The Feast of Love: A Novel
by Charles Baxter
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles BaxterEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-05-01
ISBN: 037570910X
Number of pages: 308
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Feast of Love: A Novel
Book Review: "Pictures At An Exhibition"
Summary: 5 Stars
The book is a panoply of life. Baxter describes people in love, life, death, work and all that life gives and takes. Like the orchestral piece by Mussorgsky, "Pictures At An Exhibition," "The Feast Of Love" describes life's trials, tribulations and events in small vignettes. Each vignette is unique and the characters of the picture he paints stand on their own, but they are all related in some way or manner. Primarily, they are all connected in to a coffee shop. The shop is modeled on the Starbucks formula, with soft couches and easy chairs and varieties of coffee. The happiness and sadness, the striving of the people to move through life in a meaningful manner and the successes and failures of the people to achieve that are all described with great aplomb.
Additionally, the book is a metaphor of Ezekial's vision. His seraphim on wheels of fire play a large part. The cogs in the wheels being different people who come together and sometimes break apart for many reasons. Baxter is kind to his readers in pointing this out at the end of the book, by describing the dream through the visions of Chloe', one of the main characters in the book. But in case the reader still does not recognize the vision, Baxter has Chloe' actually seek the answer to this vision, and is informed that it is the vision of Ezekial, by one of the other main characters in the book.
With descriptive metaphors, Baxter weaves his way through the lives of his characters. The young and intense love affairs, the not so impressive sex of people not really in love, the mystical and the prognostications of the fortune tellers and the potential for even reincarnation are just some of the things that Baxter so expertly interleaves into his creation. But at the bottom or interwoven, are the realities of life that many fail to see, or many ignore, because they are either too painful to integrate or too obscure to be recognized. Baxter recognizes them though and allows the reader to experience them vicariously through his book. To read this book is almost to live your life through Baxter's eyes in a matter of days, as the reader works his way through the text.
Much of the book is based on the malady of insomnia. Baxter draws a comparison between the insomnia of "Macbeth" versus the insomnia of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" using Shakespeare to assist him in showing the polar opposites of life. While the insomnia of the tragedy is ominous and eerie, the insomnia of the comedy is more of a Bacchanal, leading to intensities of love and life. Yet, they are both insomnia, and coexist in the reality of life, which mixes with the surrealism of dreams. As Edgar Allan Poe put it, "... Is all we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?" Baxter shows us that the dream and the reality of life do combine to give us a complete whole. Life is never just real, nor is it completely surreal; but rather, it is a combination of both.
The book is recommended for mature readers with a good literary background. But, all readers, regardless of their background take away some extremely intense and interesting lessons from The Feast Of Love. It is easy to see why it was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award, as it is an extraordinary piece of writing. Baxter should be watched for future creations, as his talent is brilliantly elucidated in this book.
Summary of The Feast of Love: A Novel
From "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people.The Feast of Love is just that -- a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones.
In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart Their voices resonate with each other -- disparate people joined by the meanderings of love -- and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life. Crafted with subtlety, grace, and power, The Feast of Love is a masterful novel.
Among literary cognoscenti, Charles Baxter has a well-deserved reputation as one of America's finest writers. Best known for his short stories, Baxter has also produced three novels. His fourth, The Feast of Love, combines the best of both genres--with a light dusting of metafiction to sweeten the dish. The book begins with Baxter himself waking from a nightmare and going for a moonlit walk through his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. While sitting on a park bench, he is joined by an acquaintance of 12 years--and, incidentally, one of the main characters in the novel. It is Bradley who gives Baxter the name for the novel he's currently struggling to write, and even offers himself as a character:
You should call it The Feast of Love. I'm the expert on that. I should write that book. Actually, I should be in that book. You should put me into your novel. I'm an expert on love. I've just broken up with my second wife, after all. I'm in an emotional tangle. Maybe I'd shoot myself before the final chapter. Your readers would wonder about the outcome.But why stop there? Bradley goes on to suggest that he send people to Baxter, "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"--a sly tip-off to the reader of this elegant, quirky, and wholly engrossing novel that the writer may be no more reliable than his narrators.
What follows is a chronicle of love--the mad kind, the bad kind, and the kind that sustains us when everything else is gone. In addition to Smith, we meet Chloé, a young waitress at Bradley's espresso bar, and her ex-junkie boyfriend, Oscar; Bradley's next door neighbors, Harry Ginsburg, an elderly professor of philosophy, and his wife, Esther; and Kathryn and Diana, Bradley's two ex-wives. The characters take turns narrating, often commenting on and correcting versions of events mentioned by other characters in previous chapters, and occasionally advising Baxter on the progress of his novel: "Don't threaten people, especially lawyers" legal eagle Diana warns "Charlie" shortly before she launches into her own story. "Don't threaten your own characters. It's for your own good. You'll wind up in a mess of litigation and... subplots." But in The Feast of Love, God is in the subplots--Oscar and Chloé's involvement in the porn industry; Esther and Harry's agonized relationship with their mentally ill son; Bradley's travails in love, art, and dog ownership. As the novel progresses, these separate strands gradually merge, and not even an unexpected tragedy can dim the luster of this moonstruck romance. For by the time Baxter brings his tale of love and loss and redemption to a close, his characters have all found their way to the feast--bittersweet though some of the dishes may be. --Alix Wilber
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