The Soul Thief: A Novel [Hardcover]

Charles Baxter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 2008

Here is an extraordinary new novel from one of our most admired and acclaimed writers, a creator of "stunning, never predictable, glimmering fiction, full of mischief and insight” (Los Angeles Times).
During Nathaniel Mason’s first few months as a graduate student in upstate New York, he is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There’s Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel’s past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. It is Jerome who seems to trigger the events that precipitate Nathaniel’s total breakdown, and Jerome who shows up 30 years later--Nathaniel having finally reconstituted his life--to suggest, with the most staggering consequences, that Nathaniel’s identity may in fact not be his own.
In The Soul Thief, Charles Baxter has given us one of his most beautifully wrought and unexpected works of fiction: at once lyrical and eerie, acutely observant in its sensual and emotional detail and audaciously metaphysical in its underpinnings. It is a brilliant novel--one that is certain to expand both his already-stellar reputation and his readership.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of the National Book Award–nominated The Feast of Love, Baxter returns with this ninth book, an assay into the limits of character, fictional and otherwise. The first half of the novel follows the brief arc of Nathaniel Mason's graduate career in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., which centers on his friendship with the sexy but self-dramatizing Teresa (which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were French) and her lover Jerome Coolberg, a virtuoso of cast-off ideas. Coolberg, obsessed with Nathaniel, begins taking his shirts and notebooks, and claiming that episodes from Nathaniel's life happened to him. Coolberg drops a hint that something bad will happen to Jamie, Nathaniel's sometime lover; when it actually comes to pass, Nathaniel's world begins to collapse. In the novel's second half, decades after these events have occurred, Coolberg enters Nathaniel's life again for a final, dramatic confrontation. Baxter has a great, registering eye for the real pleasures and attritions of life, but the book gets hung up on metafictional questions of identity (the major one: who is writing this first-person narrative?). The results cheat readers out of identifying with any of the characters, perhaps intentionally. (Feb.)
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From The New Yorker

Opening in gritty, nineteen-seventies Buffalo, Baxter’s suspenseful fifth novel concerns a mildmannered graduate student, Nathaniel, who falls under the spell of a cerebral but affected outsider, the aptly named Coolberg. Drawn to Coolberg’s sneering persona (and to that of his girlfriend, Theresa, who relishes Coolberg’s performances), Nathaniel begins to unravel when he learns that Coolberg is appropriating his identity: a burglar steals clothes from Nathaniel that Coolberg ends up wearing, and Coolberg begins claiming Nathaniel’s history for his own. Baxter’s talent for creating uncanny settings and telling details and his inventive way with language (a similarly dressed couple are "umbilicaled") are both on display here, but the conceptual twist at the novel’s end feels unequal to the dramatic tension that precedes it.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (February 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375422528
• ISBN-13: 978-0375422522
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,121,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

158 of 165 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Novel Rich in Imagery and Style, March 19, 2008

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Soul Thief: A Novel (Hardcover)

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

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unfortunate Outing for Baxter, February 24, 2008

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S. F Gulvezan (Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Soul Thief: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I Just Didn't Get It, March 2, 2008

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S. L. Parker "World Traveler" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Soul Thief: A Novel (Hardcover)

"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.