Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and has been made into an excellent film with Morgan Freeman. I’ve just finished reading the novel, finding it charming and moving. Rather than focusing on a single protagonist, Baxter coaxes together a wonderful ensemble of characters, each recounting his or her own amorous tale.

The unifying device is the notion that each character is speaking to the author, Baxter himself, as he seeks out people to tell him about their encounters with Cupid. Baxter is deft in creating the unique voice of each character, and perhaps he’s at the top of his game with the character of Chloe, a latter-day flower child who broke my heart and then put it together again.

Chloe experiences the extremes of sexual love–the ecstatic highs and the gloomy lows–the highs with her boyfriend and then husband, Oscar, and the lows as she is accosted by Oscar’s father, whom the two kids call The Bat. While people like The Bat remain unredeemed, most of Baxter’s characters are transformed and elevated by love. This is true even of Diane, whom we first meet as a cynical and predatory lawyer. Baxter is again brilliant as Diane’s words reveal her inner being in ways that she herself does not fully understand–and as they slowly reveal her changes. One of Baxter’s recent nonfiction books is called The Art of Subtext, and there is plenty of subtext to Diane.

Books like Baxter’s (another is Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch) alter the traditional notion of the novel as the narrative of a single character’s experiences–novels with titles such as Tom Jones, David Copperfield, Emma, and Daniel Deronda. The ensemble novel widens it’s focus to show us how the stories of various characters mingle with and transform one another. These novels, it seems to me, have at their core the deeply ethical perception that in human relations there is no single, privileged point of view. Andre Dubus makes a similar point on a smaller scale when his short stories (or many of them) refuse to remain merely with one person’s perceptions.

If the modernists thought it was careless craftsmanship for a writer to “violate” the one point of view established at the start of the story, writers such as Baxter, Dubus, and Bausch show us that it is a moral necessity to acknowledge various view points.

P.S. I review Baxter’s newest novel, The Soul Thief, in the June issue of Minnesota Literature.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Novels, Uncategorized, Writing Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.