The Soul Thief
By Charles Baxter
Pantheon, 210 pp., $20
At the start of Charles Baxter's shrewd and mischievous new novel, "The Soul Thief," our first-person narrator decides he's too implicated in the story he's about to tell. He says, "I must turn myself into a 'he' and give myself a bland Anglo-Saxon Protestant name." Nathaniel Mason, it is. Is he being coy with us? we wonder. Duplicitous?
What follows in third-person narration for half the book is on one level a tale of obsessive and impossible love. It's the early 1970s in Buffalo, a city that "runs on spare parts." It's "the epoch of bare feet in public life," of love in the time of irony. We're in the untidy world of grad students. Nathaniel, whoever he really is, is a lit major who relies on Gertrude Stein to make sense of his world and who volunteers at a neighborhood soup kitchen. That's where he met Jamie, a dancer and sculptor. He loves her soul.
He then meets Theresa, a lovely, flirtatious, and banal intellectual with a cultivated sense of the dramatic and a "Ph.D. ponytail." She introduces Nathaniel the sentimentalist to Coolberg, a guy with a "talent for creating hypothetical narratives out of thin air." He's pretentious, argumentative, given to absurd pronouncements and false claims. He's everything that Nathaniel is not. Theresa says all Coolberg "wants to do is acquire everyone's inner life."
Nathaniel is obsessed with Jamie, who's a lesbian and can't return his "love." He's also sleeping with Theresa, who's sleeping with Coolberg, who's queer "in the good way," Theresa says, and is obsessed with Nathaniel, whose body he can't have. (Well, maybe his soul, then?) There follows a brief chronicle of doom and desperation. We get the pairings and separations, the infidelities, manias, and depressions that seem the lifeblood of obsessive relationships. We never quite understand the obsessions except that, as such, they are irrational. Baxter's narrative interest lies elsewhere.
Coolberg has begun to appropriate Nathaniel's life. He's stolen his shirts and shoes. Theresa says Coolberg's writing a book and needs the personal artifacts to get inside Nathaniel's head. Yes, she tells Nathaniel, you're in the book. You play the devil. When Nathaniel storms off to confront Coolberg, he goes to his apartment building and reads the names by the call buttons. There's a Wendego (a demon in Algonquin mythology), a Highsmith (as in Patricia). There's no Coolberg, but there is a Golyadkin, and that rings a bell, for us, if not for Nathaniel. Golyadkin's the hero of Dostoevsky's novella "The Double," a man whose life is appropriated by a namesake. And Highsmith's Tom Ripley, we recall, murdered Dickie Greenleaf and assumed his identity. Coolberg carries around "The Wandering Beggar," which includes a story about the coachman Zalman, who assumes the identity of his master Calman. Doubles are everywhere.
And that book Coolberg's writing? It's called "Shadow," as in the Jungian archetype, a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. In "The Double" we understand the new Golyadkin to be the shadow of the old Golyadkin, a manifestation of his own less desirable characteristics. Not two, then, but two in one.
Which brings us back to our narrator. Who's telling this story? Who's pretending to be Nathaniel? At the end of Chapter 17, the addled "I" surfaces, calling himself obtuse, oblivious, and maybe vanished. The next time we hear the first-person pronoun is from the mouth of Nathaniel, who picks up the story decades after Jamie is raped and beaten by a group of thugs - violence predicted in Coolberg's "Shadow" - and after her disappearance and Nathaniel's subsequent nervous breakdown.
Here as elsewhere, the drama we might expect in a conventional novel is glossed over. We don't get Jamie's trauma and flight, Nathaniel's collapse and valiant recovery. The talented Mr. Baxter is not afraid to frustrate our dramatic expectations, even knowing that our longing to know the characters more intimately will not go away. All the Sturm und Drang of unrequited love - it's a MacGuffin. This is not a story of grand passion, after all, but of grand theft.
Nathaniel's a family man now, living in New Jersey, working at an arts agency, "an altogether different person from the man I once was." He's in disguise, he says. (Who's he hiding from?) He says, "Romance is a destructive myth after the age of nineteen." (But that's easy to say.)
Coolberg's an NPR talk-show host who helps people tell their stories. He summons Nathaniel with a plane ticket and the promise of a gift. In L.A., Nathaniel avoids the obvious as long as he can, avoids his grad-school notebook on the floor of Coolberg's car. When, finally, the subtext becomes the text, the novel resolves itself around two documents, one a sealed letter, addressed to Nathaniel, from Jamie. He's never opened it. In that way, he claims, he keeps hope alive. In that way, we think, he keeps the wound open and the delusion alive. (Perhaps we're too harsh.) The second document you hold in your hands, dear reader - "The Soul Thief," but to say more would be to say too much. Except this: Whoever wrote "The Soul Thief" knows that we write about what keeps us up at night, that a writer gets to inhabit many lives, and that he who tells the story makes the meaning.
John Dufresne's most recent book is the story collection "Johnny Too Bad."
