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Title: Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter, John Rubinstein ISBN: 1-59007-472-6 Publisher: New Millennium Audio Pub. Date: September, 2003 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 8 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.73 (11 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A "hard to put down" book whose characters will draw you in
Comment: Charles Baxter's new novel, SAUL AND PATSY, may be the longest short story ever written.
Based on two of his previous stories --- "Saul and Patsy are Getting Comfortable in Michigan" from THROUGH THE SAFETY NET and "Saul and Patsy are Pregnant" from A RELATIVE STRANGER --- the novel greatly expounds the title characters' lives and further explores themes of irony and sentimentality across more than 300 pages, yet by virtue of its vivid characters, incredibly targeted prose and insights into married life, SAUL AND PATSY asks to be read like a short story --- in one sitting. It lacks any suspense, but it is still hard to put down. And reading that last page is akin to saying good-bye to old college friends, who stopped by for an all-too-short visit.
Saul Bernstein, a Jewish history teacher originally from Baltimore, and Patsy Carlson, a dancer from Chicago, have recently moved to the town of Five Oaks, Michigan --- one of the many "dusty, luckless midwestern cities tucked away inside the folds of the map" --- out of Saul's youthful idealism: he wants to bring high education to the plains of rural America, to reverse the simpleness of middle-class life. It's an unrealistic, outsized, almost elitist dream, but it's also one of the few things about which he feels sincerely. Yet, as a well-educated Jew in a small midwestern town, he feels hopelessly out of place and unable to relate to his students or even his neighbors.
For the novel's first chapter, Baxter reworks and updates "Saul and Patsy Are Getting Comfortable in Michigan," which ended with an ambiguous car crash, leaving readers with no sign of whether or not the couple survived. In fact, they walk away more or less unscathed to build a home together and begin a family, gradually growing increasingly, if not perfectly, comfortable in their adopted hometown.
When Saul is assigned to teach a remedial writing course, a student named Gordy Himmelman develops an odd fixation on him and Patsy, yet his intentions are unknowable, his motivation a mystery. "On Gordy, blankness had a certain eloquence," Baxter writes. "The boy was profoundly blank." Yet he passively propels the novel's minimal plot, first as a curious stalker who stands under a tree in their front yard for hours at a time, then as a ghost who inspires rebellion in the town's susceptible teenagers.
As this story unfolds, Baxter also introduces us to Saul and Patsy's friends and neighbors --- the McPhees, a couple just out of high school who seem to thrive on "midwestern earnestness"; Saul's widowed mother, who has a scandalous affair with a younger man; and his handsome brother Howie, a tech millionaire whose life may not be as blessed as Saul assumes.
All of these characters pop in and out of Saul and Patsy's life, but the one thing that remains constant is its setting. SAUL AND PATSY is a Midwestern pastoral: Baxter evokes a Michigan whose flatness holds a "sensual loneliness" and whose cities are losing their personalities through the ups and downs of the industries that created them. Like Terre Haute, Duluth, Flint, Grand Forks, or dozens of other similar --- and actual --- municipalities, Five Oaks is one of those "cities you had heard of but couldn't quite picture, cities that called nothing in particular to mind except for an eagerness to be larger and more prosperous than they were, and an all-consuming late-stage boosterism that was mostly insecurity and worry masked by bluster." Even as Saul and Patsy get comfortable in Michigan, Michigan is becoming an increasingly uncomfortable place to live.
Even though he intends this novel to register on a state and even regional level, Baxter maintains the story's focus on its title characters and on their "plain old married love." It has an amiably small, domestic scope, which certainly is no limitation, especially in the hands of a writer who is as fearlessly playful and fiercely intelligent as Baxter. Rather, SAUL AND PATSY is wonderfully and magically life-size.
--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderful novel
Comment: Charles Baxter's SAUL AND PATSY is the best novel I've read in a long time. It's sophisticated, beautifully written, wry, emotionally rich, and funny. Loved it, and highly recommend the book to those readers who enjoy gentle irony and nuanced language, and who long to read a book that satisfies on every level.
Rating: 4
Summary: Not disappointing.
Comment: The number of reviewers who passionately disliked this book makes me wonder what they were expecting, or if they just weren't in the mood for this kind of book. "Saul and Patsy" is a very well-done novel that keeps your attention throughout, even though there's something a little, I don't know, uncomfortable about the couple's decision to relocate to a small town in rural Michigan. There's something a little off-putting about these two and their choices that is hard to put your finger on.
"Saul and Patsy" does have the sense of having been worked up from short stories, notably because characters who have already been introduced get the full intro treatment several times, as if this were the first time you were meeting them. Besides this small annoyance, it is hard to pick out where the stories were knitted into the larger novel.
I looked forward to "Saul and Patsy," which, after all, is what reading a good book should be all about.
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Title: The Namesake : A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri ISBN: 0395927218 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Fortress of Solitude : A Novel by Jonathan Lethem ISBN: 0385500696 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Feast of Love : A Novel by Charles Baxter ISBN: 037570910X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy ISBN: 0743244354 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Today Show Book Club #13) by Mark Haddon ISBN: 0385512104 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 31 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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