the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

books:


	• The Soul Thief: A Novel Charles Baxter Pantheon, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

For readers who knew this graduate student scene at UB in the early 1970s, Baxter's evocation of its inside terrors is a very convincing performance.
It was a real scene with occasional interlopers like Gregory Corso, the beat poet camp follower, who used to show up on the outdoor staircase at those Chenango shotgun flat parties out of nowhere. Baxter's book is not so much a novel with developed characters, as your reviewers complain, as Hawthorne doing that time and place. That's why the narrator calls himself Nathaniel, and why the ending is "unrealistic." Remember what Leslie Fiedler, the Lord of Misrule in that distant Buffalo moment, used to say--"reality" is a word that always ought to appear in quotations marks. As a parable of twisted intellectual inhabitation Baxter's parable rings absolutely true to the occasion. That's its realism.

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Puzzling

I like the flow of the story and how it tried to be unique and interesting, but in the end it confused me more then anything. Is it telling us we all grow up at some point, become adults and essentially become different people? Is it trying to convey deeper images and feelings meant to enlighten us? Just not sure how to take it. Otherwise not a bad read, it just leaves me hanging, maybe that's better then being spoon-fed what I'm suppose to get out of it.

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A Problem of Identity

Readers who enjoy metafiction, fiction that is about storytelling itself, will have more than a little fun pondering Charles Baxter's newest novel. This is not his first book to call attention to the circumstances of its own creation. A Feast of Love begins with, guess who, Baxter himself out for a late-night walk while trying to get his next novel started. He comes upon a friend who suggests the title and the content of the first chapter. In The Soul Thief, things are more kinky. The story starts with the protagonist's college days in the 1970's, when he meets a particularly annoying but mesmerizing trickster. Soon articles of clothing disappear from the narrator's apartment, and eventually we contemplate the question of if, when, and how his soul has been stolen as well. Who is he, and, as David Copperfield wondered before him, is he the hero of his own story? At its best, metafiction is both comical and disturbing, as when Baxter seems to ask what, after all, this thing called identity is. In Tristam Shandy, the narrator struggled to get himself born, which only happened half way through the book. In Calvino's, If on a Winter Night a Traveler, the reader stepped in to write the story. Charles Baxter's The Soul Thief is a wonderful companion to these earlier novels in the metafictional tradition.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

Here is an extraordinary new novel from one of our most admired and acclaimed writers, a creator of "stunning, never predictable, glimmering fiction, full of mischief and insight? (Los Angeles Times).
During Nathaniel Mason?s first few months as a graduate student in upstate New York, he is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There?s Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel?s past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. It is Jerome who seems to trigger the events that precipitate Nathaniel?s total breakdown, and Jerome who shows up 30 years later--Nathaniel having finally reconstituted his life--to suggest, with the most staggering consequences, that Nathaniel?s identity may in fact not be his own.
In The Soul Thief, Charles Baxter has given us one of his most beautifully wrought and unexpected works of fiction: at once lyrical and eerie, acutely observant in its sensual and emotional detail and audaciously metaphysical in its underpinnings. It is a brilliant novel--one that is certain to expand both his already-stellar reputation and his readership.

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