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The Feast of Love

Charles Baxter

3.70 · Rating details · 8,577 ratings · 905 reviews

The Feast of Love is a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined A 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 ...more

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Hardcover, 308 pages

Published April 25th 2000 by Pantheon

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Nov 02, 2008 Will Byrnes rated it liked it · review of another edition

Charles Baxter - image from Sycamore Review

This a delicious novel. Structurally it is a sort of extended spokes on a wheel. The central character is Bradley. We learn of his relationship history, and of people connected with him. A young couple, who outwardly seem very punky are in fact the most traditional. We see his relationship with a very harsh, intense woman who marries him almost for a lark and who then dumps him to return to her boyfriend. In another relationship his first wife leaves ...more

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Jul 05, 2008 Bill Kerwin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A celebration of Eros, a god to be reckoned with--dangerous, transformative, irrational--as told in at least five different voices by characters who have experienced his power. Baxter is a fine stylist, and the different voices are precisely delineated.

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Sep 16, 2007 Emily rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: no one

Uh, no. Boring. Charles Baxter has an anoying writing style that got on my nerves, Charles does. The dialog was written horribly, not at all like actual people conversing. And I am not just talking about the two youth characters. All of the characters. They were unnecassarily repetitive. The two youth were the worst though. I know that he was trying emulate the way immature 20-year-olds would actually talk, but . . . gag! I could barely plow through one particular passage were the two idiots ...more

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Apr 27, 2009 Corina rated it did not like it · review of another edition

If an older, male author is seized by the urge to speak through the mouth of a pierced, teenage nymphette, he'd better do it convincingly. The parts of this book narrated by the earnestly vapid Chloe read a little like how old men impersonating young girls in chat rooms must come off. She intersperses slang with a few ten-cent words like "mellifluous" (and then reassures us she looked the word up somewhere so we won't suspect she's really an aging academic) and, at one point refers to her ...more

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Oct 03, 2007 Empress rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: insomniacs, love-fools & Shakey Jake allumni.

A seemingly disoriented post-midnight walk through several lives and loves. People clumsily come together, and come apart, shifting narrators and tones--all thick with the theme of love (and loss) in its' many, many forms.

I loved this books and had a hard time putting it down, literally. (Which rarely happens to me.) At times, however, I was worried it was too cute a novel, given the occasional all-too-precious line, but before my skepticism could fully take hold, Baxter quickly won me back A seemingly disoriented post-midnight walk through several lives and loves. People clumsily come together, and come apart, shifting narrators and tones--all thick with the theme of love (and loss) in its' many, many forms.

I loved this books and had a hard time putting it down, literally. (Which rarely happens to me.) At times, however, I was worried it was too cute a novel, given the occasional all-too-precious line, but before my skepticism could fully take hold, Baxter quickly won me back with a succinct, beautifully eloquent line: More than enough to effectivly counteract his unfourtunate lapsess of syrupyness. As such, I found myself underlining often, and it is safe to say I am a big fan of his writing.

I would have given it five stars, were it not for the too-cutesy bits and the fact that, towards the end, the novel shifts heavily onto Chole's character--far from my favorite.

Having previosly been a teenage girl myself, I am not sure if I found her character unbelievable, or simply annoying. Of course, I empathized with, and could relate to some defining aspects of her story, but overall, I found her language tiresome and her development somewhat shallow.
Besides Chole and her lover; Oscar, I was totally engrossed in all the characters and their stories.

Particularly, the less prominent: Harry, an aging Jewish man, who constantly ruminates on Kierkegaardian theory, and the dissapearence of his adult son.

All in all, a great book about the trouble, complexity and wonder of love.

***Oh, and appraently this has just been made into a movie. The movie takes place in Oregon, and well, last time I checked, Ann Arbor ain't in Oregon. Their failure to get this primary detail correct, gives me little faith that the film will do ANY sort of justice to the book. (Though I do so love Morgan Freeman! XOXO!!!)

And shit--look at what the silver screen did to Girl, Interrupted!--I am still grumbling about that one.

