Feast of Love by Charles Baxter

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The Shelf Life of Happiness

Charles Baxter's brilliant first novel, First Light, is the only book I've read in adulthood that made me actually weep. It's the story of a stolid, stay-at-home brother and his passionate, globe-trotting sister, told in backwards chronology: Each chapter begins at a point in time soon before the previous chapter ends (thus, surprisingly and inevitably, ending with the birth of the little sister). The book's epigraph, tellingly, is from Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

Maybe it all sounds like one of those self-conscious gimmicks that British po-mo bad boys deploy in lieu of writing books with any real heart. (Four years after First Light, in fact, came Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, told in reverse chronology; to be charitable, it was not Amis's best book.) But heart is something Baxter has in abundance. Not only does he make the device work, he tells the story in a way that makes the structure seems utterly natural.

In real life, after all, falling in love does happen in reverse chronology. You learn the person's present, become enamored, and then, inexorably, come to learn about the past. That's First Light: You fall in love with the characters and then, now that you care, learn about their pasts.

And so it's with deep admiration for that novel, and for Baxter's short stories, that I now say this: His new novel, The Feast of Love, is his best work yet. It is to love in a midwestern town what The Things They Carried is to the burden of Vietnam.

Reviewers have often painted Baxter an earnest realist, perhaps because he is a midwesterner and writes about midwesterners (mostly Michiganders, which might be the most earnest proper noun in our language). What's special about Baxter's work, though, is how it's realistic on the surface, capturing the rhythms and longings of recognizable people—city managers, coffee shop owners, janitors, deaf children, aging teachers—but, right underneath, a mixture of classical storytelling devices and gentle but brainy postmodernism.

Take, for example, Baxter's most widely anthologized short story, "Gryphon" (collected in Through The Safety Net). It was inspired by Baxter's own experience teaching fourth grade in Michigan's bleak Saginaw Valley, which he did right out of college to get a deferment that kept him out of Vietnam. One day, Baxter found himself woefully unprepared for class and, on a whim, handled the lesson plan's edict to teach the students about ancient Egypt by making everything up. In the story, though, everything's told from the point of view of one of the kids, and the faux Egyptology is dispensed by an eccentric substitute teacher who also tells them that 6 times 11 is sometimes 68, that George Washington died because of a mistake about a diamond, and that she herself once traveled to Egypt and saw with her own eyes, in a cage, a half-bird, half-lion creature called a gryphon.

The story captures that (largely justified) feeling in childhood that everything you're learning in school is a big fat lie (most of what the sub tells them is strange but semifactual, like the one about "how Washington was not the first true president, but she didn't say who was"; technically, that would be Peyton Randolph, president of the first Continental Congress). Though the narrator's too young to intuit this, the story implies that the sub has just been dumped by some guy, which has left her distracted and without the time or sense of obligation necessary to prepare to teach a subject in which she is not trained.

But the story also has the zing of the fantastic (imagine Donald Barthelme in an unironic and superficially realistic mode) as well as the classical: not only because of the classical allusions but also because it is, after all, a stranger-comes-to-town story, one of two most basic tales. (As Eudora Welty once remarked, there are only two basic stories: Somebody leaves or a stranger comes to town. Everything is either one or the other or a combination thereof. Think about it: the Old Testament—somebody leaves. The New Testament—a stranger comes to town. Etc.)

When Baxter set out to write fiction, he was deeply influenced by his wide, wildly diverse reading in philosophy, criticism, and world literature (particularly Lars Gustafsson's Stories of Happy People and Robert Musil's 1,774-page The Man Without Qualities). His first three (unpublished) novels were in the Barth/Barthelme mode, and his earliest published stories came when he took those novels and boiled each down to its 15-page essence. His subsequent novels have quite consciously been composed not of one continuous narrative but rather story-sized units from different perspectives. Although in interviews Baxter has been self-deprecating about this, saying he's done it out of his own failures, he's very much taught himself to turn that failure into his advantage.

First Light, again realistic on its surface, shows in its structure Baxter's continued interest in the intellectual complexities of story, but The Feast of Love is the best synthesis of everything that's preoccupied Baxter as a writer, and everything he has heretofore done well.

