The Feast of Love: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "HEY," HE SAYS, "Charlie. What the hell are you doing here?..." (more)
Key Phrases: rubber nose, Humane Society, Ann Arbor, Harry Ginsberg (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Among literary cognoscenti, Charles Baxter has a well-deserved reputation as one of America's finest writers. Best known for his short stories, Baxter has also produced three novels. His fourth, The Feast of Love, combines the best of both genres--with a light dusting of metafiction to sweeten the dish. The book begins with Baxter himself waking from a nightmare and going for a moonlit walk through his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. While sitting on a park bench, he is joined by an acquaintance of 12 years--and, incidentally, one of the main characters in the novel. It is Bradley who gives Baxter the name for the novel he's currently struggling to write, and even offers himself as a character:

You should call it The Feast of Love. I'm the expert on that. I should write that book. Actually, I should be in that book. You should put me into your novel. I'm an expert on love. I've just broken up with my second wife, after all. I'm in an emotional tangle. Maybe I'd shoot myself before the final chapter. Your readers would wonder about the outcome.

But why stop there? Bradley goes on to suggest that he send people to Baxter, "actual people, for a change, like for instance human beings who genuinely exist, and you listen to them for a while. Everybody's got a story, and we'll just start telling you the stories we have"--a sly tip-off to the reader of this elegant, quirky, and wholly engrossing novel that the writer may be no more reliable than his narrators.

What follows is a chronicle of love--the mad kind, the bad kind, and the kind that sustains us when everything else is gone. In addition to Smith, we meet Chloé, a young waitress at Bradley's espresso bar, and her ex-junkie boyfriend, Oscar; Bradley's next door neighbors, Harry Ginsburg, an elderly professor of philosophy, and his wife, Esther; and Kathryn and Diana, Bradley's two ex-wives. The characters take turns narrating, often commenting on and correcting versions of events mentioned by other characters in previous chapters, and occasionally advising Baxter on the progress of his novel: "Don't threaten people, especially lawyers" legal eagle Diana warns "Charlie" shortly before she launches into her own story. "Don't threaten your own characters. It's for your own good. You'll wind up in a mess of litigation and... subplots." But in The Feast of Love, God is in the subplots--Oscar and Chloé's involvement in the porn industry; Esther and Harry's agonized relationship with their mentally ill son; Bradley's travails in love, art, and dog ownership. As the novel progresses, these separate strands gradually merge, and not even an unexpected tragedy can dim the luster of this moonstruck romance. For by the time Baxter brings his tale of love and loss and redemption to a close, his characters have all found their way to the feast--bittersweet though some of the dishes may be. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Baxter (First Light, Harmony of the World, Believers) has for too long been a writer's writer whose books have enjoyed more admirers than sales. Pantheon appears confident that his new novel can be his breakout work. It certainly deserves to be. In a buoyant, eloquent and touching narrative, Baxter breaks rules blithely as he goes along, and the reader's only possible response is to realize how absurd rules can be. Baxter begins, for example, as himself, the author, waking in the middle of the night and going out onto the predawn streets of Ann Arbor (where Baxter in fact lives). Meeting a neighbor, Bradley Smith, with his dog, also called Bradley, he is told the first of the spellbinding stories of love--erotic, wistful, anxious, settled, ecstatic and perverse--that make up the book, woven seamlessly together so they form a virtuosic ensemble performance. The small cast includes Bradley, who runs the local coffee shop called Jitters; Diana, a tough-minded lawyer and customer he unwisely marries after the breakup of his first marriage to dog-phobic Kathryn; Diana's dangerous lover, David; Chloe and Oscar, two much-pierced punksters who are also Jitters people and who enjoy the kind of sensual passion older people warn will never last, but that for them lasts beyond the grave; Oscar's evil and lustful dad; philosophy professor Ginsberg, who pines for his missing and beloved son, Aaron; and Margaret, the black emergency room doctor with whom Bradley eventually finds a kind of peace. The action takes place over an extended period, but such is the magic of Baxter's telling that it seems to be occurring in the author's mind on that one heady midsummer night. His special gift is to catch the exact pitch of a dozen voices in an astutely observed group of contemporary men and women, yet retain an authorial presence capable of the most exquisite shadings of emotion and passion, longing and regret. Some magical things seem to happen, even in Ann Arbor, but the true magic in this luminous book is the seemingly effortless ebb and flow of the author's clear-sighted yet deeply poetic vision. 30,000 first printing; 10-city author tour. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Assumed First edition (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037570910X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375709104
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (160 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #426,452 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Literary Meal to Savor, May 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Feast of Love: A Novel (Paperback)