So please read before you watch, and don't judge a book by it's movie!!! ...more

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Aug 05, 2008 Caitlin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: for-ma

There are few books that have possessed me -- taken ahold of me, owned me, inhabited me -- like Feast of Love has. I have been dreaming about the characters. I have been dreaming about reading the book, which is also like living inside the book. I will be thinking about Nude Descending a Staircase, as a painting and as a metaphor, and the next chapter I pick up will mention the painting. I will read a chapter that uses votive candles as a reality and as a metaphor and I will close the book and ...more

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Apr 28, 2012 Teresa rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Someone, or something I read, caused me to pick up this book several years ago at a used-books sale, because its synopsis is not one that would normally have tempted me into buying it, but whatever that something was, I have no recollection of it any longer. And it can't be the "A Midsummer Night's Dream" references as that isn't even one of my favorite Shakespeare plays.

I can tell Baxter is a smart man (his character of Harry proves that) and also a very good writer from the writing in the ...more

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Sep 28, 2015 Lee Klein added it

Shelves: put-down-for-now

Abandoning on pg 100 -- read like labored creative writing. Unbelievable. Mannered syntax. Dull. Vaguely interesting structurally. The occasional nice observation. But then there'd be a line like "We were swoon machines." Ugh. Incites hatred in me. The Jewish professor's inverted syntax? Double ugh. Goes firmly in the "too many books, not enough time to bother with this sort of BS" category. I'll need to read some Bernhard now to recover from this.

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Jan 04, 2009 Crystal rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009

A dear friend told me about this book several years ago. I bought it, like I always do, and there it sat on my shelf for years - waiting to be read. When asked for a book club suggestion, I gazed at my shelf and it screamed at me "pick me! pick me!" So, it won the suggestion and became the early January pick for book club.

It was beautiful. Well written, heartfelt, and just an overall good read. It was a terrific portrayal of how, despite our good intentions, some things just don't work out the A dear friend told me about this book several years ago. I bought it, like I always do, and there it sat on my shelf for years - waiting to be read. When asked for a book club suggestion, I gazed at my shelf and it screamed at me "pick me! pick me!" So, it won the suggestion and became the early January pick for book club.

It was beautiful. Well written, heartfelt, and just an overall good read. It was a terrific portrayal of how, despite our good intentions, some things just don't work out the way we plan. There are about 9 major characters throughout the book - all of whom are somehow interwoven with the others. It's a novel ... but written much like a memoir. The characters tell their own stories, which makes the book way more profound than had the author been a narrator. I am all about learning from books I read (yes, eve novels) so here's what I learned:

When we tell our stories to someone else, we illuminate those parts of the stories that most affect us. By telling our story, we become more aware of the power of our thought. Telling someone else helps us to see the things we need to celebrate as well as the things we need to mourn and move past.

No matter how hard we try, we can't always choose who or when we fall in love. We can work really hard to love someone with all that we are, but if we are not in love with that person, we will never be able to love them the way they love us.

When we hide our fears from other people, we really make them worse. People around us end up picking at those fears like scabs, whether they realize it or not. Unless we claim the fear as our own and work towards healing it, the scabs get opened and our fears become scars.

Well written books not only help us escape from our own lives, but also allow us to use that escape to look on our own lives from an outside perspective. This book did just that. It took me outside of my own world - to the world of 9 beautiful, wonderfully messed up people. In each character, I found a glimpse of me. I discovered something else about myself. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Well-written books become a part of us. The characters become our friends. Charles Baxter did a wonderful job at making these 9 characters a part of my life.

...more

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Mar 10, 2008 Matthew rated it liked it · review of another edition

I almost "really liked" this book, but something kept me from getting up and over that slope. It's a really large-hearted novel - and very, very well-written - but its scope was a little small for my tastes.

In terms of the characters (which, in the end, is all this novel is), I loved reading the Ginsburgs and their careworn intelligence and parental heartbreak, and I enjoyed Diana's immediately recognizable, warfaring vanity; but I couldn't stand reading Chloe and Oscar and their impoverished, I almost "really liked" this book, but something kept me from getting up and over that slope. It's a really large-hearted novel - and very, very well-written - but its scope was a little small for my tastes.

In terms of the characters (which, in the end, is all this novel is), I loved reading the Ginsburgs and their careworn intelligence and parental heartbreak, and I enjoyed Diana's immediately recognizable, warfaring vanity; but I couldn't stand reading Chloe and Oscar and their impoverished, unwashed amour fou. Baxter doesn't let this issue slide entirely, to his credit, but in which atlas are these proletariat sensualists within a day's drive of the bourgeois professionals that inhabit the rest of the novel? I grew up in the Midwest: you may be surprised to learn that, as elsewhere, class divisions exist there. I also couldn't really place Bradley, who was supposedly at the center of this story. It seemed to me that he was a different character entirely to every other character (the narrator included). Maybe that's the point but, well, if that's the point... make that the point.

