SOURCE: Prose, Francine. “Fiction in Review.” Yale Review 81, no. 3 (July 1993): 122-33.

In the following excerpt, Prose discusses parallels between Charles Baxter's Shadow Play and Johnson's Jesus' Son.

No one's going anywhere in Charles Baxter's novel, Shadow Play, and the characters in Denis Johnson's story collection, Jesus' Son, are going nowhere, fast. Responsibility—moral, social, domestic, communal—is the subject that seems to most fully engage Charles Baxter's writerly sensibilities; and Wyatt Palmer, Shadow Play's hero, has as much responsibility as anyone could be expected to handle. He's moved back to his home town, Five Oaks, Michigan, where he's been hired as an assistant city manager, and where everyone and everything—family, old friends, the past, the living and dead—have a claim on him. Though blessed with a loving marriage, a sweet daughter, a passing sexual interest in a wryly attractive co-worker, Wyatt, like many of Baxter's...