The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Soul Thief, by Charles Baxter
reviewed by Richard Kalich

Untitled document

Pantheon, 2008. 224 pp. Paper: $20.00.

Charles Baxter, best known for his National Book Award-nominated novel, The Feast of Love (2000), now gives us The Soul Thief. The first half of the novel tracks Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student in 1970’s Buffalo, NY, and displays with virtuoso relish how he is drawn into a tangled web of relationships, all different, all the same, all people lying somewhere outside Nathaniel’s own self-destructive conception of romantic love’s “Impossible Dream.” There’s the beauty, Theresa, seemingly available, but not really; and Jamie, a sculptor, possessing a generous nature, but even less romantically available because of lesbian inclination. And then there’s Jerome Coolberg, aptly named, who is Theresa’s lover and himself more than somewhat obsessed with Nathaniel. Coolberg, enigmatic, mysterious, makes every effort to usurp Nathaniel’s identity, steals and wears his clothes, internalizes much of Nathaniel’s past and makes it his own. Coolberg’s actions of “identity theft,” combined with Nathaniel’s self-destructive romantic dreams of Jamie, have dire consequences. When Jamie is assaulted, raped and ultimately disappears, Nathaniel breaks down. Baxter’s grad students, their youth and passions, insecurities and fears, are wonderfully communicated in this first half of the novel. For certain, romantic obsession, hopeless love, “identity theft,” serves well as grist for this writer’s mill. Then, suddenly, we’re in Part Two. Nathaniel’s life thirty years later. Part Two serves as counterpoint to Nathaniel’s youth and graduate school days. However, in an effort to center the second half of the book around the quotidian existence of Nathaniel’s adult life, marriage and family, whether purposeful or not, some of Part Two groans under exposition. The problem is that the juxtaposition from youth and vitality to the mundaneness and ordinariness of adult life has the concomitant effect of the text taking on somewhat of a quotidian tone in and of itself. Indeed, a certain portion lacks dramaturgy, aliveness, seems conceptual, even schematic in tone. However, Baxter is too fine a writer to lose his novel wholly and, to be sure, much of Part Two is suffused with literary gems. And this is where the author can be at his best: dramatizing a final confrontation between Nathaniel and Coolberg, thirty years later, to bring the story closure. This final confrontation is full of insight into the nature of idealized hopeless love, pathological maddening obsession, identity, loss, and contains all the pathos and wonderment, depth and futility, of human encounter.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Soul Thief, by Charles Baxter reviewed by Richard Kalich Untitled document Pantheon, 2008. 224 pp. Paper: $20.00. Charles Baxter, best known for his National Book Award-nominated novel, The Feast of Love (2000), now gives us The Soul Thief. The first half of the novel tracks Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student in 1970’s Buffalo, NY, and displays with virtuoso relish how he is drawn into a tangled web of relationships, all different, all the same, all people lying somewhere outside Nathaniel’s own self-destructive conception of romantic love’s “Impossible Dream.” There’s the beauty, Theresa, seemingly available, but not really; and Jamie, a sculptor, possessing a generous nature, but even less romantically available because of lesbian inclination. And then there’s Jerome Coolberg, aptly named, who is Theresa’s lover and himself more than somewhat obsessed with Nathaniel. Coolberg, enigmatic, mysterious, makes every effort to usurp Nathaniel’s identity, steals and wears his clothes, internalizes much of Nathaniel’s past and makes it his own. Coolberg’s actions of “identity theft,” combined with Nathaniel’s self-destructive romantic dreams of Jamie, have dire consequences. When Jamie is assaulted, raped and ultimately disappears, Nathaniel breaks down. Baxter’s grad students, their youth and passions, insecurities and fears, are wonderfully communicated in this first half of the novel. For certain, romantic obsession, hopeless love, “identity theft,” serves well as grist for this writer’s mill. Then, suddenly, we’re in Part Two. Nathaniel’s life thirty years later. Part Two serves as counterpoint to Nathaniel’s youth and graduate school days. However, in an effort to center the second half of the book around the quotidian existence of Nathaniel’s adult life, marriage and family, whether purposeful or not, some of Part Two groans under exposition. The problem is that the juxtaposition from youth and vitality to the mundaneness and ordinariness of adult life has the concomitant effect of the text taking on somewhat of a quotidian tone in and of itself. Indeed, a certain portion lacks dramaturgy, aliveness, seems conceptual, even schematic in tone. However, Baxter is too fine a writer to lose his novel wholly and, to be sure, much of Part Two is suffused with literary gems. And this is where the author can be at his best: dramatizing a final confrontation between Nathaniel and Coolberg, thirty years later, to bring the story closure. This final confrontation is full of insight into the nature of idealized hopeless love, pathological maddening obsession, identity, loss, and contains all the pathos and wonderment, depth and futility, of human encounter.

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