The Feast of Love

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and "one of our most gifted writers" ( Chicago Tribune )

With his five previous books of fiction, Charles Baxter established himself as a contemporary literary master, in the traditions of Raymond Carver, William Maxwell, and Alice Munro. This radiant collection confirms Baxter's ability to revel in the surfaces of seemingly ordinary lives while uncovering their bedrock of passion, madness, levity and grief.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Baxter's (Shadow Play) sixth work of fiction is something of an incongruity: seven virtuosic stories preceding a novella largely bereft of the stories' shared merits. Ambitious and accomplished, the shorter works here tackle slippery themes and subjects-fleeting moments of truth; the ambiguities of daily life and the defenses through which ordinary men and women attempt to clarify them. In "Kiss Away," for example, a young woman wonders if she should believe a stranger's announcement that her lover has a history of battering women, or if the stranger is no more reliable than the alcoholic who promised to grant her three wishes (which, incidentally, come true). Here as elsewhere, Baxter unrolls his canvas slowly and deliberately, convincing the reader of his characters' vitality and patterning their responses delicately and with pathos. In the title novella, however, the suppleness of the author's observations coarsens into heavy ironies and almost melodramatic revelations. Narrated with deliberate (and often painful) artlessness by the protagonist's son, "Believers" pits a good country priest against a wealthy and corrupt couple who might be outcasts from a Fitzgerald novel. It is 1938, and they lure him from Michigan to travel with them to Germany, where the wife briefly and admiringly encounters Goebbels and the priest loses his faith (the wife "throw[s] rocks through the glass of his soul"). Fortunately, the novella comes last: newcomers will have seen what Baxter's reputation is built upon, and admirers will not mind that his gambles do not always pay. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

No one will ever accuse Baxter of literary frivolity--and that's the problem. In these eight stories, even the most casual events come bathed in sociopolitical gloss, often to the detriment of Baxter's modest narrative instincts. ``Believers,'' the novella that takes up a large part of this volume, strives for world-historical significance to explain one man's loss of faith: the narrator's father, a former Catholic priest who was seduced from his bumpkin modesty in the Midwest by a couple of northeastern smarties, a Protestant husband and wife who aspired to be America's answer to the Cliveden set--witty and urbane fascists, with oodles of dough and a fancy estate in Michigan. The narrator's frustration is simple: He was conceived as a direct result of apostasy and abandoned celibacy. Such clear and easy ironies abound in Baxter's remaining stories as well. In ``The Next Building I Plan to Bomb,'' a seemingly bland (and heterosexual) midwestern banker finds a threatening message on a piece of paper and decides to act out his own need to be dangerous by engaging in unsafe sex with a young man. Baxter's well-written narratives are distinguished by such surprises--the odd revelation in an apparently ordinary life, like the neighbor who may or may not be a child molester/killer (``Time Exposure''); the happily-in- love young slacker who isn't sure whether her boyfriend is a woman beater or not (``Kiss Away''); and the married father who acts like a fool over his first wife, whom he hasn't seen since she left him over a decade ago (``Flood Show''). Linked by their underlying concern with the forms of passion, these stories are best exemplified by ``The Cures For Love,'' a relatively modest tale of a classics teacher who finds solace in Ovid. Baxter's banal commentary about America as mouthed by his characters is slightly more endurable than those same characters' tendency to write things like ``sadness'' on grocery lists. A fine writer is here tried (tired?) and true. (Author tour)