The book is foursquare about happy love, even if the shelf life of that happiness is mournfully finite. On the surface, it's an engrossing, engaging collection of intersecting first-person monologues. The two main characters are Bradley Smith, twice-divorced owner of a coffee shop at the mall, and Chloé, one of his much-pierced teenaged employees, who is besotted with love for Oscar, another coffee shop clerk. In addition, Baxter creates amazingly convincing portraits of Bradley's ex-wives and of their lovers and of his next-door neighbor, a 60-something professor of Kierkegaardian philosophy at the University of Michigan.

All of this is drawn together by a character named Charlie Baxter, who both is and mostly isn't the writer, the same way that the Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried both is but mostly isn't Tim O'Brien the actual person (who was, actually, the student government president at Macalester College the same time Baxter was the editor of the literary magazine).

It's a device for our times, a way of acknowledging and skewering the culture's appalling habit of reading fiction merely to decode it for autobiography. The Charlie Baxter of the novel is, like the author, a professor at the University of Michigan. He lives on the author's street and shares the author's problem with insomnia. Oscar and Chloé plan to kick off their honeymoon by going to see a band called the School of Velocity; the author's son plays in a band by the same name, and the author writes lyrics for the band's songs.

None of which helps the reader better understand the novel, or is of more than voyeuristic interest, but which allows Baxter to use a storytelling device that is at once ancient (think of how Chaucer shapes The Canterbury Tales) and postmodern (unreliable narrator, direct address of the reader, moving a story forward with the spaces and gaps withing the story), all to create a novel that is 100 percent Charles Baxter.

--Mark Winegardner

Mark Winegardner, a professor in the creative writing program at Florida State University, is the author of four books, including the novelThe Veracruz Blues.

From the Publisher

From "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people.

The Feast of Love is just that -- a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones.

In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart Their voices resonate with each other -- disparate people joined by the meanderings of love -- and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life. Crafted with subtlety, grace, and power, The Feast of Love is a masterful novel.

Wall Street Journal - Gabriella Stern

Feast of Love is a radiant work of art that evokes the romance that the characters describe. To find out how things play out for this extraordinary bunch of ostensibly ordinary Midwesterners, pick up this funny, sad, gorgeous novel.

Publishers Weekly

Baxter (First Light, Harmony of the World, Believers) has for too long been a writer's writer whose books have enjoyed more admirers than sales. Pantheon appears confident that his new novel can be his breakout work. It certainly deserves to be. In a buoyant, eloquent and touching narrative, Baxter breaks rules blithely as he goes along, and the reader's only possible response is to realize how absurd rules can be. Baxter begins, for example, as himself, the author, waking in the middle of the night and going out onto the predawn streets of Ann Arbor (where Baxter in fact lives). Meeting a neighbor, Bradley Smith, with his dog, also called Bradley, he is told the first of the spellbinding stories of love -- erotic, wistful, anxious, settled, ecstatic and perverse -- that make up the book, woven seamlessly together so they form a virtuosic ensemble performance. The small cast includes Bradley, who runs the local coffee shop called Jitters; Diana, a tough-minded lawyer and customer he unwisely marries after the breakup of his first marriage to dog-phobic Kathryn; Diana's dangerous lover, David; Chloe and Oscar, two much-pierced punksters who are also Jitters people and who enjoy the kind of sensual passion older people warn will never last, but that for them lasts beyond the grave; Oscar's evil and lustful dad; philosophy professor Ginsberg, who pines for his missing and beloved son, Aaron; and Margaret, the black emergency room doctor with whom Bradley eventually finds a kind of peace. The action takes place over an extended period, but such is the magic of Baxter's telling that it seems to be occurring in the author's mind on that one heady midsummer night. His special gift is to catch the exact pitch of a dozen voices in an astutely observed group of contemporary men and women, yet retain an authorial presence capable of the most exquisite shadings of emotion and passion, longing and regret. Some magical things seem to happen, even in Ann Arbor, but the true magic in this luminous book is the seemingly effortless ebb and flow of the author's clear-sighted yet deeply poetic vision.

The New York Times Book Review - Jacqueline Carey

Extraordinary . . . Rich, juicy, laugh-out-loud funny and completely engrossing . . . What's amazing -- but never distracting -- is how distinctive Baxter makes the different voices of all these characters.

