was pretty strung out when I f
inished it.”

More sensitive readers will possibly feel the same way upon completing Baxter’s just published Munich Airport – an airport novel in name only. As with his two previous works, it is fairly low on plot and suspense, but very high on solipsism and existential angst.
Those books – controversial 2010 memoir A Preparation For Death and his 2012 debut novel The Apartment – seriously divided critics. Some reviewers regarded Baxter as an unbearably pretentious wannabe, while others favourably compared the Texas-born author to the likes of Kafka, Sebald and Murakami.
We’re meeting in the lobby of Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Hotel a couple of days after a critic in The Telegraph demolished the novel with a truly scathing one-star review. Wearing a conservative business suit and sipping a vodka and tonic, the bookish-looking 39-year-old author declares himself entirely unconcerned.
“My work always seems to provoke extreme reactions,” he shrugs, nonchalantly. “I think that’s a good thing. Negative reviews have nothing to do with me. I think that I was a bit puzzled by the reception that The Apartment got, having not thought that I’d written a novel that would provoke scorn. It got panned in some places, but had a lot of critical success in the States. I don’t want to dwell on reviews. I don’t read them. I know about them, because I get a lot of emails (smiles). But it’s so alien to why you’re doing it in the
first place.”
With all due respect, The Telegraph couldn’t have been more wrong. Baxter is the real deal. Absorbing, atmospheric and rich in philosophical ideas, Munich Airport is a stunning literary achievement.
Narrated by an unnamed, London-based American expat whose estranged anorexic sister, Miriam, has been found starved to death in her Berlin flat, the novel spans the three weeks that he and his elderly father spend in Germany making arrangements for her emaciated body to be flown home. Accompanied by a sympathetic female American consular official, they wind up stranded in a fogbound Munich Airport, where Miriam’s coffin is to be loaded onto a commercial jet.
Interspersed into the account of their emotional trip to Germany and an agonising wait at the airport are recollections of their earlier family life. As the grief-stricken father and son subconsciously turn away from food (and binge on unneeded consumer goods), they fruitlessly search their memories for an explanation for Miriam’s suicide.
Amongst other themes, it’s a novel about the meaning of home and the families we improvise when our real families fall apart.
Speaking of which, Baxter finished it just before his Irish wife gave birth to their second son in Berlin. Having lived in Dublin for many years, they’ve been based in Germany since 2011. “We have a new addition,” he smiles. “Two sons now, and that’s part of the reason that I’m rushing back home. All hands on deck! Nine months old.”
His son’s impending birth gave writing the novel a certain urgency towards the end. “I finished it about a week before the baby came,” he recalls. “There were some edits that went on for about a month or so after that. I started writing it September 2012, and finished in August 2013. Previous to that, I hadn’t touched pen to paper for 18 months. Since The Apartment, I hadn’t written
a thing.”
Although thematically different, stylistically Munich Airport reads like a sequel to The Apartment (a novel about the thought processes of another unnamed American as he spends a day trudging around a wintry Eastern European city in search of a new place to live). “All of my books are deeply connected,” he maintains. “Even the memoir, they’re all part of the same volume.”
He doesn’t map the novels out in advance. “There’s no specific structure or approach. It flows pretty organically, it’s just a product of obsession. It’s what the inside of my brain looks like. I think the way I go off-track is in some ways more important to me than the way I stay on-track.
“The Apartment was different in the sense that I didn’t know it was going to read the way it did,” he continues. “Though edits changed it slightly. With The Apartment, I had tried to hold onto the present tense for as long as possible. When the present tense collapsed about halfway through the book, it started to move into digressions. I just found something quite suitable for me in those digressions, and I kind of knew from the beginning that Munich Airport would be digressive from the start. The personalities of the narrators are different; this one is more stressed out. Rather than trying to hold back the past, he’s trying to get everything out all at once. He digresses for different reasons than the other narrator.”
While A Preparation For Death was a relatively straightforward memoir, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the narrators of both of Baxter’s novels are largely the author in thinly-veiled disguise. “I’m not exactly sure when I stop and they begin,” he admits.
The relationship between the father and son in Munich Airport is occasionally strained. Baxter’s an only child. So how is his relationship with his own father?
“It’s a really good relationship,” he says. “Certainly some of his eccentricities found their way into the book, but the greater fracture is not autobiographical. He does watch golf all the time. We skype, and he’s not the greatest communicator, like a lot of fathers. But we’re in contact all the time.”
Was any of the book actually written in airports?
“I can write anywhere. I write longhand, so I have my notebook and pen with me. If I’m working on something, then I can write anywhere. The problem is that now with these big long gaps, there’s no point. Trying to write when there’s nothing there is too frustrating. A lot of self-loathing can rise from that and it’s just not healthy.
“Because I do longhand, I’m not aware of word counts. The way I write, I will go somewhere to write in the daytime; a bench, a café, or an office that I rent. I might write between one and ten pages in my little notebook, which isn’t very much. But then I go home and type it up, and what I type is completely different to what I’ve written longhand. Sometimes one hand in longhand can become ten pages typed, or ten pages longhand become one sentence typed. I think, for whatever reason, that process works well for me.”
He hasn’t penned a word since completing the novel. So any idea what’s coming next?
“What tends to happen is that, when I start to get back into work, I do so by producing bad quality, lifeless drafts that are doomed to failure,” he laughs. “I have to get through that process. I can get up to 50 pages and throw something away. That’s kind of where I am now. It’s been a year since I’ve written anything. But I’m sure the desire will start to come back.”

Munich Airport is published by Penguin.