Charles Baxter’s "The Soul Thief" has left me wondering what I must have missed. Baxter, after all, is a writer with a reputation, and one of his previous eight books, "The Feast of Love," was a National Book Award nominee. This is my first Charles Baxter book and, based on reputation and reviews of his previous work, perhaps I expected too much from "The Soul Thief." Whatever the reason, the book did not quite work for me.

The book’s central character, Nathaniel Mason, is a 1970s graduate student in Buffalo, New York, a loner who unexpectedly meets a pretty girl while making his way to a rumored party location one rainy night. Little does he know that this girl, Teresa, and the young man to whom she introduces him, Jerome Coolberg, will conspire to steal the rest of his life from him.

Coolberg is so obsessed by Nathaniel that he almost immediately begins to make portions of Nathaniel’s past his own, publicly claiming that the most dramatic events from Nathaniel’s history actually happened to him rather than to Nathaniel. With a little help, Coolberg manages to secure some of Nathaniel’s clothing and other personal items for his own use, pushing Nathaniel to the verge of collapse in the process, and uses the items to remake himself in Nathaniel’s image.

The second half of "The Soul Thief" happens some two decades later when Coolberg calls the Mason home asking for Nathaniel. Nathaniel, who has never mentioned Coolberg to his wife in all the years they have been married, reluctantly agrees to meet in Los Angeles, hoping for the long overdue confrontation that will provide him answers to all the questions he has carried inside for so many years.

By this point in the book, Baxter has created a level of anticipation and tension that has his reader racing toward what promises to be a dramatic climax. What the reader gets, instead, is a tricky ending that will likely leave him more confused than satisfied and perhaps, as in my case, at least a bit disappointed in the whole experience.

Rated at: 3.5 ( )

There's not much I can say about this book without just saying, "Huh?!" I just didn't get it. For a while I thought I was on the verge of getting it, but by the time I got to the rather abrupt ending, I still felt like there was a giant bubble above my head with lots of question marks in it & a very confused look on my face. Perhaps it was just beyond me & I didn't appreciate it for its true worth, and if that's the case, I guess I'll just avoid books like these. I will say that I read this on audio, and it may have been more helpful to re-read a few portions in writing. Maybe it would've clarified things a little. Or maybe not. ( )

A weird little story. Wasn't sure where it was taking me at first. But it wound around quite nicely and finished up okay. ( )

Readers who enjoy metafiction, fiction that is about storytelling itself, will have more than a little fun pondering Charles Baxter's newest novel. This is not his first book to call attention to the circumstances of its own creation. A Feast of Love begins with, guess who, Baxter himself out for a late-night walk while trying to get his next novel started. He comes upon a friend who suggests the title and the content of the first chapter. In The Soul Thief, things are more kinky. The story starts with the protagonist's college days in the 1970's, when he meets a particularly annoying but mesmerizing trickster. Soon articles of clothing disappear from the narrator's apartment, and eventually we contemplate the question of if, when, and how his soul has been stolen as well. Who is he, and, as David Copperfield wondered before him, is he the hero of his own story? At its best, metafiction is both comical and disturbing, as when Baxter seems to ask what, after all, this thing called identity is. In Tristam Shandy, the narrator struggled to get himself born, which only happened half way through the book. In Calvino's, If on a Winter Night a Traveler, the reader stepped in to write the story. Charles Baxter's The Soul Thief is a wonderful companion to these earlier novels in the metafictional tradition.

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Well-written, intersting tale of college students and what becomes of them. Interedting twist, but I haven't decided how credible it is and how much it really adds to the story. ( )