Charles Baxter is an accomplished writer. But he has had less attention than many other writers with his achievements. “Part of the explanation may lie with the label ‘Midwestern’ and the mostly dubious associations it implies that hover over his fiction like, well, storm clouds over the prairie. ‘When others think about Midwesterners, they think: naïve, somewhat simple. Why else would you live here if not for some failure in judgment’?”