The Feast of Love

Rating:
Summary: A remarkable feast
Review: Charles Baxter has written a clever, insightful, funny and heartbreaking novel.

The Feast of Love opens with writer/insomniac Charlie Baxter walking through his Ann Arbour, Michigan neighborhood in the dark, early hours of the morning. During his journey he encounters Bradley, a fellow insominiac, walking his dog who also happens to be named Bradley. After greeting, the topic turns to Charlie's new book of which has no title and is only in the beginning stages.

"You should call it The Feast of Love," says Bradley, "I am the expert on that. Actually, I should write 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."

And so begins the foray into The Feast of Love, a novel capturing love's great and painful moments told by the residents of Charlie's neighborhood. There's Bradley, the coffee shop owner, his two ex wives and their lovers; Chloe and Oscar the adventurous gen-xers with an uncontainable love; and Harry and Esther, Bradley's neighbors who mourn the son that has walked out of their lives.

This cast of characters is insightful, yet unknowing, and is always learning, hopeful and searching for the tables from which they can consume their feast. While not all the characters are successful in this endeavor, the novel leaves you content and feeling fortunate for the glimpse into the lives of these individuals and the chance to hear their stories in their own words.

Lara H. Smith

Rating:
Summary: Needs some tweaking
Review: The Feast of Love leaves the reader awed by Baxter's wonderful characterizations and utterly believable narratives, but dissapointed by the book's hollow format. Baxter sets up an elaborate framework for his novel in the first couple of chapters that is so annoying and completely without significance that I wanted to stop reading it right then and there. The author comes across as being hideously self-conscious and lacking in good ideas. Baxter should have simply dropped the bothersome pretense and written a collection of short stories. This would have done the book's striking and relatable characters greater justice and made for a more readable book. So why read the book? Baxter is full of delightful insights that surprise the reader and keep the book moving. The story of Chloe and Oscar is especially beautiful and unpredicatble. Baxter only rarely rests on the common conceptions and sterotypes that are so evident in much contemporary media. It is this unique view of the emotional reality of love and sex that makes the book worthwhile; Baxter draws on what he knows and therefore connects with the reader in a tangable and powerful way. Baxter has also clearly read some of his contemporaries. I see traces of Don Delillo in his ideas and prose as well as smatterings of David Foster Wallace's brand of self-consciousness, although Baxter does not meet either of these excellent authors at their level of originality and power. Baxter's redemption comes with his humor and emotional power. He does not fail to keep the reader involved in his first person tales of love found and lost, at times simultaneously. The complexity and confusion of his charatcers is an accurate portrail of the mess of feelings that is love; unlike other authors, Baxter does not try to dumb down love's difficulty for the sake of easy reading. His power, infact, comes from the characters' vividness inspite of their relative newness to the reader. Without elaborate background or explication the reader can feel the characters' pulse in the pages, these become people that one can imagine being or atleast knowing. The characters are familiar without being tired mostly because of Baxter's fresh observations and keenly contemporary style. His prose is colloquial to whichever character happens to be speaking and this too keeps things interesting. It allows Baxter to avoid all the cliche language that is commonly associated with fictional love. Baxter does a fairly good job of keeping his own voice out of the charatcers' discussions. When the charatcers are women, Baxter only rarely reveals his own agenda and keeps his male voice fairly absent. Most contemporary critics refuse to believe that men can successfully write women but Baxter provides an example of fairly good cross gender voice. His women are believable as women but his men seem slightly more heartfelt and more vivid. All around the charatcers are very well develpped and in most cases delightful to read. The diversity of their experiences even within a fairly narrow circumstance is pretty remarkable and feels very true. If your looking for character driven reading by a thoughtful and insightful author that only briefly threatens his own work, read The Feast of Love. It is enjoyable reading, gives you something to chew on, and won't bore those interested in the many faces of love.

Rating:
Summary: A modern Symposium...
Review: I see this book compared to Plato's Symposium in the critical blurbs. That's fair enough - Baxter references it himself in the book. I admire any writer who can write about philosophy so effortlessly while not being boring. As soon as one of the characters claimed to be obsessed with Kierkegaard, I was hooked.

Yes, this book is a feast of love. It is about romantic love in all its aspects - young and not so young. The most adorable couple in the book are the teenagers Oscar and Chloe (pronounced "Klow-Ay"). They are just punks who spend most of their time having sex, but their dreams are surprisingly traditional.

Don't be scared off if you think that a book about love is going to be sappy - it isn't. Baxter breathes life into all of his diverse characters. We come to feel for them - their dreams, their fears, and their frustrations. When tragedy finally strikes, we are so involved we become heartbroken too.

Baxter writes in an interview style, effectively giving us multiple first-person narrators. The conversational writing quickly hooks the reader and moves him briskly along. It is like an Altman film - there is no central character, just an interesting journey into the lives and loves of these Midwestern people. A very good read.

