Baxter’s Literary PuzzleDana Crowellbyline‚ Mar. 27‚ 2008Charles Baxter’s The Soul Thief is not a typical novel. It is not formulaic. It is not plot-heavy. And, its characters are not predictable. Rather, The Soul Thief is Charles Baxter’s literary experiment to merge fiction and the real, a literary game for the literary-minded. Baxter’s novel grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let go. The novel is set in the early 1970’s, “days of ecstatic bitterness and joyfully articulated rage,” and then jumps several decades into the present. It tells the story of Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student, and his relationship to a small circle of friends and lovers in Buffalo, New York. |