The reason why Calvin Baker is one of my favorite living writers is that he works in a rarefied strain of literature whose practitioners include Faulkner and Morrison, Calvino and Cormack McCarthy: allegorists whose stories are tinged by parable and psalm even as their sensibility remains keenly attuned to the avant garde. Grace is a tale of existential isolation juxtaposed against a sense of interpersonal connection that borders on the Brahmanic. The perfectly balanced counterpoint produces a book so universal and timeless you could almost believe it had been unearthed from a medieval crypt, even as its critical but always compassionate observation of human folly positions it squarely within the increasingly fractious ethnic, cultural, and sexual paradigms of the postmodern world.
