Amazon.com Review
Poor Charles Baxter, doomed to be forever thought of as a writer's writer. The languidly plotted
Saul and Patsy hardly promises to be his long-awaited breakout novel. It's just too quiet. But for those of us who fervently admire Baxter's prose, that's a selling point. In this tale of a Midwestern marriage, there's lots of time and space for the author to show off his incisive style, studded with the kind of subtle observations that make you stop, laugh, and then feel oddly lanced somewhere in the neighborhood of the soul.
Saul Bernstein has become a high school teacher because he feels a need "to contribute to what he called 'the great project of undoing the dumbness that's been done.'" He and his wife Patsy live in small-town Michigan, where their "love for each other had created a magic circle around themselves that outsiders could not penetrate. No one who had ever met them knew what made the two of them tick; the whole arrangement looked mildly fraudulent." There's a glitch in this idyll, though. One of Saul's students, a mildly retarded boy named Gordy, takes to haunting their house, maybe with malicious intent, maybe not. Gordy hangs around, Saul and Patsy have a baby, and then finally a crisis provokes Saul to decide what kind of man he'd like to be. The novel is, in the end, a portrait not of a marriage, but of an ambivalent, evasive, very funny man. Along the way, we get to know Saul's fed-up wife, his fraudulent brother, and his libidinous mother, who makes this observation of Saul: "As a father, he exhibited great tenderness, which had a touch of vanity in it." It's a classic Baxter aside, at first mildly funny, then barbed with the truth. --Claire Dederer
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
For the first quarter of this novel, even the talented John Rubinstein can't save it from sounding like
Annie Hall Redux. The clash between Midwest WASP and East Coast Jew is better captured by Woody Allen in a single line. However, this quirky novel improves vastly when the none-too-bright Gordy, performed to slow-talking perfection by Rubinstein, stalks Saul's family, and the plot shifts into a different gear. Rubinstein subtly controls the voice of Gordy's aunt Brenda so that she sounds simultaneously greedy and grieving. He individuates Saul's friends and family and occasionally provides amusing sound effects—for example, Mad Dog inhaling pot and then speaking with his throat full of smoke. Rubinstein's well-paced narration extracts as much humor from the novel as possible. Unfortunately, the audio's production is far from perfect. Awkward silences separate the tracks, and each CD ends abruptly. Occasional bits of music seem randomly dropped in. Despite the technical flaws, Rubinstein's fine performance makes
Saul & Patsy a notable new audio.
A Vintage paperback (Reviews, Sept. 28, 2003). (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
