Customer Reviews

The Soul Thief

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Charles Baxter is mining new territory in his latest novel THE SOUL THIEF, and while his trademark keen character development ability remains intact, he takes a step further into the realm of spiritual surrealism - and makes it work on every page!

Nathaniel Mason is the character with the 'available soul', a graduate student whose life is operating on a subsistence level, partially due to circumstances beyond his control (loss from his father's death, and his sister's accident that has left her isolated and mute), and partially due to his misjudgment of relationships. He encounters the beautiful Theresa on a rainy Buffalo, NY night, is enchanted by her beauty and her presence, but also conflicted by the fact that she openly admits to being in a relationship with the bizarre Jerome Coolberg, a strange lad whose writing is as bizarre as his interaction with those around him. It is Coolberg who sets about hiring a thief (Ben) to enter Nathaniel's humble apartment to rob him of anything pertinent to Nathaniel's character -clothes, personal items, and anything that will allow Jerome to appear as Nathaniel, including his writings, his ideas, and his style. Oddly, caught in the act of the aborted robbery, Ben and Nathaniel become 'friends' - Ben hangs out at a soup kitchen where Nathaniel cooks and serves the indigent. Also working at the soup kitchen is lesbian artist Jamie with whom Nathaniel forms a somewhat symbiotic relationship and soon the players - Nathaniel, Theresa, Jamie, and Jerome - become involved in the gradual 'theft' of Nathaniel's soul. Nathaniel is not a stable personality and Jerome's very personal 'robbery' drives him into a state of psychological dissolve.

The story jumps forward in time to a Nathaniel who has survived his breakdown (due largely to his sister's regaining her voice to read to him when he is in his near comatose state). Nathaniel has married, has children, and subsequently re-encounters Jerome Coolberg, his soul thief, and the changes in the two men's personalities and lives bring the story to an end.

Yes, there are moments almost supernatural that test the reader's ability to stay with the story, and the concept of stealing (or selling!) a soul is not a new one: Goethe comes to mind throughout the narrative. But the strangeness of the story allows Baxter the freedom to rise above the pure narrative and wax philosophical, a technique that feels new to his work in comparison to previous novels. 'No one knows who we are here, in this country, because we're all actors, we've got the most fluid cards of identity in the world, we've got disguises on top of disguises, we're the best on earth at what we do, which is illusion. We're all pretenders.'

Toward the end of the novel there is a statement that seems to echo the experience most sensitive readers will experience after reading THE SOUL THIEF: 'Is there anything more restorative than the act of one person reading a beloved book to another person, also beloved?' Reading Charles Baxter's latest novel is enriching and wholly satisfying. Grady Harp, March 08

While I have followed Mr. Baxter's career with considerable interest, I'm sorry to say he has badly missed the mark with this effort. It reads rather like a short story that Mr. Baxter tried to stretch into a novel with unfortunate results. Who is the narrator? Where is the heart, not to mention the soul, of the book? These are the questions that I cannot answer. While the book starts out as a fairly realistic collegiate story, before long it congeals into a sort of miasma of existentialist pretentions. While Mr. Baxter's prose style is, for the most part, good, it is very hard to care about the characters and plot. Without these elements you are not left with much of a novel.

"Deliciously creepy and full of hidden meaning"
-Washington Post (Media Mix)

That's a quote taken from one of the reviews from the Washington Post that's shown here at Amazon. Well, the story was creepy and had so much promise, but what was the hidden meaning, or better yet, who was telling this story and what was up with that ending? In the first part of this book, the characters were developed well, but then fell flat in the second half, leaving me with the feeling "who cares?"

I read this short book twice trying to see if I missed something, and I still couldn't figure out who was telling the story or where all these hidden meanings were. Don't believe the hype like I did. If you really want to read this book, save your money and check it out from the library.

I really had to struggle to finish this book. I just didn't get it or find it believable. I wouldn't even know how to classify it. Science Fiction? Supernatural? I'm not even sure who was telling the story and half way through I just stopped caring. There were just too many metaphors and five dollar words. It seemed like the author was trying too hard to create something really profound. It just didn't work.

I like the flow of the story and how it tried to be unique and interesting, but in the end it confused me more then anything. Is it telling us we all grow up at some point, become adults and essentially become different people? Is it trying to convey deeper images and feelings meant to enlighten us? Just not sure how to take it. Otherwise not a bad read, it just leaves me hanging, maybe that's better then being spoon-fed what I'm suppose to get out of it.

Charles Baxter's "The Soul Thief" has left me wondering what I must have missed. Baxter, after all, is a writer with a reputation, and one of his previous eight books, "The Feast of Love," was a National Book Award nominee. This is my first Charles Baxter book and, based on reputation and reviews of his previous work, perhaps I expected too much from "The Soul Thief." Whatever the reason, the book did not quite work for me.

