The Soul Thief

Jefferson Mays brings a sly hyperawareness to this novel, which is interested in the elusive matter of identity. Though his delivery is carefully modulated, Mays is alive to both the comic and sinister elements that run parallel through Baxter's entire work. The protagonist, a graduate student in Buffalo, possibly named Nathanial Mason, falls into several odd relationships that push him to the edge of sanity. As Baxter intends, listeners are never sure where they, or Mason, stand in terms of reality. Mays's ironic detachment keeps listeners riveted to the story, if increasingly uncomfortable as well, right up to the final, lacerating revelation. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

November 5, 2007
The author of the National Book Award–nominated The Feast of Love
, Baxter returns with this ninth book, an assay into the limits of character, fictional and otherwise. The first half of the novel follows the brief arc of Nathaniel Mason's graduate career in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., which centers on his friendship with the sexy but self-dramatizing Teresa (“which she pronounces Teraysa
, as if she were Frenchâ€) and her lover Jerome Coolberg, “a virtuoso of cast-off ideas.†Coolberg, obsessed with Nathaniel, begins taking his shirts and notebooks, and claiming that episodes from Nathaniel's life happened to him. Coolberg drops a hint that something bad will happen to Jamie, Nathaniel's sometime lover; when it actually comes to pass, Nathaniel's world begins to collapse. In the novel's second half, decades after these events have occurred, Coolberg enters Nathaniel's life again for a final, dramatic confrontation. Baxter has a great, registering eye for the real pleasures and attritions of life, but the book gets hung up on metafictional questions of identity (the major one: who is writing this first-person narrative?). The results cheat readers out of identifying with any of the characters, perhaps intentionally.

February 11, 2008
Baxter's novel is an unusual comic work about a grad student whose life gets progressively stranger and stranger as he finds himself attracted to two women and discovers a fellow student is swiping bits and pieces of his life. Jefferson Mays reads with little hoopla or self-regard. He makes the book into a bedtime story, tucking us each into bed with his middle-register of a voice-no noticeable highs or lows. Baxter's book is funny in a deeply low-key fashion; without careful attention, much of the humor can zip by unnoticed. In that regard, Mays treats Baxter properly, trusting the author enough to maintain his tone throughout. Simultaneous release with the Pantheon hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 5).

June 1, 2008
Best known for his comic look at marriage in the National Book Award-nominated The Feast of Love, Baxter here takes a darker look at intertwined destinies. As a graduate student in Buffalo in the early 1970s, Nathaniel Mason finds himself involved with two quite different women. More important, the eccentric Jerome Coolberg intrudes in Nathaniel's life and seems to be trying to manipulate it, perhaps even steal it. Baxter lovingly re-creates the university milieu of the period, complete with his characters' self-involvement. When the narrative leaps forward to the present, Nathaniel has a more mature perspective on the challenges presented by Jerome. Baxter is an adept storyteller, helping to give this novel a smooth transition to audio. Tony Award-winning actor Jefferson Mays's sympathetic reading perfectly captures these individuals' confusion and contradictions. Recommended for all collections. [Also available as downloadable audio from Audible.comMichael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr.

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