The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter (#7, Contemporary Fiction)

I went out on a limb for this book. I read Charles Baxter in my Techniques of Fiction class sophomore year and on a recent book hoarding trip to the library three days before my surgery I saw it on the Popular Book Club Picks list. I recognized Baxter's name and thought why the hell not? They also just made this into a movie with Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear. It couldn't be that bad could it?

I also thought that I had gone to see him read when he came to St. Lawrence that September and that it would be a great beginning to this post--to say that I had seen the guy read but I was wrong. That was the weekend of Andy's sister's wedding. So while I cannot brag that I attended a Charles Baxter reading, I must say that waking up the morning after the reception to find my underwear in my boyfriend's suit pant pocket a much more exciting memory than some badly strung together sentences spoken by an English professor not adhering to that old adage: those who can't do, teach.

I guess that last sentence pretty much sums up my feelings on The Feast of Love. I found this book almost as bad as Caroline Parkhurst's Lost and Found. I won't deny that this book had promise--it really did. It is referred to as a suburban rendering of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and who wouldn't want to read a pseudo-modern rendering of one of Shakespeare's most magical plays? One of the reviewers on the back referred to it as a "banquet for the soul," which I must admit is quite clever in reference to the title of the book, but this is no banquet for the soul. This is an inept attempt at sketching out love's many facets. I generally do not enjoy multiple narrators because I don't really like the obvious style changes writers have to use to make it clear that it is the eighteen year old girl talking instead of the thirty-five year old man. Had Baxter not used multiple points of view, I might have actually enjoyed this one. The movie is in my Netflix queue--maybe Hollywood will get this one right.

And even though I hurriedly finished this one, I did come across a paragraph that got to me. Bradley says, "Here's a profundity, the best I can do: sometimes you just know...You just know when two people belong together." I want to believe this, I used to believe this. I remember writing those exact words in a note to Andy but now, I wonder if you can ever really know. I think it really depends on what you are willing to believe and what you are willing to give up to believe it.