The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter

There is a lot of good writing in this book, good descriptions, good sentence, and some challenging ideas.  The title of the book comes from the name of a painting that the main character makes, one that far surpasses all his other mundane “art”, but one he has put away in his basement because he sees it as unobtainable.  It is a table glowing in light, reflected light, direct light, light that is literally the food of the feast, the enlightenment that he seeks.

Through the novel we find a collection of stories – each inspecting an aspect of love.  It is a journey of loneliness and wanting.

“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  Depth has been replaced by texture.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 is its beauty.”

His love life and two failed marriages has caused him to challenge his friend to interview the people surrounding him about love.  In his own sad reflection he states, “But it’s’ a funny thing about other people’s phobias, when you don’t share them: you pick at them, like a scab.  You want to remove them.”

The wife that leaves him for another woman says “He loved only his love for me…”  and described her dissatisfaction with their sex, “…he made love the way you would drive a car to work.  Autopilot stuff.”

In his loneliness he has to get back the dog that he asked his sister to keep for him for two months only to learn that she does not want to give it back now.  How he gets it is a good tale, but also a sad commentary.  Then we meet his Jewish neighbors, the male is a professor who has his career based on Kierkegaard.  “Of the two vast subjects about which one can never be certain and should therefore perhaps keep silent, God and love, Kierkegaard, a bachelor, claimed especial expertise.”  “He wrote intricately beautiful semi-nonsense and thus became a hero of the intellectual type.”

It is obvious that the writer publishes short stories, because many of the chapters could stand alone as short stories, but gain in poignancy by our familiarity with the characters.  Bradley the man, Bradley the dog, the neighbors (Ginsbergs), and the tragic pairing of Chloe and Oscar – youthful lovers who have been goth, addicted, tattooed and slightly outside of any mainstream. 

Chloe and Oscar are wonderful contrasts to Bradley and his two wives.  They are so in love that faults and obstacles fall away from them, while Bradley in his quest for love continues to find nothing but obstacles.   Their lack of pretension is a contrast to the brief second marriage of Bradley.  The short term wife – Diana – reflects on their Ann Arbor locations, “Out here in Michigan, real style is too difficult to maintain; the styles are all convenient and secondhand.  We’re all hand-me-down personalities.  But that’s liberating: it frees you up for other matters of greater importance, the great themes, the sordid passions.”

The Ginsberg’s are another contrast.  A married couple that has settled in to being together, though not being passionate anymore, just living parallel lives in the same home with respect of one another.  Their great tragedy is their third child who creates all the drama in their lives and occupies their minds more than their other two children combined.  It is a tragic reality that many families have experienced.

Ginsberg, who is a professor of philosophy states, “As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it’s the unhappy ones who create the stories.”

Chloe walking the streets after losing the love of her life reflects on what she sees in the Ann Arbor homes, “ I walk past these houses and I see all these domestic arrangements, I guess you’d call them. Women living with women.  Women living with men.  Men living with men.  Women living alone.  Men living alone.  Sane people and crazy people, people who have lost what once remained of their minds.  The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way.  I believe that.”

In the end, the book is a reflection on our need for love, not just the physical aspect of sex, but that deeper need for someone to understand us, to sympathize with us, to listen to us.  Finding that person is not easy and all of us who have, are really lucky.

Highly entertaining book.