Soon after Nathaniel Mason meets Theresa, the two visit Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery to experience Lucas Samaras’ “Mirrored Room.” The room-sized cube is lined with mirrors, and standing inside the work — with reflections in the green-tinted glass moving into infinity — has to feel like being absorbed by a piece of art.
As Nathaniel “peers into the visual soup created by the green mirror glass . . . he sees himself, having aged eighteen reflections down, eighteen/twenty/ thirty years from now.” The closer he comes to the foremost reflection, the more the furthest fade from sight. The shifting mirrored views are an apt metaphor for the reality portrayed in Charles Baxter’s “The Soul Thief.”
Nathaniel, a graduate student, has met Theresa on his way to a party. He is taken by the “young woman, dressed as he himself is, in jeans and T-shirt, though she is also wearing an Army surplus flak jacket, which fits her rather well and is accessorized with Soviet medals probably picked up from a European student black market.” They are both looking for the same gathering and, after stopping for a Gene Kelly moment to sit on a park bench in the rain, head to their intended destination.
Among the guests is the enigmatic Jerome Coolberg, described to Nathaniel as “a virtuoso of cast-off ideas,” and “the first person I’ve known who can be in two places at once.” When they are finally introduced, Coolberg says, “I’ve heard a lot about you. But they’re perfunctory things.” And he seems interested in finding out more.
But too soon, Coolberg’s interest seems anything but benign. It seems not just that he wants to know Nathaniel, it seems he wants to be Nathaniel.
Lost in a strange world
It starts with Coolberg talking about details of Nathan- iel’s life that he cannot remember sharing. It escalates with a competition for Theresa’s attention, and the theft of some of Nathaniel’s nicer clothes. The sole center of sanity is Jamie, a fellow volunteer at the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance. A lesbian, she offers Nathaniel comfort and a safe harbor, an anchor in a world going increasingly mad.
Nathaniel, it must be said, operates in a strange world. He has long felt that ghost- women watch him, and he comes home the night of the party to find a burglar in his apartment. The would-be thief, disgusted by Nathaniel’s complete lack of anything worth stealing, asks him for coffee instead.
Baxter’s eye for student- speak, much in evidence in his National Book Award finalist novel “The Feast of Love,” is equally apparent here. When Nathaniel and Theresa walk into their party, in 1973, they are greeted at the door with, “You’re soaked! That is so cool. This is very MGM, you two. Did you just kiss out there? Standing up or sitting down? Do you even know each other? Did you just meet? Are you guys in a Stanley Donen movie or a Vincente Minnelli movie? . . . Do you want to dry off or is that soaked look a thing you’d like to keep going for a while? Want a joint, want a beer?”
And in Nathaniel, Baxter has captured a distinctly Midwestern sensibility. There is a nasal twang to his voice, and a personality that is more at home in the Milwaukee of his youth than with the New York City home of his mother and stepfather.
In Milwaukee, the sun “tended to be Midwestern and diffident, hidden by clouds tossed up by moisture from the Great Lakes.” His home was a “three-bedroom suburban house with a white picket fence and a large grassy backyard with a rose garden, an arbor and a reflecting ball.”
New York, by contrast, seems too sharp: “On a good spring day the light defined trees, buildings and people alike with brilliant tactile clarity. . . In August, Nathaniel thought, the sopping gruesome heat in Manhattan liquefied the city. Someday the entire urban landscape would ooze into the Hudson. In New York, summer would be the season of doom.”
And if Nathaniel is a family sedan that never breaks the speed limit, Coolberg is the sexy sports car dodging the traffic jam by racing along the breakdown lane. He is “insufferable, one of those boy geniuses, all nerve and brain.” He is “a whiz-kid sage with a wide range of affectations,” one “given to public-performance thinking.” Though many find him off-putting, he is a magnet for attention. And for reasons not clear, he is drawn to Nathaniel.
Four distinct parts
“The Soul Thief” is divided into four sections: Nathaniel’s college interaction with Coolberg; Nathaniel’s life with his family, upended by a phone message from Coolberg; a meeting between the two men as adults; a short conclusion. Baxter, never a slouch, is most entertaining in the first section, and it is here he raises the questions that fuel the rest of the work.
There is a moment in the first few pages of “The Soul Thief” when the narrator steps in front of the reader and says, “Here I have to perform a tricky maneuver, because I am implicated in everything that happened. The maneuver’s logic may become clear before my story is over. I must turn myself into a ‘he’ and give myself a bland Anglo-Saxon Protestant name. Any one of them will do as long as the name recedes into a kind of anonymity. The surname that I will therefore give myself is ‘Mason.’ An equally inconspicuous given name is also required. Here it is: ‘Nathaniel.'”
And with that sleight-ofhand, Baxter casts a pall of suspicion over all that follows. The narrator is clearly suspect, and the story is shaped to fit his vision and whims.
It is impossible to stop wondering where reality fits in the story that unfolds, and the way Baxter resolves the question will work for some readers and not for others. It’s a moot point. He warned you.
Ultimately, it’s hard to argue with a book filled with prose so toothsome it is tempting to read it aloud, just for the taste of the words, with a work that keeps you unflaggingly engaged and with one that makes you want to start re-reading once it is done.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Fiction
The Soul Thief, by Charles Baxter, $20