Kirkus Reviews

The different longings people subsume within the actions of loving others are explored with wry affection: an extremely likable third novel from the celebrated author (Believers, 1997; Shadow Play, 1993, etc.) It consists of stories told to author Charles Baxter by several of his mutually involved neighbors, beginning when `Charlie,` strolling his hometown's nearly deserted streets on an insomniac midsummer night, sneaks into Michigan Stadium and observes a young couple making love on the football field's 50-yard line, then meets his neighbor Bradley Smith, who (not entirely credibly) pours out the tale of losing his wife Kathryn to another woman. The scope steadily expands, as we become acquainted with Kathryn's version of her marriage's failure, Bradley's dog (also named Bradley—a rather Anne Taylor-touch); then, in roughly this order, teenaged Chloé (who waitresses at the coffee shop Bradley runs) and her `reformed boy outlaw` sweetheart Oscar; Bradley's next-door neighbor Harry Ginsberg, a doggedly idealistic philosophy professor whose familial happiness is threatened by the anger of his estranged son; Bradley's new wife Diana (who continues her affair with her married lover David); and, yes, others. The Feast of Love achieves an eccentric, fascinating rhythm about halfway through, when its characters' now-established individual stories begin bouncing off one another intriguingly. The novel is quite skillfully (if unconventionally) plotted, and grips the reader's emotions surely as Baxter connects its distinctive dots during some absorbing climactic actions, when the genuine love between Chloé and Oscar (two wonderfully realized characters) takes onanunexpected maturity and gravity. Just a shade too warm and fuzzy to be fully successful, but awfully entertaining nevertheless. And the Joycean monologue (spoken by Chloé) and graceful acknowledgement of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with which Baxter ends this rueful tale of romantic folly, are the perfect touches.

What People Are Saying

Andrea Barrett
Rich, strange, alive with the miracles of daily life, this novel is a banquet for the soul. So many wonderful characters, all of whom I came to cherish as I watched them intersecting, the intitial configurations of love reconfiguring themselves by the end. Truly, this is a novel in which the unexpected is always upon us.

Alan Lightman
The Feast of Love is hilarious and at the same time desperately sad, full of wit and poetry and exquisitely observed perceptions of the human condition, erudite and streetwise at once. It conveys the delicacy, the violence, the salvation, and the destruction of love. What a brilliant, powerful novel.
—(Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams)

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Reading Group Guide

Question: As the book opens, the character Charles Baxter leaves his house for a walk in the middle of the night. As he passes an antique mirror at the foot of the stairs, he describes the mirror as "e;glimmerless,"e; a word he has used to describe himself [p. 4]. What does he mean by this? At the end of the novel, as dawn arrives, he tells us that "e;all the voices have died out in my head. I've been emptied out. . . . My glimmerlessness has abated, it seems, at least for the moment"e; [p. 307]. What is the real Charles Baxter suggesting about the role of the author in The Feast of Love?

