'A chameleon's skill'
The incident had the bizarre aspect of a "Twilight Zone" episode, minus Rod Serling's baritone: A man was impersonating Charles Baxter. This happened 27 years ago, before Baxter wrote the novels "Feast of Love" and "Saul and Patsy," before he was awarded the Award of Merit by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was, by his own admission, anonymous.
Even stranger, it was someone he knew, a friend who claimed to be the then-unknown writer.
"When I found out that he was doing what he was doing, I was astounded," Baxter says. "When he finally admitted it, I said it was preposterous."
Baxter changes his register, deepening his voice like a B movie villain to mimic the man's reply: " But it's true; what do you think I should do?"
A similar theft of identity occurs in Baxter's new novel, "The Soul Thief." Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student at a college in Buffalo, befriends a strange, enigmatic peer who starts to inhabit and appropriate his life. Jerome Coolberg hires a thief to steal Mason's clothes and otherwise insinuates himself in Mason's life.
Part of the novel's premise is that a large segment of Americans increasingly attempt to model their lives on the rich or famous.
"But it's something you outgrow, or should outgrow," says Baxter, who teaches English at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. "We're not outgrowing it, and it's why I wanted the last part of the book to take place in Los Angeles. That's where the sloughing off of the old self and the taking on of the new self is prevalent."
The first segment of "The Soul Thief" occurs in Buffalo, a place where "commodities and objects were manufactured," Baxter says. The midsection of the novel takes place in the non-descript suburbia of New Jersey.
By the time the story moves to Los Angeles, Mason and Coolberg are 30 years past their post-graduate days and the point-of-view of the story has changed, as has the voice.
"I've been thinking about voices a lot since I wrote 'The Feast of Love,'" Baxter says. "With that book, I wanted the reader to be able to identify the characters when they came back without my having to label them at the beginning of every chapter."
In "The Soul Thief," Nathaniel Mason remains the focus of the story, but the tone of voice varies. By the time the book gets to the Los Angeles phase and Coolberg is hosting a show called "An American Evenings" on a NPR radio station, a reader might start to hear "This American Life" host Ira Glass.
Baxter says he thought that might happen, but is adamant that Glass was not a model or inspiration in any way.
"The voice in Part One, the strings are more tightly strung," he says. "In Part Two, the guy has calmed down describing his family life. ... The guy in Part Two is a sort of Jeff Daniels type. In Part One, he's more Robert Downey."
If there's a consistent theme in Baxter's writing, it's dislocation: How safety nets can suddenly be lost, and lives thrown out of balance. He traces this to the unexpected death of his father when he was but 18 months old, and how his family was never the same.
"There are all these sudden deaths in my fiction, it's true," Baxter says. "It's true in 'Saul and Patsy,' it's true in 'The Feast of Love,' and it's true in this book. I just can't get away from it. It is sort of the bottom-line story I'm always telling."
While this fascination might be considered macabre or morbid, Baxter is only reflecting the human bias. Feel-good stories aren't the stuff of network news, let alone good fiction.
"Happiness is not a story, and what I'm always telling my students is that you have to destabilize the situation," he says. "You can't write about happiness in an extended dramatic medium. It's impossible. Nobody can do it."
Baxter compares the form of "The Soul Thief" to a Chinese puzzle box. As the voices change in tone and viewpoint, an identity emerges that was hinted at in the book's first pages. The clue comes by way of the title itself, and in Baxter's own description of the book as being about "thievery."
Most of all, "The Soul Thief" gave the author a chance to do what he loves most: assume another, if fictional, identity.
"It's what you do as a writer, the qualities of empathy and getting into or under someone's skin," he says. "It's a chameleon's skill. I love doing it. In its best light, what I did in the book is a model for putting together a story that's partly a puzzle. At its worst, it illustrates how the vampire soul works, by being invisible, him or herself, and taking on the personality of someone else. That's socio-pathology."
Additional Information:
'The Soul Thief'
Author : Charles Baxter
Publisher : Pantheon, $20, 210 pages
Additional Information:
Capsule review
Charles Baxter's 'The Soul Thief' reflects a culture in which voices strain and sometimes fight to be heard, where the ordinary call for and demand the spotlight. A charming, bookish graduate student, Nathaniel Mason, befriends the enigmatic Jerome Coolberg, 'a whiz-kid sage with a wide range of affectations.' A strange friendship develops, with Coolberg becoming increasingly an irritant as they vie for the same woman who wears a flak jacket adorned with Soviet medallions.
Baxter constructs the novel meticulously, changing tone and color as he switches locales from Buffalo to suburban New Jersey and, finally, Los Angeles. There is trickery, but it's right in front of the reader at all times, not hidden behind a curtain. The novel's stunning conclusion, in this context, is indeed a magical act.
