Saul and Patsy [Audiobook, CD] [Audio CD]

Charles Baxter (Author), John Rubinstein (Performer)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2007

Five Oaks, Michigan is not exactly where Saul and Patsy meant to end up. Both from the East Coast, they met in college, fell in love, and settled down to married life in the Midwest. Saul is Jewish and a compulsively inventive worrier; Patsy is gentile and cheerfully pragmatic. On Saul's initiative (and to his continual dismay) they have moved to this small town-a place so devoid of irony as to be virtually "a museum of earlier American feelings"-where he has taken a job teaching high school. Soon this brainy and guiltily happy couple will find children have become a part of their lives, first their own baby daughter and then an unloved, unlovable boy named Gordy Himmelman. It is Gordy who will throw Saul and Patsy's lives into disarray with an inscrutable act of violence. As timely as a news flash yet informed by an immemorial understanding of human character, Saul and Patsy is a genuine miracle.

Editorial Reviews

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 Unknown Binding 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.)
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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Phoenix Audio; Unabridged edition (September 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159777149X
• ISBN-13: 978-1597771498
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,678,288 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing and beautiful, September 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Saul and Patsy: A Novel

This book is so extraordinary -- I am a fan of Charles Baxter's and was waiting for it, but had no idea what a massive, exciting, heartrending, and gripping story it would be. This is much more than a family story, or a love story, or a beautiful, complex portrait of a marriage, though it's all those things. It's the story of our time and our embattled world. It's an examination, via the lives of a few small-town characters, of a world where terrorism and the spirits of mischief run wild. Love and destructiveness, the desire for happiness and the desire to do damage, the longing for the perfect lives we imagine others to have, and the harm we are willing to do them because of these imaginings...it's all in here.

The characters are so human, the observations about them so wonderfully written and so full of depth and surprises. This novel is a masterpiece, a permanent work of literature. It makes demands on you, but is incredibly gripping. It also has a brilliant, inventive structure that reinforces the themes and events of the book. I was up very late with it, and finished it with such happiness that I had to tell someone (you, whoever you are, who are reading this!) I'm writing this because I long to discuss it with someone, but don't want to give away any of the intricate turns of plot and the great connections.

Oh, lucky readers who get to experience this for the first time, lovers of great fiction, do yourself a favor and read this book!

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A big yawn..., November 30, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Saul and Patsy: A Novel

Yes, I agree with the other reviewers that Baxter displays a keen sense of language and there are occasional light touches that made me snicker. However, the problem for me is that I don't give a hoot for Saul and this feeling remains unchanged by the end of the book. When I turned the last page, I was just glad to be done with a boring book.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I almost hate myself for this review, March 3, 2007

By 

Mr. Richard K. Weems "emperor_weems" (Fair Lawn, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saul and Patsy (Paperback)

I have no doubt that Charles Baxter will be noted as one of our most thoughtful and philosophic American writers of this time period. He has moved impressively from short story collections (my experience with his work started with _A Relative Stranger_) to a full-blown novelist. Even from his first novel, _First Light_, Baxter has shown a great mixture of a kind of old-school character depth, with high school teachers able to discuss railroad companies and quote classics in normal conversation, mixed in with a clearly modern sense of the world. His characters remind me somewhat of people who occupy Tony Hoagland poems--people who seem to be stuck in a netherworld of intelligentsia and down-home simplicity. _The Feast of Love_ was a good choice as a finalist for an NBA--perhaps it should have won, but I haven't yet read the competition and winner.

But this novel doesn't ring out like other works, and it seems to spend too long mulling about with little engagement. I almost regret saying these things, and almost feel that I need to rethink my priorities, that maybe I've become a jaded or oversimplified reader, for I very nearly put down this book after about forty pages because I was feeling that Baxter was a little more invested in the young couple that is the primary focus of this book than he was able to convey to me.

To tell the truth, the only thing that really brought me back to this book to gut it out and read through the rest is that the back cover promised some violence, something I would not have predicted from my initial experience in the reading.

Now I really feel ashamed. Baxter is such a wonderful writer, who is able to take the oft-used gimmick of quirkiness and use it to his advantage. Usually, his characters engage me me solely for their oddities that bring out their humanity rather than display their eccentricities. But even with the promised violence of this book, I remained unengaged to the end.

I think Baxter is a wonderful writer. Really. And it is the truly fantastic writer who gets the job done, who finishes a work even though lightning hasn't struck yet and do his job and get his efforts out there into the world.

But unfortunately, this one just wasn't one of his best efforts. But I shouldn't be the one to talk--after all, HE is the one who later put out _The Feast of Love_ and very nearly got one of the big prizes, and I just sit here typing this review.