How strange it would be to have a grown child go missing in your own city. In Charles Baxter’s absorbing new novel, The Sun Collective, that heartbreaking strangeness is just one of many. Set in Minneapolis, Baxter’s fictional world intermixes the everyday and the uncanny ... The novel’s politics are all over the board, perhaps reflective of the fragmented lunacy of contemporary America ... I found myself at times frustrated by storytelling paths not taken, motivations unexplored ... Hints are dropped, but Baxter seems content not knowing all the answers, or maybe believing that motivations are no easier to fully comprehend than instances of everyday magic. His gift is to tune us into the beauty and the strangeness that walks among us, right here in river city.
That question hangs over Charles Baxter’s tense, wry and ultimately touching new novel, The Sun Collective, which vividly recreates the oscillating sense of dread familiar to anyone who hasn’t spent the last four years in a coma, or in Canada ... There is plenty of artful subtext in The Sun Collective, and a burning house or two. But, as with his sumptuous 2000 novel The Feast of Love (a finalist for the National Book Award), Baxter’s true gift is in describing the tender complexities of a relationship. Here, it’s the wistful, at times contentious, 'post-love”'of Harold and Alma, whose real problem might not be the times, but time, and their own senescence and mortality ... This is one of the dangers of writing fiction that aims to capture the current moment. The current moment is a slippery bugger, not inclined to wait for publishing schedules. After a summer of actual riots, of racial and social unrest over the very real and nonfuzzy, heart-rending issue of police violence against Black Americans, the simmering rebellion of the Sun Collective feels like a halfhearted thought experiment ... the novel continually builds poignancy by revealing that what Harold and Alma really long for is themselves at that age, when they had the passion of those young people cavorting across the park.
Mr. Baxter continues to chip away at the myth of the Midwest’s innocence, probing the anarchy and fear that gape beneath the mown lawns and mini-malls ... The Sun Collective wobbles between the prosaic and the suburban ... the likeness that occurred to me is with Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, where the underlying chaos is both concealed and somehow deepened by the inviting, mannerly prose. While Mr. Baxter is not as formally daring as Mr. Ishiguro, he possesses many of the same insights, not least about the mysteries of old age.
Is collectivism the key to revolutionary change during these unsettling times? Defined as an adjective, collectivism refers to actions done by people as a group; as a noun, the word is defined as a cooperative enterprise. In The Sun Collective , the latest novel by National Book Award finalist Charles Baxter, a hodge-podge collection of Minnesotans searching for meaning seek collectivism as the portal to self-actualization. Chaos and conflict, as well as a certain uneasy awareness, settle around the protagonists in the book as they are all drawn closer toward a dangerous local activist group.
There was something about The Sun Collective, Baxter's sixth novel, reminiscent of Saul and Patsy and not in the superficial resemblance some characters in the present book bear to some in the older one. It's more in Baxter's reflexive humanism, or the reflexive humanism expressed by his characters ... Toward the end of the novel events begin to pile up like a chain reaction of rear-enders on a freeway, but Baxter manages to retain control of the narrative, delivering us to our destination even as firecrackers explode and shrapnel sings through the air.
The Sun Collective, Charles Baxter’s novel about a retired couple searching for their missing adult son, has a question at its heart about human reliance on belief ... The Sun Collective is ambitious, if disorganized ... Baxter’s prose is artfully subtle in the way it links one character to another. Some are mistaken for twins of others, or appear to be a reflection of another character ... Baxter makes some astute revelations about the intimate interactions of family ... The Sun Collective is heavy with literary and mythological allusion — blind prophets, people who can talk to animals, characters blinding themselves when they come to great realizations, twins, curses from spurned lovers, and Brettigan and Alma, waiting. Godot only gets a brief mention in reference to Timothy’s disappearance, but it’s a clue to Baxter’s game, as is another brief discussion about MacGuffins, the 'thing that gives meaning to everything else.' Baxter’s characters and readers face the same question: why do we need to believe in a bigger idea, a mission, or a god or gods in control of our actions, in order for a story to make sense?
It takes a writer with his gifts to capture the zeitgeist with the insight, wit and grace he displays in this enchanting work ... The Sun Collective burrows deeply into the lives of five unexceptional but intriguing characters ... Baxter’s portrait of the retail capitalism that provokes terrifying fever dreams like Ludlow’s and Harry’s own free-floating angst is sharply rendered. He succeeds admirably, moving unobtrusively from scenes of benign domesticity to glimpses of dystopian violence in both suburbs and city, infusing all of it with a spectral quality that brings to mind some of the short stories of Steven Millhauser. For all the outward signs of normality, things are never quite what they seem ... But for all the ways it obliquely faces societal flash points, like economic inequality and generational tensions, The Sun Collective is also a deeply personal novel.
Sometimes with tongue in cheek but more frequently with deadly seriousness, Baxter plumbs the depths of Alma and Harry's 40-year marriage while tackling global issues ... Fans may be surprised at the dark tenor of his latest novel, but Baxter...masterfully captures the zeitgeist of our country as we navigate multiple crises, some he could never have predicted. This is truly a compelling book for our times.
Fiction virtuoso Baxter’s artistry and merciless insights are in full, intoxicating flower in this sinuous, dark, and dramatic tale ... As abrupt mental shifts strike like lightning, pitching Baxter’s intricately portrayed characters dangerously off course, the country convulses under the authoritarian rule of an unhinged president. Baxter has brilliantly choreographed a wholly unnerving plunge into alarming aberrations private and public, festering political catastrophe, and woefully warped love.
The prose throughout is graceful, the writing perceptive, resonant, and deeply sympathetic. With his small cast, Baxter explores gurus and charlatans and other responses to hunger, homelessness, destitution, and simpler woes ... There are no easy answers, but there’s promise, even respite in the quasi-magical, the nearly miraculous. An exceptional work.
... a messy yet engrossing tale of activism and aging ... Throughout, Baxter smartly lampoons America’s political state and adds enough odd details to offset the occasionally murky plot threads. Readers willing to wade through the diversions will find a thoughtful study of anger, grief, and hope.
