Tuesday, April 8, 2008

#31: Reading

My book club read Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter, this month. I think this may have been a book I suggested--based on the synopsis, it sounded like something I thought the gals would enjoy. Each of several characters tells the author their love story, narrating their own chapter, and all the stories and characters are interwoven. (Perhaps reminiscent of one of my favorite shows?)

The first few chapters were promising; the characters were interesting, and each seemed to have their own unique quirks. But, by the time all of the characters had been introduced, I was already getting tired of one of the main ones--Bradley, the author's twice-divorced neighbor who owns a coffee shop in the mall. Bradley is depressed and strange. He's difficult to like, and every time I came to one of the chapters he narrated, I found myself rushing through. A few of the plot points of Bradley's story were implausible to me, particularly the way his love story ends. Some of the relationships between characters are also a reach. For example, I doubt a middle-aged sucessful businessman is somehow a good basketball buddy of an early twenty-something former drug addict who works in a coffee shop. Contrivances like this (and others) take me out of the story and make it difficult for me to connect with the characters.
I was hoping this book would be more like True Love, by Robert Fulghum. In that book, Fulghum reports real-life love stories he's collected via mail and in person. Yep, he apparently set up a table at a Seattle coffee house, and put out a sign asking people to tell him their love stories in exchange for a cup of coffee and possibly being made famous. Hearing other people's love stories, their how-we-met stories is one of my favorite things. Maybe one of these days I will set up a table at a coffee shop and ask for stories!
From Publisher's Weekly:

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; and philosophy professor Ginsberg, who pines for his missing and beloved son, Aaron. 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.

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