On a related note, Comma Press see fit to post a warning to writers to avoid submitting short fiction of certain types, among them:
http://www.commapress.co.uk/?section=FAQs

If you’re a male writer: writing about breaking out of humdrum, conventional existences/work; getting stoned; wild irresponsible nights with unhinged mates; feeling intellectually superior.

Comma might have taken Baxter as their archetype – except B’s work is not fiction.This I think gets at something distinctive and disturbing about the work. It would not work at all as fiction. The reader needs to believe it is real.

In the first essay, Baxter writes about the dangers of resentment: “.. and if you are a writer, you produce reactionary trash. You must learn to discard any hope of making a difference. You must stop asking dumb questions.”
This sounds like a man trying to convince himself, and maybe many a reader will also be convinced. But I don’t believe it for a second. The subsequent essays show Baxter has not abandoned hope of making a difference, or given up asking dumb questions. And I reckon he still clings to resentment.

“I spent many years trying to interpret existence, when I ought to have been squandering it”
Again, don’t believe what he says.

The Baxter of these essays lives an existence exposed to the thought of the great thinkers: Nietzsche, Sartre, Cioran, and many others. Salvos of thought impinge on him, and he has no skin to protect himself from them. He does not resort to the thought-trick of regarding such writers as impossibly intellectual or as belonging to a different era. “My favourites seethe through me. They boil right out of my eyes and ears and fingertips,” he writes.
Most contemporary writing ignores the harsh vision bequeathed by the early 20th century continental writers of existentialist/nihilist tendency. Baxter is in some ways a throw-back, and is grappling the world with a different toolbox.

An obvious issue that arises with confessional writing is the recording of trite and cliched thoughts. Honesty demands that they also be recorded, but if the writer fails to signal that s/he now ‘disowns’ such thoughts, the reader may be confused, and think this is trite and cliched writing. Baxter occasionally reflects on how self-important or full of illusions he was – and then a few pages later writes something which shows he still believes his experiences soar far above the mundane.
“I ran for thirty minutes, up and down the street, without hope or desire, infinitely nobody.”
It’s deliciously taunting kind of writing, full of contradictions between what he says and the experiences he relates.

Baxter’s chosen path is one of a ruthless searing honesty, an honesty which is inspired by a feeling of frustration with fiction as a tool to reach truth or insight.
At every page there will be some comment or happening that will repel or enrage the reader. When he drops an observation, such as on his first visit outside the USA, to Vienna,
“It was also the first time I had been to a city, or rather, my first realization that places like San Antonio and Houston were not cities at all but vast and loose agglomerations of parking lots.” we know this is no literary device, but the bare-toothed truth.

Baxter’s is a landmark document on what it is to keep on thinking in the spiritual/intellectual (geistige) landscape left by the likes of Sartre, Nietzsche, Cioran, and the psychological sciences. He at several points mentions that he feels an affinity with his Austrian grandfather Herbert. Perhaps he views himself as being misplaced from a previous era.

These memoirs are not what one man might write to another. There is a lot about them in common with the latest celebrity spewings of their private lives. Baxter is “making a show of himself” to use the colloquial expression. Was it worth it?

GO FIGURE: Greg Baxter can write neither prose fiction nor prose essay, yet he has achieved his goal of publication

That’s the conclusion of this review.
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books-arts/review-a-preparation-for-death-by-greg-baxter-26678234.html

It reads like something Greg Baxter might think on the downswing after thinking he’d written something brilliant.
The review is raw and real, unrestrained, and thoroughly confused between attacking the person and attacking the prose.

The sum effect is akin to being buttonholed by an inebriated, garrulous egotist in a public bar

It seems the reviewer thinks the big-name publisher means this book is being rammed down his throat as being crucial new intellectual thinking. Perhaps the reviewer thinks “I could have written shit like this.” On the evidence of this review, that sounds likely.

Another thought as to why Baxter throws in threesomes, vomitting, and petty thieving into his accounts of himself: the Russian concept of “Yurodivy” — fools for Christ, fools for the Truth. The yurodivy speaks plays the fool and speaks in riddles, mixes mockery with profound truths. The yurodivy has no position of respect, and has little regard for the proprieties of the world. They may at times seem like simpletons.