Question: Does Baxter's decision to give the job of narration over to the characters themselves create a stronger sense of realism in the novel? Does it offer a greater possibility for revelation from the characters? What is the effect of this narrative technique on the reading experience?
Question: Does Bradley become more interesting as the novel unfolds? Kathryn says of him, "e;He turned himself into the greatest abstraction"e; [p. 34]. His neighbor Harry Ginsberg says, "e;He seemed to be living far down inside himself, perhaps in a secret passageway connected to his heart"e; [p. 75], while Diana says, "e;What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight. He was uninteresting and genuine, sweet-tempered and dependable, the sort of man who will stabilize your pulse rather than make it race"e; [p. 140]. Which, if any, of these insights is closest to the truth?
Question: The novel takes its title from a beautiful, light-filled painting that Bradley has made and hidden in his basement. When Esther Ginsberg asks him why there are no people in the painting, Bradley answers, "e;Because . . . no one's ever allowed to go there. You can see it but you can't reach it"e; [p. 81]. Does the fact that Bradley has been able to paint such a powerful image suggest that he is closer to attaining it than he thinks?
Question: Why does Chlo? go to see Mrs. Maggaroulian, the psychic? Is the fortune-teller's presence in the novel related to Harry Ginsberg's belief that "e;the unexpected is always upon us"e; [pp. 290, 302]? How might this belief change the way one chooses to live?
Question: What are Diana's motivations for marrying Bradley? Does her reasoning process [p. 138] seem plausible, or is it the result of desperation and self-deception? Is Diana, at the outset, the least likable character in the novel? How does she manage to work her way into the reader's affections?
Question: Bradley is a person who baffles himself. He says, "e;I need a detective who could snoop around in my life and then tell me the solution to the mystery that I have yet to define, and the crime that created it"e; [p. 106]. Why, if his first wife Kathryn has a profound fear of dogs, does he take her to visit a dog pound? Why, if his second wife Diana is afraid of open spaces, does he take her to the wide skies and watery horizons of Michigan's Upper Peninsula? Why does he often act in ways that will compromise his happiness? Is Bradley like most people in this unfortunate tendency?
Question: The characters often define themselves in strikingly economical statements. For instance, Diana says, "e;I lack usable tenderness and I don't have a shred of kindness, but I'm not a villain and never have been"e; [p. 258]; and Bradley says, "e;My inner life lacks dignity"e; [p. 58]. Do the characters in this novel display an unusual degree of insight and self-knowledge? Are some more perceptive about themselves than others?
Question: In his description of the shopping mall in which Jitters is located, Bradley remarks, "e;The ion content in the oxygen has been tampered with by people trying to save money by giving you less oxygen to breathe. You get light-headed and desperate to shop. . . . Don't get me wrong: I believe in business and profit"e; [p. 110]. In what ways is Bradley not a typical businessman? How does Jitters differ from a caf? such as Starbucks? What observations does the novel make about America's consumer-driven culture?
Question: Throughout literature (for example, in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), the traditional boy-meets-girl plot is complicated by the presence of a father or parents who refuse to sanction the union of the lovers. Can Oscar's father be seen in this traditional role—as a potential threat to the happiness of Chlo? and Oscar? Or does he represent something far more threatening and evil? What is his effect on the latter part of the novel?

Question: Harry Ginsberg tells Bradley about a poem his mother used to recite, about a dragon with a rubber nose. "e;This dragon would erase all the signs in town at night. During the day, no one would know where to go or what to buy. No signs anywhere. Posters gone, information gone. . . . A world without signs of any kind. . . . Very curious. I often think about that poem"e; [p. 88]. Bradley takes up the idea, and begins to draw pictures of the dragon. How does the parable of the dragon resonate with some of the larger questions and ideas in the novel?
Question: Speaking of Oscar, Chlo? says, "e;Words violate him. And me, Chlo?, I'm even more that way. There's almost no point in me saying anything about myself because the words will all be inhuman and brutally inaccurate. So no matter what I say, there's no profit in it"e; [p. 63]. Does Chlo? underestimate her own talent for self-expression? Do her sections of the narrative belie her opinion about the uselessness of words?
Question: How would you characterize Chlo?'s unique brand of intelligence? What are her strengths as a person? Is it likely that she will survive the loss of Oscar, and the challenge of single parenting, without any diminishment of her spirit?
Question: Chlo? believes that she once saw Jesus at a party; she also believes in karma and similar forms of spiritual justice. Harry Ginsberg, a scholar of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, remarks, "e;The problem with love and God . . . is how to say anything about them that doesn't annihilate them instantly with wrong words, with untruth. . . . We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up—wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and pfffffft, they die"e; [p. 77]. Why do questions of spirituality and the meaning of human existence play such a major role in The Feast of Love?

Question: In The Feast of Love, is sex an accurate gauge of the state of two people's emotional relationship to each other? If sex is an expression of Chlo? and Oscar's joy in each other, does it make sense that they attempt to use it to make some sorely needed money? Is it puritanical to assume that they are making a mistake? Why are they ill suited for the pornography business?

Question: Based on what happens in The Feast of Love, would you assume that the author believes that love is necessary for happiness? Although they begin the novel mismatched, Bradley, Kathryn, and Diana eventually all find themselves with the partners they truly desire. Is it surprising that the novel offers so many happy endings? How does the tragedy of Oscar's death fit in with the better fortunes of the other characters? Why has Baxter chosen to quote Prokofiev [p. 237] to open the section called "e;Ends"e;?

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