I did like the the construction of the narrative, and I found that there were some wonderful writerly gems ("America, of course, is a country vast enough to lose a child in" really stuck out for me; as did the image of the Dragon with the Rubber Nose; I also really liked "Ginsburg's" understanding of child sacrifice vis-a-vis the Kierkegaardian Abraham, but that may just be because that's all I recall of the time I spent with Fear and Trembling).

I guess I struggle, systematically, with renderings of human experience so focused on love, or sex, as the prime mover of identity. I suppose you might ask a waiting room of thoughtful people which description of human life's value they'd pin their name to, if pressed; I suppose a percentage of them might say love, some, even, without having to think about it first. This book is written for them. It's well-written and has moments of brilliant perceptiveness - I almost "really liked" it - but, for my tastes, its scope is a little small (as I mentioned). ...more

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Jun 19, 2007 gwen g rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Oh, did I love this book. Clever, but not for the sake of being clever; self-aware, but not self-absorbed. And so beautiful. Charles Baxter himself is the narrator, visible only periodically, and his neighbor Bradley is telling his own story intertwined with those of people he knows.

I turned down about 15 different pages that had passages I liked... here are two:

The upshot of it was, I kept Bradley. I fed him and petted him and I built him a doghouse and called his name when I came home, and in ...more

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Mar 25, 2019 Cheryl rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I like to read local authors before heading to a new vacation destination so this fit the bill. I was part-way through before recognizing I'd seen the movie version just a few months ago! Ha! (Big duh, I knew something seemed familiar!) It was fun, engaging, meaningful writing throughout and by the end came together in lovely ways I hadn't expected. Per usual, while the movie was decent, the book provided a depth that the film couldn't achieve.

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Jul 25, 2012 Mary McCoy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I've read this book about ten times and bought it at least four times because I keep giving my copies away to friends. Over time, I've come to see that it's not a perfect book - certain turns of phrase clunk, certain character traits don't ring true. But it's perfect to me, and no matter how many times I've read it, there are still passages that blow me away, move me to tears, and strike me as profoundly true and correct.

There are also lines that I've never noticed before that get my attention ...more

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Oct 02, 2007 cindy rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Goodness this was hard to get through. I couldn't finish it. It was written Phil Donahue confessional style. Everyone seems to have the same voice, even if they're an old Jewish man grieving the loss of his drug addict son, a young tattoed alternative in-love couple, or a middle-aged man surviving the tatters of a second failed marriage. Maybe the movie is better?

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Nov 28, 2008 Katherine Malmo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this book. It has become an all time favorite (for teh moment :). I can't quite articulate what about it I love so much. It's a good story told in an interesting way. The dialogue is perfect. I just find it so inspiring as a writer. He breaks the rules and he tells a good story.

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Jan 15, 2009 Sally rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: library-book, beautiful

Baxter's novel unfolds like an origami swan. The entire concept is beautiful and intricate. Upon first inspection it wows. How complex! Amazing! What an original narrative, layering individual perspectives within, among, alongside one overarching meta-narrative. The whole novel is deeply hyper-conscious of its own creation from page one.

The characters, residents of the same Michinan town are all comfortably familiar, sketched as someone recognizable. Baxter illuminates Ann Arbor's sedate Baxter's novel unfolds like an origami swan. The entire concept is beautiful and intricate. Upon first inspection it wows. How complex! Amazing! What an original narrative, layering individual perspectives within, among, alongside one overarching meta-narrative. The whole novel is deeply hyper-conscious of its own creation from page one.

The characters, residents of the same Michinan town are all comfortably familiar, sketched as someone recognizable. Baxter illuminates Ann Arbor's sedate Midwesterness, the residents are familiar with one another before their intermingling.

The book reads as a series of character portraits, told in the first person. The individuals appear at first resistant, and then yielding participants in the story. Each a work of art not unlike the basemented art of our "protagonist" Bradley. A solitary man, the owner of a mall coffee shop, Bradley's lovers describe him as both downtrodden and yet optimistic. One particularly mean lover, Diana, takes to calling him "toad" before dismissing him altogether after 2 months of marriage. We follow all of the people Bradley encounters, in a series of almost-interviews these people tell Bradley their story in first-hand accounts. At times initially unwilling participants in his novel, the characters are unrealistically verbose in describing minutiae of their daily existence to this man. We hear from his former and future lovers, past lovers' future partners, his employees and their lovers, his next door neighbors' relationship.

