The Soul Thief: A Novel

*Starred Review* Where does our essence reside? In our bodies, our belongings, our memories? Do we own our lives? In each of his glimmering novels, Baxter explores the plexus between the dazzle of language and shadowy life. Baxter infuses place here the shabbiness of 1970s Buffalo and the feral ambition of present-day L.A. with the voltage of desire while dramatizing the magnetic pull of obsession and loneliness. When we first meet Nathaniel, he is a brooding college student happiest among scruffy outcasts. Sensitive and self-defeating, he makes a cup of coffee for the junkie who breaks into his apartment, falls in love with a lesbian, and doesn't know how to handle Jerome Coolberg, the mad semigenius who seems to be co-opting Nathaniel's life. Baxter's novel is, by turns, poetically melancholy, a touch surreal, and wistfully hilarious. The cosmic haplessness of his passive antihero is enchanting, and Baxter's riffs on the nature of the soul and the metaphysical aspects of a truly diabolical form of identity theft are profoundly unsettling. Threading his bluesy magic with traces of Calvino, Gertrude Stein, and Auster, Baxter creates a ravishing twilight tale of breakups and breakdowns, stories pilfered and reclaimed, souls stolen and liberated.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist

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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Best known for his comic look at marriage in the National Book Award-nominated The Feast of Love, Baxter here takes a darker look at intertwined destinies. As a graduate student in Buffalo in the early 1970s, Nathaniel Mason finds himself involved with two quite different women. More important, the eccentric Jerome Coolberg intrudes in Nathaniel's life and seems to be trying to manipulate it, perhaps even steal it. Baxter lovingly re-creates the university milieu of the period, complete with his characters' self-involvement. When the narrative leaps forward to the present, Nathaniel has a more mature perspective on the challenges presented by Jerome. Baxter is an adept storyteller, helping to give this novel a smooth transition to audio. Tony Award-winning actor Jefferson Mays's sympathetic reading perfectly captures these individuals' confusion and contradictions. Recommended for all collections. [Also available as downloadable audio from Audible.com.--Ed.]--Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Predatory love wreaks havoc on two lives in the latest novel from Baxter (Saul and Patsy, 2003, etc.). Nathaniel Mason is a grad student in Buffalo in 1973. He's going to a party with a beautiful fellow student, Theresa; they've just met, and Nathaniel's intrigued. The party throbs with "hysterical intellectualism"; its high priest is the impossibly brainy Jerome Coolberg, who draws Nathaniel into his circle. Though Theresa and Jerome are lovers, the latter now becomes obsessed with Nathaniel; he starts appropriating his life story and even stealing his clothes. An open, innocent Midwesterner, Nathaniel is an easy mark. He helps out at a kitchen for down-and-outs where he meets Jamie, a lesbian sculptor and cabdriver. In this world of fluid sexual identities, he sleeps with both Theresa and Jamie until, wham! He plunges headlong into the magnificent confusion of first love--for Jamie. A fire destroys the kitchen; Jamie is raped by a gang and leaves town; Nathaniel has a breakdown but, sheltered by his family, makes a very slow recovery. Years later, Nathaniel is a solid citizen with a family of his own: A devoted, guileless wife and two teenage sons. Out of the blue, Jerome calls. He has found the perfect niche as host of a public radio show, burrowing into the lives of his guests; he insists Nathaniel visit him in Los Angeles. During their reunion it emerges that Jerome was behind the attack on Jamie, of whom he was insanely jealous. He thought he could control the narrative of Nathaniel's life and has kept tabs on him ever since. The problem here is that Jerome doesn't radiate the sinister power he should, and the meeting is an anti-climax. The antidote to Jerome's poison is compassionate love, and Baxter excels at highlighting its manifestations. Structural weaknesses aside, a subtle, engaging novel. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Where does our essence reside? In our bodies, our belongings, our memories? Do we own our lives? In each of his glimmering novels, Baxter explores the plexus between the dazzle of language and shadowy life. Baxter infuses place here the shabbiness of 1970s Buffalo and the feral ambition of present-day L.A. with the voltage of desire while dramatizing the magnetic pull of obsession and loneliness. When we first meet Nathaniel, he is a brooding college student happiest among scruffy outcasts. Sensitive and self-defeating, he makes a cup of coffee for the junkie who breaks into his apartment, falls in love with a lesbian, and doesn't know how to handle Jerome Coolberg, the mad semigenius who seems to be co-opting Nathaniel's life. Baxter's novel is, by turns, poetically melancholy, a touch surreal, and wistfully hilarious. The cosmic haplessness of his passive antihero is enchanting, and Baxter's riffs on the nature of the soul and the metaphysical aspects of a truly diabolical form of identity theft are profoundly unsettling. Threading his bluesy magic with traces of Calvino, Gertrude Stein, and Auster, Baxter creates a ravishing twilight tale of breakups and breakdowns, stories pilfered and reclaimed, souls stolen and liberated. Copyright 2007 Booklist Reviews.

Why does Jerome seem to know things that Nathaniel has never revealed, and, years after Nathaniel's breakdown, what does Jerome mean when he hints that Nathaniel's identity may not be his own? With a six-city tour. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Nathaniel Mason is a graduate student in early 1970s Buffalo. At a beer party one autumn night, he meets the mysterious Jerome Coolberg, "a virtuoso of cast-off ideas." Coolberg quickly becomes obsessed with Mason, going so far as to steal his notebooks, his clothes, his girlfriend, and, finally, his memories and identity. But what exactly is Mason's identity? In Baxter's (The Feast of Love ) view, everyone in Buffalo's student ghetto is a poseur, trying on different identities as though they were a change of clothes. Several decades on, in the book's second half, Mason is living a colorless existence in the Midwest, while Coolberg has transformed himself into a National Public Radio star who encourages people to narrate personal stories on the air. In a surprise ending, we learn that Coolberg played a much bigger role in Mason's life than we'd originally been led to believe. Though the novel's menacing academic setting recalls Donna Tartt's brainy thriller, The Secret History , this is basically a lightweight doppelgänger tale infused with 1970s nostalgia. The real fun comes in decoding Baxter's cultural allusions. For larger fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/07.]—Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

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.)