The book's central character, Nathaniel Mason, is a 1970s graduate student in Buffalo, New York, a loner who unexpectedly meets a pretty girl while making his way to a rumored party location one rainy night. Little does he know that this girl, Teresa, and the young man to whom she introduces him, Jerome Coolberg, will conspire to steal the rest of his life from him.

Coolberg is so obsessed by Nathaniel that he almost immediately begins to make portions of Nathaniel's past his own, publicly claiming that the most dramatic events from Nathaniel's history actually happened to him rather than to Nathaniel. With a little help, Coolberg manages to secure some of Nathaniel's clothing and other personal items for his own use, pushing Nathaniel to the verge of collapse in the process, and uses the items to remake himself in Nathaniel's image.

The second half of "The Soul Thief" happens some two decades later when Coolberg calls the Mason home asking for Nathaniel. Nathaniel, who has never mentioned Coolberg to his wife in all the years they have been married, reluctantly agrees to meet in Los Angeles, hoping for the long overdue confrontation that will provide him answers to all the questions he has carried inside for so many years.

By this point in the book, Baxter has created a level of anticipation and tension that has his reader racing toward what promises to be a dramatic climax. What the reader gets, instead, is a tricky ending that will likely leave him more confused than satisfied and perhaps, as in my case, at least a bit disappointed in the whole experience.

This is a surreal and fantasy-ridden tale that left me cold. Not much in the way of suspense, reality or character development. Can't really recommend it to fiction lovers.

A fractured narrative is borne out of two men's bizarre relationship. The narrator, who gives himself the name Nathaniel Mason, and Jerome Coolberg, "a whiz-kid sage with a range of affectations", are bound for life in each other's imaginations. With its tenuous grip on the identity of the narrator, events that initially appear real turn out to be dreamed or written about by somebody else. This is the kind of a novel that would thoroughly captivate a freshman intellectual, but is too overwrought to have a lasting impact.
Initially, the story presents itself as a coming-of-age tale in which Nathaniel, through his relationships with two women (Theresa and Jamie, a Catholic lesbian sculptor), must find a way to be honest with himself about his own feelings. Later, however, the narrative fast-forwards to Nathaniel's suburban, unremarkable middle age, and one is tempted to find out exactly how the ambition and imagination of his student years have been erased from his personality.
In the end, no satisfactory resolution can be found. Scenes of little consequence are overburdened with detail while crucial points of the narrative lack scaffolding. The post-modern trickery, thus, appears to be much too self-centered, distracting from the overall effect of the work. However, the book has moments of true grace when it unobtrusively evokes the mood of loneliness and futility that is all too familiar to many young people. When Nathaniel surprises a burglar in his poorly outfitted apartment, the two men discover a disgruntled accidental companionship: they are both lonesome and need someone to complain to.

I enjoyed this book, not as much as "Feast of Love," but it kept me turning the pages and had some excellent writing. I thought the plot was a bit contrived, but hey, why can't Baxter have a bit of fun and make us think in the process. I loved the 70's Buffalo descriptions, the lesbian artist / cab driver lover, and the swift beginning of the book where you're just sorta thrown in and things get interesting real quick.

I'm not an expert on fiction like this with narrator tricks, where questions arise about who did and wrote what, but it made me think, it's new to me, and kudos to Baxter for an enjoyable novel.

Nathaniel Mason, a grad student in Buffalo, NY, in the 1970s, meets two emotionally unattractive and even vaguely repulsive people at a drink and drug fueled party one night, and the main narrative springs from there. Theresa enchants him with her free spirited ways, and Jerome Coolberg fascinates him too, even though Nathaniel "experiences wanly the need for quiet and sincerity, some antidote to cleverness." (So do I, Nathaniel, so do I.) Nathaniel does find some sincerity in his relationship with a fellow volunteer at a soup kitchen, a lesbian named Jamie, who at least has practical and real conversations with him.

As the story progresses, Nathaniel finds personal items missing, practically on a daily basis, and hears Coolberg telling others Nathaniel's own history, adopting it as his own as he shows up wearing Nathaniel's clothes. Nathaniel pulls closer to Jamie as an antidote for the craziness or Theresa and Coolberg, but proves to be a remarkably easy mark, having a breakdown as his physical world is literally stolen out from under him.

When the book picks up in the next section, we learn that Nathaniel is fine, years have gone by, and he is happily married with children. When Coolberg calls out of the blue, we get to witness their final showdown, if one can call it that.

Baxter plays his audience all along in this `cleverly' constructed, slim book. We are meant to be confused about the narrator and about what constitutes living a real life. There are references to several classic and/or obscure literary works, all quite high-falutin'. The `twist' at the end of the book is hollow - just a trick. Thankfully, this book is short, since, overall, the characters are not that interesting and the construction only mildly amusing.