Each one of these stories in inextricably linked to the others - yet reads as its own narrative. What does this tell the reader about Baxter's view of the world? I can't help but imagine the place he imagines he holds - the as silent observer - noticing more about those around them than they know he does.

When the plot begins jettisoning forward and back through time I grow weary. Why do I honestly care about Bradley the coffee shop owner and his dog Bradley? What about his ill-starred home and overly-friendly workplace draw such curious characters into his life? Is anyone really that interesting when you get down to the nitty-gritty of their daily existence?

Baxter has 42 more pages to show me. I hope he delivers.

Update: I have only one chapter left and I'm a little bit afraid to pick it up one last time. I don't want the story to conclude! Baxter does reveal the connections between all the threads. Like a masterwork of macrame. ...more

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Dec 24, 2015 Manik Sukoco rated it really liked it · review of another edition

There's such a thing as comfort-eating. Food you turn to when feeling sad or lonely. Food that is familiar, yet delicious and can help get your spirits up each time you turn to it. Well, I believe there is also such a thing as comfort reading. It is one of the best novels that I read last year. After reading it for the first time, I've found myself returning to it again and again, turning to favorite pieces, or simply reading it from cover to cover, on long, rainy, lonely weekends. It's the kind There's such a thing as comfort-eating. Food you turn to when feeling sad or lonely. Food that is familiar, yet delicious and can help get your spirits up each time you turn to it. Well, I believe there is also such a thing as comfort reading. It is one of the best novels that I read last year. After reading it for the first time, I've found myself returning to it again and again, turning to favorite pieces, or simply reading it from cover to cover, on long, rainy, lonely weekends. It's the kind of novel that makes you step out of your everyday-world, forget all that's on your mind and live through the characters inhabiting the book.
I've been a fan of Charles Baxter for ages. It came as a surprise, because it's different from other works by Baxter. It's a novel, but it's also a collection of stories, so in this way Charles Baxter doesn't move far from his usual style of writing. One of the surprises is the fact that the author appears as a character in the book. This trick could work or could not and then would be considered just a party-trick and thus, tacky. Here, it works.
Charlie is a blocked writer who suffers from insomnia and wonders the streets of Ann Arbour, Michigan during long nights, looking for ideas but finding none. On one of his nightly walks he meets his neighbor Bradley, who's walking his dog, also named Bradley. Why not name your new novel feast of love? Bradley suggests. I could tell you stories about myself and people around me and you could talk to some of them yourself. This is the basic idea of the book and the stories start unfolding, one more enchanting than the next.
This book vaguely reminded me of "things we talk about when we talk about love" by Raymond Carver. It's one of the best collections of love stories I've ever read and for me getting such a strong emotional response from a book is reason enough to love it. There's no point in getting into details about the actual love stories. Just read this book, read it when you're in the right frame of mind and enjoy it. ...more

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Sep 11, 2017 Kelly rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: didn-t-finish

I had such high hopes for this. Baxter is well awarded and I assumed this would be great. It's terribly disappointing and somewhat insulting. This is a boomer male who tries to write in the voice of a mix of characters but they all sort of sound the same. Of particular annoyance is the character Chloe, a teen punk whose monologue is a mix of weird slang (that Baxter seems to think teens use) and MFA-type $5 words. Read the 1-star reviews by members Emily and Corina, I agree with them entirely. I ...more

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Jul 16, 2007 Matthew rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: mostly everybody (proven)

This is a book I often recommend when asked to recommend a book by someone whose taste I don't know well.

It's not that it's "safe" (although everyone seems to like it) but that it's one of those transcendent middebrow books like Salinger's--Shawshank Redemption, which everyone also likes, does the same thing in the movie genre--that confirms everything you already thought or wanted to believe, and makes it seem richer than you'd ever thought. For which I'm grateful.

