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Baxter explores personality in novel The Soul Thief

By John Kenyon

Charles Baxter said in 2003 that despite the success of novels like Feast of Love, he felt he was involved in “a great scam… a short story writer trying to disguise myself as a novelist.”

While he admits today that he’s still involved in the same scam as a writer trying his best “to find an outlet for what I think of as episodic stories,” he has at least earned the imprimatur of a friend, who called to tell him, “You’ve finally written a novel” when his latest book, The Soul Thief, was published. Baxter says he reminded his friend that he has a handful of novels to his credit, but the friend brushed him off, saying those were just “stories strung together.”

Baxter agrees with his friend, at least that this is a novel, despite that, in an era when most novels top 400 pages or more, this one comes in at a lean 210 pages.

“I started as a poet, and poets are always interested in moments more than they are sequences,” he says. “Novels are moments that have been illuminated. I think this thing is a real novel. It’s kind of a page turner, I hope. I don’t know what else there is to writing a novel that I still have to do.”

While Baxter’s back catalog is filled with critically acclaimed short story collections, novels that do feel at times like linked short stories and his last novel, Saul and Patsy, which revisits characters from earlier stories. The Soul Thief is indeed a novel, and one that is unique even in the career of a writer unafraid to experiment in his fiction.

The novel tells the story of a love triangle of sorts, though it is much more. Nathaniel Mason, a grad student in early 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., falls for Theresa, a “young woman dressed in an Army surplus jacket, which fits her rather well and is accessorized with Soviet medals probably picked up from a European student black market.”

They encounter Jerome Coolberg, a brilliant but perhaps troublingly devious young man who, to Nathaniel’s dismay, begins appropriating parts of Nathaniel’s story as his own. At one point, he says “nothing is me,” at another, he tells Nathaniel, “I know everything about you.” Hovering around the periphery is Jamie, a lesbian artist who Nathaniel also romances, and Ben, a burglar who is appalled at Nathaniel’s lack of things to steal.

The story then leaps forward three decades to a time when Nathaniel, after a nervous breakdown brought about in part by Jerome’s actions, has rebuilt his life as a middle class family man. Jerome returns, however, which brings the story to its climax.

That might seem fairly straightforward, but all is not as it appears. Baxter leaves ample clues along the way to help readers figure things out, and the more sophisticated the reader, the more sense the clues will make.

“You certainly don’t have to come to my book with a Ph.D in your hand,” he says. “If you’ve read some of the other literature of doubles or identity switching, you may be prepared for what happens in this book. I hope it’s a good yarn.”

Baxter says there is no one “right” way to read the book. It is written in such a way that the story could be interpreted in any number of ways.

“I think every book is open to interpretation,” he says. “There is no book that is closed to our views on it. That’s the great thing about literature and art. We’re free to think anything we like about it. I have certain opinions about it, but once I’ve written it, I’m just another reader.”

He draws Jerome as a character with a personality disorder in that he tries to create his own personality by appropriating that of others because he has no sense of self. He goes on to describe that as “vampirising,” something he acknowledges can also be used to describe a novelist.

“When most people think about authors they think about them as being admirable, but also a little creepy because they are looking around to see what they can steal from your life, or what there is about you that they can use,” he says. “It’s a vampiric quality. If they’re paying attention, they’re stealing things.”

The success of Feast of Love forced Baxter to re-evaluate his role as a novelist, because he began to hear from readers in ways he hadn’t before, something that made him realize the effect his work had on people.

That did not, however, lead him to write what his fans may have come to expect. He says he warned his publisher that The Soul Thief was likely to earn mixed reviews, and he was right. Some revel in the twists and turns; others find it underwhelming.

“Readers were going to expect me to do another nice sort of Midwestern pastoral,” he says. “Or, they wanted a lot of mayhem at the end… and decided that I had failed in my efforts to write a thriller. At this point of my life after nine books of fiction, I have come to expect that not everyone will like what I do. It’s important to satisfy myself. Not all of my books make me happy. This one does.”

To read more from John Kenyon's interview with Charles Baxter, check out his personal blog, Things I'd Rather Be Doing.

Charles Baxter reads from The Soul Thief at 7 p.m. Friday at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City. It is free and open to the public.