Beth's Reviews> The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

This is one book in a series about the art of writing (some of the others include commentary on poetry). Charles Baxter's book is a collection of essays all dealing with the same subject. Although I understood the point of each essay, it would be difficult to summarize them as a whole, hence I'll provide a brief summary of each.
The Art of Staging is more than simply about setting but how setting and positioning of characters leads to the what is going on underneath the action. Although there may be little action in a piece (example Frost's poem Home Burial), given the right staging the simpliest gesture can convey worlds of inner feelings.
Digging the Subterranean: Baxter uses the game of Careers to illustrate his point in this chapter in which he discusses the conflicts between getting a lot of something you didn't necessary want (e.g. love when you wanted fame) or conversely getting what you want but finding it burdensome (Edith Warton's My Mortal Enemy. As in life, action also often contradicts intention (thus presenting a conflicted character).
Unheard Melodies is a meditation upon how much we are forced to filter out of our noise-filled world a necessity that often leads to not hearing what is important and necessary.
Inflection and the Breath of Life essentially deals with "It's not what you say, but how you say it."
Creating a Scene points out that the characters we like to read about are NOT the characters we would either want to live with in real life or to be.
Loss of Face observes the lack of description of facial expressions in many modern works and writing students' apparent misunderstanding that this is no longer done. Face, after all, Baxter argues, is what infants first attend to. Worlds of information can be conveyed by an author in describing faces.