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Jan 02, 2013 Erin rated it liked it · review of another edition

I was not expecting to like this book when I picked it up. A used bookstore had clearance books on sale 7 for 5 dollars and I needed a seventh book, so I just threw this one on top of my stack. I'd heard of Baxter, but wasn't too familiar with his writing. I was kind of put off at the beginning by the meta-narrative style of the novel, but once I got into the stories of these characters, I was engrossed in their lives. Each chapter in this book is a vignette that sketches each character's love ...more

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Jul 07, 2017 Stephen rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: conbsistently-good-books-by-the-sam

This is the 2nd book I have read by this author and I am not sure what made me opt for this, but I did and I can say that I was not disappointed, but I do feel that Baxter was trying to be.....too hip? too pithy with his prose? too quirky with his character portrayal? too cool for words? Being perfectly frank, it was......I get it Charles. I do. And perhaps his assessment of life as portrayed by the characters is indeed how we live now. It is not how I live, but then I don't live nor work in Ann This is the 2nd book I have read by this author and I am not sure what made me opt for this, but I did and I can say that I was not disappointed, but I do feel that Baxter was trying to be.....too hip? too pithy with his prose? too quirky with his character portrayal? too cool for words? Being perfectly frank, it was......I get it Charles. I do. And perhaps his assessment of life as portrayed by the characters is indeed how we live now. It is not how I live, but then I don't live nor work in Ann Arbor, MI. I like Ann Arbor. It is the only college town I have been in that has two distinct downtowns, one for the college students and one, several blocks away for the locals. But I digress. This is not an assessment of the merits of proper city planning and urban design.

The novel is divided into three main sections: Beginnings, Middles and Ends. So he introduces the characters, and develops the plot, well enough that you are interested in moving onto the next section. Things get, to a degree, a tad stranger here as some of the foibles and quirky-ness of the actors becomes a tad more solidified. It is like really, you'd think one of the characcters would be named Crispin. You do start to feel sorry for some of them and one or two, well, you probably will not like them. I didn't. And as one would expect, it is all resolved, more-or-less, by the final section, appropriately titled Ends.

The action takes place over an extended period, but such is the magic of Baxter's telling that it seems to be occurring in the author's mind on that one magical midsummer night. It really does.
He seems to capture in that one night, a group of contemporary people, for Ann Arbor anyway, and their feelings of love and loss and regret and misgivings and confusion and passion, that perhaps many of us feel, but are not able to express, because it makes us too infallible and we are not able to process that emotion. We are always in control....at lease those of us who are upper-middle-class in our outlook to the modern world. Always in control. Sorry, nature is in control and it is not nice to fool Mother Nature.

There was one scene towards the end that I found funny, because I to experienced the same thing, in another college town, New Haven, CT. I was driving to the gym to swim, stuck in grid-lock at Elm & York with an ambulance in my rear view mirror with its siren wailing. No one was going anywhere. The same thing happened in the book, not an ambulance per say, but trying to get someone to the hospital, a university hospital - University of Michigan and in New Haven it was Yale New Haven Hospital! We know how that ended, I don't know what happened in New Haven.
So I chose this book as a break from some of the headier stuff i was reading: William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Willa Cather. It is good to read that kind of writing. It makes one realize how elegant the English language can be and how far we have fallen from grace from the sea. Will I read more Charles, probably. When i need a break. ...more

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Mar 23, 2017 Jim Leckband rated it really liked it · review of another edition

If Mr. Baxter was writing in earlier times this book would have been written in the manner of The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales where a framing excuse is used to write disparate tales that often don't have much to do with each other. Baxter isn't quite that off of that though - the framing device is an author (Charles ~~Kaufman~~ Baxter) waking up in the middle of the night, going for a walk and meeting another insomniac, Bradley Smith, who acts as Baxter's intercessor for the many tales of love ...more

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Mar 22, 2017 Judy rated it liked it · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jan 24, 2018 Kim Savage rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An exploration of love and all its varieties. All of its confusion and pain and wisdom. In this book it takes on many forms. Beauty. Humor. Tragedy. Charlie, Bradley the human and Bradley the dog. Kathryn, Diana, Chloe and Oscar, Esther and Harry. All from different walks of life, but all with their own love story. I’m emotionally involved with all the characters. I don’t usually like love stories, but this one has its own unique twist. It touches the heart. A very good read.

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Oct 02, 2017 Rebekah Redinger rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I was totally entranced by this book!!!! LOVED IT!!

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Apr 02, 2018 Reyna Gentin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I very much enjoyed this insightful and clever book. It explores many paradigms of love, and is sad and moving and hopeful.

