The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [0]
THE FEAST OF LOVE
“Sumptuous…. To find out how many things play out for this extraordinary bunch of ostensibly ordinary Midwesterners, pick up this funny, sad, gorgeous novel.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Baxter has a talent for making us aware of things—like love and despair—that we may not know about. His pictures are graceful, tough, and strikingly even-handed.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A delicious comedy of passion.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“For readers willing to wait and to watch the play unfold, the rewards are no less delicious than Shakespeare's romantic comedies. Baxter's characters are complex. Unafraid to let them err, their unthinking mistakes and mistaken plans weave a wonderful tale.”
—The Seattle Times
“Baxter's brilliant new novel…grabs you immediately with its ingenious premise.”
—Minneapolis Star Tnbune
“Baxter's novel is a modern day Symposium, unexpectedly hilarious in its attempt to get to the evasive truths of love.”
—The New Yorker
“Joyous and playful … a beautiful, sly, bawdy and wondrous conversation on love.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Charles Baxter has given us a remarkable spread here, a smorgasbord, a true feast of love. It is an unusual, unexpected, un reasonable and beautiful book.”
—The Oregonian
“A delicious new novel…. The Feast of Love serves up a sumptuous banquet of passion and partnership, humor and heart break.’ ‘
—Ann Arbor News
“The Feast of Love succeeds as an unsentimental journey to the core of the most unsentimental of human experiences.”
—The Plain Dealer
“A spectacular novel that serves up everything its title promises.”
—New York Post
“The Feast of Love is a marvel of narrative voices, each one is crafted, then inhabited, that it seems perfectly feasible to run into these characters at Starbucks.”
—The Boston Globe
“A breakthrough book for this writer's work.”
—Newsweek
THE FEAST OF LOVE
CHARLES BAXTER
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
VINTAGE BOOKS
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
NEW YORK
Copyright © 2000 by Charles Baxter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in United States by Vintage Books,a division of Random House, Inc., New York,and simultaneously in Canada by Random House Limited, Toronto.Originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York in 2000 and in trade paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House,Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Baxter, Charles, 1947–
The feast of love / Charles Baxter.
p. cm.
1. Fiction. 2. Community life. I. Title.
PS3552.A854 F43 2000
813’.54 — dc21
99-053088
ISBN: 0-375-70910-X
Book design by Johanna Roebas
www.vintagebooks.com
CONTENTS
Beginnings
Preludes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Middles
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Ends
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Postludes
Acknowledgments
BEGINNINGS
Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be.
— SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy
PRELUDES
THE MAN — ME, this pale being, no one else, it seems — wakes in fright, tangled up in the sheets.
The darkened room, the half-closed doors of the closet and the slender pine-slatted lamp on the bedside table: I don’t recognize them. On the opposite side of the room, the streetlight’s distant luminance coating the window shade has an eerie unwelcome glow. None of these previously familiar objects have any familiarity now. What’s worse, I cannot remember or recognize myself. I sit up in bed — actually, I lurch in mild sleepy terror toward