Rating:
Summary: A Literary Feast
Review: This is a wonderful book with very lively and colourful characters. Baxter evokes every type of emotion in the reader, very much like the characters who experience the pains and joys of love. Some parts are very humourous while others can be very serious and heartbreaking. I have never read a fiction novel written in this form before where the author is in the novel interviewing the characters. I think Baxter allows the reader to dive into this fairy tale like story while also being very realistic. You will wonder while you are reading whether or not these characters really exist or not. As a Michigander, and now a resident of Ann Arbor where the story takes place, I thought this story was believable and it felt more real to me. Many of the places and streets in the novel exist. It's refreshing to finally see a midwestern tale that is as exciting and lively as The Feast of Love

Rating:
Summary: The Feast of Love
Review: This was a truly amazing book! Charles Baxter did an amazing job of showing how deep down everyone just wants to be loved. Bradley, one of the main characters, wants to love and to be loved so badly that he will give up anything for it. Chloe, a worker in Bradley's coffee shop, and her boyfriend, Oscar, are the only ones who actually find true love. Although they are the youngest characters in the novel, they are the wisest when it comes to love. Diana, Bradley's first wife, wants an exciting lover more than she wants to find her soulmate. Kathryn, Bradley's second wife, finds the love she needs in another woman. Harry Ginsberg, Bradley's next-door neighbor, has a lot of love for his son, Aaron, who has run away and won't return. Bradley the dog, Bradley the human's dog, also needs love from his owner. So basically, everyone spends their lives looking for love. And everyone needs love. Also, everyone needs to read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Don't be scared off by the title or the cover!
Review: This book is amazing and a 2004 must read for both guys and gals! If you enjoyed movies like Short Cuts or 6 Degree's of Separation you will love this book and understand how it's laid out (i.e. separate characters - living separate lives - somehow connected). This book proved to me that ANY unique thought, personality trait, quirk/tick, phrase/snappy word selection, word choice, vision, day dream, fear, insecurity, issue, event, etc. that I thought was truly unique to ME and made me different from everyone else is/was a big farce. Charles Baxter was able to provide me with a 'grow up' wake up call - prove to me that there is nothing original nor unique about me or how I think or what I say or how I act, etc. My entire 'supposedly unique character/self' is smeared across every character (male and female) in this book. All men over the age of 30 should be required to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Intimate slice-of-life in everyday setting
Review: This is a nice book, with a variety of brooding characters who are involved in different love affairs. I enjoyed the dreamy quality of the prose and how all the characters lives, although mundane, were described in a poetic way, as if trascending their own existence.

In summary, I found this book a pleasant and high-quality quick read. Recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Flawless!
Review: Wonderful characters; wonderful dialogue; wonderful humor; wonderful everything. I want to make sure I get my 5 stars in. I just read Anne Tyler's Amateur Marriage, and this is much more enjoyable, actually like some of Tyler's best books.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth your time, money--GREAT discussion for book clubs
Review: This was one of our picks for book club and it generated terrific discussion. The entire title/theme centers around a painting one of the characters did. Original plot, premise, and treatment. Well written, finely drawn characters, deftly made connections, just a really great book. Don't hesitate here. Read it; share it with a friend though... Because you will want to discuss this with someone.

Rating:
Summary: Love - both mistaken and real
Review: Charles Baxter, an acclaimed master of the short story, proves himself equally adept as a novelist in The Feast of Love. The writer "Charlie" scrambles out of bed late at night because of a recurrent nightmare and decides to take a walk. A few blocks from his house, he encounters Bradley, an acquaintance and fellow insomniac who is walking his dog (also named Bradley.) There, in the middle of the night in Ann Arbor, Bradley the human dictates the title and characters of the novel Charlie should be writing. What follows then is pure structural brilliance: Charlie, as an invisible interviewer, pursues the "real" people who have touched Bradley's life: ex-wives Kathryn and Diana, young employees Chloé and Oscar, neighbors Harry and Esther - and the people who affect them. Each character tells a part of the story in his or her own voice. Soon, Charlie the interviewer fades into the background, emerging only when details that he has revealed at the beginning appear in the lives of his characters and thus remind the reader that, in true metafiction style, this fiction has a creator.

These love stories tell of mistaken love and true love - and the heartbreak that comes with both. Although they begin as separate tales, by the end they converge, bringing the novel together in a heartwarming whole. Baxter's prose is, as always, precisely clear. The distinct voices of the narration are superbly handled, especially in the case of Chloé, who is the most memorable character in the novel.

Charles Baxter fans should not pass up this extraordinary novel. If you like the metafiction in Ian McEwan's Atonement or the quirkiness of Anne Tyler's characters, you should appreciate this novel.