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Jul 19, 2010 Judy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: anyone

I read this because I was planning to watch the movie. The book was full of surprises. I knew that Charles Baxter taught at the University of Michigan, a school I once attended, but was delighted to find The Feast of Love set in Ann Arbor, MI, where I lived for many years. I often read just for the pleasure and experience of being taken to places I will probably never go to myself, but there is a unique pleasure to recognizing the details of weather, types of people, buildings and streets, while

I read this because I was planning to watch the movie. The book was full of surprises. I knew that Charles Baxter taught at the University of Michigan, a school I once attended, but was delighted to find The Feast of Love set in Ann Arbor, MI, where I lived for many years. I often read just for the pleasure and experience of being taken to places I will probably never go to myself, but there is a unique pleasure to recognizing the details of weather, types of people, buildings and streets, while reading a work of fiction.

The novel opens with a writer named Charles Baxter who, suffering from insomnia, goes out for a midnight walk. He wanders into the U of M football stadium (one of those places I know well) and then on to a nearby park where he encounters a neighbor. They strike up a conversation and soon the neighbor, not a writer, starts to give Charles advice about writing a book, including a title and a plan: to talk to various people about love.

At this point, sixteen pages about a man taking a walk and describing what he sees followed by some clunky dialogue with his neighbor have me worried. I am definitely not hooked except by the fact that I know exactly where these two men are sitting. I decide to give both Charles Baxters one more chapter. (An odd point is that Bradley, the neighbor, has a dog named Bradley.)

By the end of Chapter Two I am intrigued. A story about Bradley and his first failed marriage has unfolded. I had a first failed marriage in Ann Arbor. So I keep going and more characters show up, who are all connected to Bradley in one way or another, who all have relationships of varying success. By the time Oscar and Chloe show up, a pair of quintessential Ann Arbor love children, I find myself completely involved in a feast of love that I hope will never end.

Chloe is my favorite character: she is young, reckless, intrepid and believes totally in love. There are several other female characters of different types and Baxter's writing chops are good enough that not one of them comes off as a type. Each is a fully realized personality. He is just as good with the male characters but especially with Harry Ginsberg, a professor of philosophy with a secret sorrow.

Bradley continues to be a clunky guy. It was his "bad dialogue" that I objected to, but that turns out to be a product of his personality and in fact, I know a guy from Ann Arbor who is amazingly like Bradley. Every once in a while though, Bradley comes up with a zinger, delivered in his clunky manner: "This song, 'My Funny Valentine,' as sung by Ella Fitzgerald, was going through my head as I walked. I always liked her; I liked it that she sang jazz while wearing glasses."

The Feast of Love, which is the name of Bradley's best painting (yes, he is a secret painter though he manages a franchise coffee place in the mall, the one I shopped in for years) turned out to be a little masterpiece of a book, celebrating people, life and love, with all the amazing moments of transcendence and many of the sorrowful depths of loss that most of us experience.

The very evening of the day I finished the book, I watched the movie. My advice is just read the book. Morgan Freeman as the Jewish philosophy professor? Please, skip the movie which does not begin to capture the magic of the book. Anyway, it is set in Portland, OR. ...more

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May 06, 2008 Richard rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: so-glad-i-read

Charles Baxter may have started out as a short story writer, but his latest efforts of note have been his novels. _The Feast of Love_ was a finalist for the National Book Award, and I can see why (though I have still to compare it to that year's winner). The idea is somewhat Kundera-esque--the novel begins with writer 'Charlie Baxter' waking in the middle of the night from a dream of asynchronous gears and finds that he is suffering from temporary amnesia. Once recovered, he decides to take a Charles Baxter may have started out as a short story writer, but his latest efforts of note have been his novels. _The Feast of Love_ was a finalist for the National Book Award, and I can see why (though I have still to compare it to that year's winner). The idea is somewhat Kundera-esque--the novel begins with writer 'Charlie Baxter' waking in the middle of the night from a dream of asynchronous gears and finds that he is suffering from temporary amnesia. Once recovered, he decides to take a walk to calm his nerves, and while doing so runs into a neighbor, Bradley, who has a dog of the same name. As they talk, the subject of love comes up, and 'Charlie Baxter' decides to make Bradley the first subject in his new project--a novel about love.

