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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Soul
Thief by Charles Baxter |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Identity I
finished reading Charles Baxter’s new novel, The Soul
Thief, and continued to wonder about who and what this was all about. Set
in two time periods: 1970’s Buffalo and today, Baxter centers the action on two
characters. Nathaniel Mason is a graduate student, and Jerome Coolberg has
fashioned himself as a cerebral outsider. Coolberg begins to assume Nathaniel’s
identity and claim Nathaniel’s past as his own. Here’s an excerpt, from
the beginning of Chapter 2, pp. 6-8: On
a cool autumn
night in Buffalo, New York, the rain has diminished to a mere
streetlight-hallucinating drizzle, and Nathaniel Mason has taken off his
sandals and carries them in one hand, the other hand holding a six-pack of
Iroquois Beer sheltered against his stomach like a marsupial's pouch. He
advances across an anonymous park toward a party whose address was given to
him over the phone an hour ago by genially drunk would-be scholars. On Richmond?
Somewhere near Richmond. Or Chenango. These young people his own age,
graduate students like himself, have gathered to drink and to socialize in
one of this neighborhood's gigantic old houses now subdivided into apartments.
It is the early 1970s, days of ecstatic bitterness and joyfully articulated
rage, along with fear, which is unarticulated. Life
Against Death stands
upright on every bookshelf The
spokes of the impossibly laid-out streets defy logic. Maps are no help.
Nathaniel is lost, being new to the baroque brokenness of this city. He holds
the address of the apartment on a sopping piece of paper in his right hand,
the hand that is also holding the beer, as he tries to read the directions and
the street names. The building (or house—he doesn't know which it is) he
searches for is somewhere near Kleinhans Music Hall—north or south, the
directions being contradictory His long hair falls over his eyes as he peers
down at the nonsensical address. The city, as a local wit has
said, gives off the phosphorescence of decay. Buffalo runs on spare parts.
Zoning is a joke; residential housing finds itself next to machine shops and
factories for windshield wipers, and, given even the mildest wind, the
mephitic air smells of burnt wiring and sweat. Rubbish piles up in plain
view. What is apparent everywhere here is the noble shabbiness of industrial
decline. The old apartment buildings huddle against one another, their bricks
collapsing together companionably. Nathaniel, walking barefoot through the
tiny park as he clutches his beer, his sandals, and the address, imagines a
city of this sort abandoned by the common folk and taken over by radicals and
students and intellectuals like himself—Melvillians, Hawthornians,
Shakespeareans, young Hegelians— all of whom understand the mysteries and
metaphors of finality, the poetry of lastness, ultimaticity—the architecture
here is unusually fin de something, though not siecle, certainly not
that—who are capable, these youths, of turning ruination inside out. Their
young minds, subtly productive, might convert anything, including this city,
into brilliance. The poison turns as if by magic into the antidote. From the
resources of imagination, decline, and night, they will build a new economy,
these youths, never before seen. The criminal naďveté of these ideas amuses him.
Why not be criminally naďve? Ambition
requires hubris.
So does idealism. Why not live in a state of historical contradiction? What
possible harm can there be in such intellectual narcissism, in the Faustian
overreaching of radical reform? Even the upstate New York
place-names seem designed for transformative pathos and comedy:
"Parkside" where there is no real park, streets and cemeteries in
honor of the thirteenth president, Millard Fillmore, best known for having
introduced the flush toilet into the White House, and ... ah, here is a young
woman, dressed as he himself is, in jeans and t-shirt, though she is also
wearing an Army surplus flak jacket, which fits her rather well and is
accessorized with Soviet medals probably picked up from a European student
black market. Near the curb, she holds her hand to her forehead as she checks
the street addresses. She is, fortunately, also lost, and gorgeous in an
intellectual manner, with delicate features and piercing eyes. Her brown hair
is held back in a sort of Ph.D. ponytail. The
young woman described at the end of the excerpt, Teresa, also plays a
significant role in the plot of The Soul
Thief. Baxter’s writing is precise, his imagination complex, and the
structure and development of this novel may on occasion lead to reader
frustration, but for those who persevere, Baxter delivers a fine book, even
if it left me wondering about who was who and what exactly happened. Steve
Hopkins, May 15, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the June 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Soul Thief.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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