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Feast of Love
Charles Baxter. Vintage Contemporaries: 2001 (paperback). ISBN: 037570910X. 308 pages.
Guide not available
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"Every relationship has at least one really good day," according to
Bradley Smith. Bradley is an unlikely connoisseur of love, a man often described by friends and lovers as "an exceptionally
handsome toad," a man who seems, well, rather ordinary.
But one of this novel's greatest pleasures is the way it slowly
immerses us in Bradley's life until his desires and heartbreaks are both familiar and extraordinary. Through Bradley, we
meet a pair of young lovers whose appetite for each other is insatiable: Oscar, a pierced and tattooed post-rehab heroine
addict, and his wise and profane girlfriend, Chloe. We meet Harry, an old philosophy professor, and his wife, Esther, and
we witness the repeated devastation of their domestic harmony by their suicidal son, Aaron. Like Charlie Baxter, the Ann
Arbor creative writing professor who begins the novel with a stroll into the cool quiet of a summer's early morning, each
of these narrators shares a surprising tale of love. We've grown wary of novels that feature the author as a character--
usually they're self-consciously clever. But in The Feast of Love, Baxter has written a finely tuned, warm, and deeply
humane novel, one that is filled with characters who tell their unique stories of love with great candor and grace.
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