From there, the narrative is taken over by the characters the writer talks to for their stories and reflections on love. Aside from Bradley, we meet his two ex-wives, and a young couple, Oscar and Chloe, who work at Bradley's coffee shop. There is also Harry Ginsberg and his wife, Esther, who live next door to Bradley. Quite quickly, three generations are established to offer different perspectives of love. The interest Baxter sustains here is that the stories are all quite difficult--Bradley has definitely run a string of bad luck when it comes to choosing wives. One is very confused about her sexuality, another is not sure if she wants to relinquish the lover she has when she meets Bradley. Oscar and Chloe fall under the temptations of quick money to allow them to get away together from their bad home situations, and with the allure of quick money comes contact with less than scrupulous people. Even Harry and Esther have a troublesome son, Aaron, who likes to call in the middle of the night to extort money out of his folks.

Baxter's fiction is sometimes a little too distancing, when his characters too freely discuss philosophy or obscure ancient music, playing up the element of quirkiness, but making the characters themselves more representative than sympathetic. _The Feast of Love_ does have moments of quirky conversation, but Baxter sustains it all quite well in this book. Most all of the characters feel very substantial, possibly because Baxter has found a format that permits introspection and philosophy very naturally.

I was quite impressed with this novel and read it quite thoroughly. I found all of the characters engaging and the hints of danger palpable and possible. Baxter is out to paint the Midwest as a solace for the introspective and quietly conflicted. Possibly this is the Midwest Baxter has known all of his life, or perhaps it is a fictive world that he hopes will find a niche in American literature. Either way, this novel has definitely broken solid ground in literary tradition.
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Oct 04, 2011 Whitney rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love is described as a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us (Chicago Tribune). Compared to Midsummer Night’s Dream, this novel explores the lives of individuals when love becomes a complicated factor.
Beginning the novel Charlie Baxter leaves his house for a midnight walk through his Ann Arbor neighborhood. Passing two love stricken individuals on the fifty-yard line of a football field Baxter eventually encounters a friend Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love is described as a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us (Chicago Tribune). Compared to Midsummer Night’s Dream, this novel explores the lives of individuals when love becomes a complicated factor.
Beginning the novel Charlie Baxter leaves his house for a midnight walk through his Ann Arbor neighborhood. Passing two love stricken individuals on the fifty-yard line of a football field Baxter eventually encounters a friend on a bench, Bradley Smith.
Smith recommends Baxter write about him and title the book, “The Feast of Love.” In spite of Baxter’s opposition, Smith begins his story of love—beginning with that of him and his first wife Kathryn. After speaking with Smith, Baxter calls Kathryn and the audience hears her story of a lesbian affair.
The essential factor in this novel is Baxter’s jump from Smith’s point of view and his wife’s.
To summarize the novel: Kathryn, Smith’s ex-wife, left him for another woman. Diana, Smith’s second wife, is a cold and vicious sexual lawyer. Chloe and Oscar are a young couple in love and often imagines their future together. Esther and Harry Ginsberg are Smith’s neighbors, are the parents of a mentally deranged son whom they love despite his hatred toward them.
There are many themes and analogies throughout the novel.
The moonlight themed taster in the beginning of the novel and a verse in ending of the novel put forward a correlation between The Feast of Love and Midsummer Night’s Dream. The novel is set in various places and times; however one can see the link between the two.
Passing a mirror at the bottom of the stairs, he says it is glimmer less. This is a reoccurring theme throughout the beginning novel as Baxter describes himself as glimmer less on page four. One wonders what the author means when he uses this adjective. He does not clarify what this means, however at the end of the fiction he addresses it by writing, “All the voices have died out in my head. I've been emptied out. . . . My glimmerlessness has abated; it seems, at least for the moment."
The theme of love, I believe, is most apparent with Chloe and Oscar. A nontraditional young couple covered in piercings and tattoos with dreams of a traditional lifestyle together. Oscar, a former drug addict, imagines coming home to a house and Chloe imagines three kids in Oshkosh overalls. The two love each other and often show public displays of affection. Later in the novel Chloe becomes pregnant but is becomes a single mother when Oscar dies.
The Feast of Love is a romantic novel with excerpts of sex, drama and the overall pursuit of happiness.
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Mar 28, 2013 Nicole D. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Back when I first started on Facebook, author Jonathan Carroll posted this as a great book for a weekend read. 5 - 6 years later, I finally got to it. I love Carroll and I can absolutely see why he liked it.

This is a story about various loves and relationships - Baxter is more of a short story writer, and you can kind of tell. These seemed like very connected short stories, but it totally worked as a novel. In the early chapters it is suggested that in every relationship there is a perfect day, ...more

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About Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter

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Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of ...more