Feast of Love by Charles Baxter
	List Price:   $14.95 Unit Price:   $11.96 You Save:   $2.99 (20%) ISBN-10:   0307387275 ISBN-13:   9780307387271 Publisher:   Random House [MD]; Vintage Series:   Vintage Contemporaries Ser. Category:   Young Adults Pub. Date:   August 2007 Pages:   320 Format:   Paperback
Subjects
MICHIGAN_FICTION FICTION_ROMANCE_CONTEMPORARY
Description/Notes
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 the vertical. There's a demon here, one of the unnamed ones, the demon of erasure and forgetting. I can't manage my way through this feeling because my mind isn't working, and because it, the flesh in which I'm housed, hasn't yet become me. Looking into the darkness, I have optical floaters: there, on the opposite wall, are gears turning separately and then moving closer to one another until their cogs start to mesh and rotate in unison. Then I feel her hand on my back. She's accustomed by now to my night amnesias, and with what has become an almost automatic response, she reaches up sleepily from her side of the bed and touches me between the shoulder blades. In this manner the world's objects slip back into their fixed positions. 'Charlie,' she says. Although I have not recognized myself, apparently I recognize her: her hand, her voice, even the slight saltine-cracker scent of her body as it rises out of sleep. I turn toward her and hold her in my arms, trying to get my heart rate under control. She puts her hand to my chest. 'You've been dreaming,' she says. 'It's only a bad dream.' Then she says, half-asleep again, 'You have bad dreams,' she yawns, 'because you don't . . .' Before she can finish the sentence, she descends back into sleep. I get up and walk to the study. I have been advised to take a set of steps as a remedy. I have 'identity lapses,' as the doctor is pleased to call them. I have not found this clinical phrase in any book. I think he made it up. Whatever they are called, these lapses lead to physical side effects: my heart is still thumping, and I can hardly sit or lie still. I write my name, Charles Baxter, my address, the county, and the state in which I live. I concoct a word that doesn't exist in our language but still might have a meaning or should have one: glimmerless. I am glimmerless. I write down the word next to my name. On the first floor near the foot of the stairs, we have placed on the wall an antique mirror so old that it can't reflect anything anymore. Its surface, worn down to nubbled grainy gray stubs, has lost one of its dimensions. Like me, it's glimmerless. You can't see into it now, just past it. Depth has been replaced by texture. This mirror gives back nothing and makes no productive claim upon anyone. The mirror has been so completely worn away that you have to learn to live with what it refuses to do. That's its beauty. I have put on jeans, a shirt, shoes. I will take a walk. I glide past the nonmirroring mirror, unseen, thinking myself a vampire who soaks up essences other than blood. I go outside to Woodland Drive and saunter to the end of the block onto a large vacant lot. Here I am, a mere neighbor, somnambulating, harmless, no longer a menace to myself or to anyone else, and, stage by stage, feeling calmer now that I am outside. As all the neighbors know, no house will ever be built on the ground where I am standing because of subsurface problems with water drainage. In the flatlands of Michigan the water stays put. The storm sewers have proven to be inadequate, with the result that this property, at the base of the hill on which our street was laid, always floods following thunderstorms and stays wet for weeks. The neighborhood kids love it. After rains they shriek their way to the pu From 'one of our most gifted writers'(Chicago Tribune),here is a superb new novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people. The Feast of Loveis just that -- a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imaginedMidsummer Night's Dream,men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones. In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart Their voices resonate with each other -- disparate people joined by the meanderings of love -- and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life. Crafted with subtlety, grace, and power,The Feast of Loveis a masterful novel. “Superb—a near-perfect book, as deep as it is broad in its humaneness, comedy and wisdom.”–TheWashington Post Book World Baxters novel is now the basis for an upcoming feature film starring Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear and scheduled for release on September 21. A community of friends in Oregon explores the magical, mysterious, and sometimes painful incarnations of love.