Charles Baxter's Feast of Words

I wish you could see my face as I type this review. It is gleaming, it is beaming, it is radiant with the kind of glow reserved for moonlight and prom queens. You see, my eyes have just been released from the final word of the final sentence of Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, a novel that gleams, beams and glows.

In the past 365 days, I have read 40 books—amassing to roughly 3.5 million words. You have seen me praise authors to the high heavens, you’ve witnessed me gush and spew forth great fountains of hyperbole. But nothing could have prepared me for the wordy delights of The Feast of Love. Purely by accident, it was the last book I read in 2000. Talk about saving the best for last!

It’s going to be difficult, but I’ll try to calm down enough so that I can type out a lucid, rational review of this novel. But please excuse me if the fountain of superlative praise starts gushing again—Charles Baxter has earned all the lofty blurbs that we critics can shower on him.

So, you ask, what is The Feast of Love about? On the surface of the page, nothing happens. And yet, scratch beneath the pulp and ink and you’ll see it’s about everything, the castoff moments of our daily lives, the silences, the chatter, the longings, the heartbreak, the joy, the death, the sex. In short, The Feast of Love is an album of Polaroid snapshots capturing the intimate moments between lovers, between parents and children, between close friends and casual acquaintances. In this book, Baxter is the literary equivalent of filmmaker Robert Altman gliding his roving camera through a big cast of characters, all of them connected in one way or another.

Baxter, the author of three novels and three short story collections, has always impressed me with his attention to the details of modern living—his prose reads like a fattened-up Raymond Carver. Baxter has been good before, but here he ascends to the realm of masterpiece. The Feast of Love was nominated for a National Book Award, but lost to Susan Sontag’s In America. I can only imagine that Ms. Sontag’s book transcends the heavenly, because Baxter’s is already at the highest celestial level.

The novel opens with Charles Baxter, the character (a successfully bold move by Baxter, the author), waking from a bad dream. His wife rouses next to him (“the slight saltine-cracker scent of her body”), murmuring that “It’s only a dream.” But now he’s awake, his mind restless. He gets up, goes out for a walk in the middle of the night and ends up at the University of Michigan football stadium where he spies “an actively naked” couple locked in a tryst on the 50-yard line. Outside the stadium, Charles Baxter runs into his neighbor, Bradley.

“Listen, Charlie,” Bradley says. “I’ve got an idea…Why don’t you let me talk? Let everybody talk. I’ll send you people, you know, 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.”

And so, a novel is born.

In an interview on his publisher’s website, Baxter describes the genesis of The Feast of Love like this: “I came up with this idea out of sheer desperation. I was stuck on a new project, which I wanted to be a love story of some sort, and I didn't know how to go about it, or even how to start it. So I began by using my own insomnia, and a nighttime walk I took once down to the vacant lot at the corner of our street. I heard voices coming from someone's house, and I thought of that line from Shakespeare, ‘the night air is full of voices,’ and I thought: I'll write a novel with voices, a sort of Midsummer Night's Dream in which people are paired off with the wrong partners at first, and then are paired off with the right partners later, and everyone will tell their stories to Charlie, who will be this shadowy listener, like the reader. Like a friend, a therapist, or a detective.”

Baxter, the character, gradually fades into the scenery and a chorus of other voices take center stage:

Bradley, the owner of a coffee shop in a shopping mall and an amateur painter (“The Feast of Love” is one of his impressionistic pieces he’s got hanging in the coffee shop). Bradley’s life is a string of fizzled relationships and now he finds himself in “an emotional tangle.” Here’s what one ex-wife says of him: “After we were married, I realized that I had no particular idea who he was. I once called him the Lon Chaney of Ann Arbor, and instead of being hurt, he was pleased. At least I’m a star, he said.”

Diana, another of Bradley’s former wives. She’s a lawyer and approaches love as if it were a court case. She’s smart and beautiful, but she never really unlocks her heart for Bradley. “Some matters you shouldn’t verbalize. I mean really, Bradley”—and here she raised her hand and caressed my cheek—“all this love business is just nature’s way of getting more babies into the world. The rest of it is just all this romance nonsense.” She struggled for the word. “The rest of it is just superstructure.”

Harry and Esther, Bradley’s next-door neighbors. Harry’s a professor of philosophy (which allows Baxter to include academic paragraphs on the nature of love) and Esther’s a biochemist. Their children are grown and living elsewhere—all of them successful except for Aaron, their mentally-ill son who calls in the middle of the night to curse them in one breath then beg for money in the next. Harry is troubled by the mysteries of parental love: “To have a son or daughter like this is to have a portion of the spirit shrivel and die, never to recover. You witness the lost soul of your child floating out into the ethers of eternity.”

Chloe and Oscar, the lovemaking couple on the 50-yard line. They work for Bradley at his Jitters coffee shop. There’s only one way to describe these teenagers: crazy in love. Here, I’ll let Chloe explain: “He told me he was burning for me, and he meant it. When he was around me, he gave off a smell of young man musk, mixed of salt and leather and grass. He’d stare at me desperately, smoldering his life away. To be more romantic than we were, you’d have to kill yourself in the middle of the street and then write about it. Shakespeare did that.”

Ah yes, the Bard. Dropping Shakespeare’s name into the conversation is not unintentional. There are plenty of references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in The Feast of Love. While it isn’t a literal retelling of that romantic romp in the woods, the novel has Shakespeare’s sensibility washing over every page like moonlight. Remember the pleasant, near-giddy feeling that went through you when you first read (or saw) Midsummer? That’s how Baxter’s book will make you feel.

I’ve been quoting a lot from the novel; more than usual, I suppose. But that’s because this book works best, as all great novels do, at the basic level of language. What is literature anyway, but the precise arrangement of words and punctuation? Baxter certainly knows how to compose prose. The Feast of Love is a sumptuous banquet of voices, each unique and compelling. My favorite, however, (and I’ll bet yours, too, once you read the book) belongs to Chloe. Here’s another sample:

"I can be so unmotivated. For example. You know the dust that can, like, float in the air? Me, I was totally capable of sitting in a chair for hours, watching the dust-fuzz hanging in front of me. If there was sunlight in the room, just the particles of visible molecules or whatever, I was excellent and enthralled. I’m not saying that I’m deep, I’m just saying I watch the dust, and I’m not stoned either, when I do it. Just observant. I’m concentrating on it, figuring out its mystery, its purpose for being here in the same universe with us."

Baxter creates real character who inhabit our universe, too. He has taken his time writing this book—I can picture him sitting in a coffee house somewhere, eavesdropping on the rabble-babble around him, then writing it all down on scraps of paper. Because he has paid attention to the details of relationships, Baxter creates a universal story. This is a book for everyone to enjoy—those in the bloom of love, those whose hearts have withered and those who are impatiently waiting for someone to plant a seed.

As Bradley says, “In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.” In this, the best book of 2000, Charles Baxter invites readers to step inside and gorge themselves on a very satisfying feast of words.