What do we talk about when we talk about love? This fine novel answers that question in ways that delighted, surprised, and fascinated me. Think about it. We spend hours and hours talking about love--how it enthralls and defeats us--with our friends in cafes or with our lovers in the dark, but what do we REALLY learn about ourselves during such chatter? Baxter, one of our best ever short story writers, casts the most ordinary moments of love as extraordinary in this inventive novel. The narrator (named Charlie) coaxes stories of love--good and bad--from his characters (who present themselves as his actual neighbors and Ann Arbor acquaintances). Instead of melodrama and Shakespearean high tragedy, however, these love stories offer insight into the true affections that tug at our inner selves. I was most affected by the crazy passions of Baxter's teen lovers, Chloe and Oscar, and by the pained poignancy of a father's wrenching love for his mentally-ill son. This novel is deep and subtle. It's also sexy, savvy, sly and very, very funny. I highly recommend it to anyone who has been baffled by the circus tricks of the human heart.

56 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A breathtakingly beautiful novel!, June 2, 2000

By	CoffeeGurl (MA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Feast of Love: A Novel (Paperback)

Charles Baxter, author of the book Believers, has a writer's block. He is wandering around his neighborhood late at night, hoping to get ideas for his novel. When he sits on a bench, a young fellow named Bradley has a marvelous idea for a novel. The name of the novel is The Feast of Love.

This is a wonderful piece of literature. It vaguely resembles Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, except that this novel is utterly contemporary. The novel is about love. The author explores different kinds of human relationships. There's Bradley: the hopeless romantic; there's Harry Gingsberg: an old philosopher with a troubled son; then there's Chloe and Oscar: the young, wild lovers. Chloe and Oscar touched me; their love was so pure that it made me cry.

This novel is breathtakingly beautiful. I love the language; the characters' voices are very expressive. I highly recommend this novel. Now run along and get it!

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love - both mistaken and real, September 1, 2003

By	Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Charles Baxter, an acclaimed master of the short story, proves himself equally adept as a novelist in The Feast of Love. The writer "Charlie" scrambles out of bed late at night because of a recurrent nightmare and decides to take a walk. A few blocks from his house, he encounters Bradley, an acquaintance and fellow insomniac who is walking his dog (also named Bradley.) There, in the middle of the night in Ann Arbor, Bradley the human dictates the title and characters of the novel Charlie should be writing. What follows then is pure structural brilliance: Charlie, as an invisible interviewer, pursues the "real" people who have touched Bradley's life: ex-wives Kathryn and Diana, young employees Chloé and Oscar, neighbors Harry and Esther - and the people who affect them. Each character tells a part of the story in his or her own voice. Soon, Charlie the interviewer fades into the background, emerging only when details that he has revealed at the beginning appear in the lives of his characters and thus remind the reader that, in true metafiction style, this fiction has a creator.

These love stories tell of mistaken love and true love - and the heartbreak that comes with both. Although they begin as separate tales, by the end they converge, bringing the novel together in a heartwarming whole. Baxter's prose is, as always, precisely clear. The distinct voices of the narration are superbly handled, especially in the case of Chloé, who is the most memorable character in the novel.

Charles Baxter fans should not pass up this extraordinary novel. If you like the metafiction in Ian McEwan's Atonement or the quirkiness of Anne Tyler's characters, you should appreciate this novel.