description: bThe Shelf Life of Happiness/bPCharles Baxter's brilliant first novel, IFirst Light,/I is the only book I've read in adulthood that made me actually weep. It's the story of a stolid, stay-at-home brother and his passionate, globe-trotting sister, told in backwards chronology: Each chapter begins at a point in time soon before the previous chapter ends (thus, surprisingly and inevitably, ending with the birth of the little sister). The book's epigraph, tellingly, is from Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." PMaybe it all sounds like one of those self-conscious gimmicks that British po-mo bad boys deploy in lieu of writing books with any real heart. (Four years after IFirst Light,/I in fact, came Martin Amis's ITime's Arrow,/I told in reverse chronology; to be charitable, it was not Amis's best book.) But heart is something Baxter has in abundance. Not only does he make the device work, he tells the story in a way that makes the structure seems utterly natural. PIn real life, after all, falling in love does happen in reverse chronology. You learn the person's present, become enamored, and then, inexorably, come to learn about the past. That's IFirst Light:/I You fall in love with the characters and then, now that you care, learn about their pasts. PAnd so it's with deep admiration for that novel, and for Baxter's short stories, that I now say this: His new novel, IThe Feast of Love,/I is his best work yet. It is to love in a midwestern town what IThe Things They Carried/I is to the burden of Vietnam. PReviewers have often painted Baxter an earnest realist, perhaps because he is a midwesterner and writes about midwesterners (mostly Michiganders, which might be the most earnest proper noun in our language). What's special about Baxter's work, though, is how it's realistic on the surface, capturing the rhythms and longings of recognizable people#151;city managers, coffee shop owners, janitors, deaf children, aging teachers#151;but, right underneath, a mixture of classical storytelling devices and gentle but brainy postmodernism. PTake, for example, Baxter's most widely anthologized short story, "Gryphon" (collected in IThrough The Safety Net/I). It was inspired by Baxter's own experience teaching fourth grade in Michigan's bleak Saginaw Valley, which he did right out of college to get a deferment that kept him out of Vietnam. One day, Baxter found himself woefully unprepared for class and, on a whim, handled the lesson plan's edict to teach the students about ancient Egypt by making everything up. In the story, though, everything's told from the point of view of one of the kids, and the faux Egyptology is dispensed by an eccentric substitute teacher who also tells them that 6 times 11 is sometimes 68, that George Washington died because of a mistake about a diamond, and that she herself once traveled to Egypt and saw with her own eyes, in a cage, a half-bird, half-lion creature called a gryphon. PThe story captures that (largely justified) feeling in childhood that everything you're learning in school is a big fat lie (most of what the sub tells them is strange but semifactual, like the one about "how Washington was not the first true president, but she didn't say who was"; technically, that would be Peyton Randolph, president of the first Continental Congress). Though the narrator's too young to intuit this, the story implies that the sub has just been dumped by some guy, which has left her distracted and without the time or sense of obligation necessary to prepare to teach a subject in which she is not trained. PBut the story also has the zing of the fantastic (imagine Donald Barthelme in an unironic and superficially realistic mode) as well as the classical: not only because of the classical allusions but also because it is, after all, a stranger-comes-to-town story, one of two most basic tales. (As Eudora Welty once remarked, there are only two basic stories: Somebody leaves or a stranger comes to town. Everything is either one or the other or a combination thereof. Think about it: the Old Testament#151;somebody leaves. The New Testament#151;a stranger comes to town. Etc.)PWhen Baxter set out to write fiction, he was deeply influenced by his wide, wildly diverse reading in philosophy, criticism, and world literature (particularly Lars Gustafsson's IStories of Happy People/I and Robert Musil's 1,774-page IThe Man Without Qualities/I). His first three (unpublished) novels were in the Barth/Barthelme mode, and his earliest published stories came when he took those novels and boiled each down to its 15-page essence. His subsequent novels have quite consciously been composed not of one continuous narrative but rather story-sized units from different perspectives. Although in interviews Baxter has been self-deprecating about this, saying he's done it out of his own failures, he's very much taught himself to turn that failure into his advantage.PIFirst Light,/I again realistic on its surface, shows in its structure Baxter's continued interest in the intellectual complexities of story, but IThe Feast of Love/I is the best synthesis of everything that's preoccupied Baxter as a writer, and everything he has heretofore done well. PThe book is foursquare about happy love, even if the shelf life of that happiness is mournfully finite. On the surface, it's an engrossing, engaging collection of intersecting first-person monologues. The two main characters are Bradley Smith, twice-divorced owner of a coffee shop at the mall, and Chlo
language: English
title: Feast of Love
titlecomplete: Feast of Love
genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Book Club, Romance, Adult, Novels, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Literary Fiction, Love
ratings_count: 9399
places: Ann Arbor, Michigan
awards: awardedAt: 946713600000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Premi Llibreter de narrativa
publisher: New Millennium (GB)