September 7, 2020
Baxter’s first novel in over a decade (after The Soul Thief) juggles satirical social critique and family drama, resulting in a messy yet engrossing tale of activism and aging. Retired Minneapolis engineer Harry Brettigan spends his days searching for his adult son, Tim, who fell out of touch months earlier, and sweetly bickering with his wife, Alma. After Alma faints one day, she starts talking with their pets and is drawn to the Sun Collective, a community group that offers resources to homeless people. There, she befriends a younger couple, Ludlow and Christina, and Harry balks when Ludlow details his homicidal vision for “effective microviolence” against suburbanites to achieve the Sun Collective’s full potential. As Harry reckons with his relationships to Alma and Tim, he also travels down the rabbit hole of the Sun Collective to parse its true intentions; along the way, Tim reappears as a saved Collective member; the Sandmen, an extremist group that allegedly murders vagrants, emerge; and there’s a series of mysterious deaths. 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.
October 1, 2020
When he's out-and-about in Minneapolis, Harry, a retired structural engineer married to Alma, a former music librarian and school principal, always hopes to spot his son Tim, who is living rough and out-of-touch. Harry gets close the day he notices a young, curiously mismatched couple. Christina, overly reliant on a risky designer drug, Blue Telephone, came to Minneapolis because of handsome actor Tim, becoming entangled, instead, with self-described revolutionary Ludlow, a member of the Sun Collective, which, despite its cheery name and positive community initiatives, is actually a shadowy, increasingly sinister assemblage of anarchists. Fiction virtuoso Baxter's artistry and merciless insights are in full, intoxicating flower in this sinuous, dark, and dramatic tale of the assaults of age, a hard-tested marriage, alienation, entrenched social inequality, hijacked activism, altered states, and convictions turned violent. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)
Starred review from October 1, 2020
The mother of falling-star actor Tim Brettigan knows that he has disappeared intentionally but still seeks him, finally discovering a community run by an ideal-ridden leader. Newbie drug addict Christina is lured to the same community by a man with visions of revolution. Through these characters, National Book Award finalist Baxter (The Feast of Love) examines American excess and anxiety in a Minneapolis setting.
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Starred review from September 15, 2020
In his sixth novel, Baxter looks into the timely question of how we might help ourselves and others in need. As the book opens, Harold Brettigan, a retired bridge designer, boards a light-rail train to the Utopia Mall in Minneapolis, where he regularly exercises with a group of walkers. He is "shadowed" onto the train by a young couple, who sit across from him but keep to themselves, and he meets a man in a trilby who recommends a healing ritual involving a hand mirror. Harold's wife, Alma, begins talking to their cat and dog after she has a small stroke. Their son, Timothy, is missing, maybe living on the city's streets. The young couple on the train are Ludlow, who belongs to a local activist group called the Sun Collective, and Christina, who often takes a hallucinogenic called Blue Telephone. Some time later, Alma also meets the man in the trilby, who recommends a wish-fulfilling ritual involving two of her eyelashes. The Brettigans and the young couple are drawn together by accident and then by possible links to Timothy. It's an uneasy relationship, which Baxter signals by using the word "shadowed" during that first encounter on the train. 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. Skepticism vies with hope, fanaticism with fantasy. A Trump-like President Thorkelson and his Cabinet embrace the ideas of an Ayn Rand-like writer for whom "charity was a sin...because it encouraged losers." A group of rich young fellows called the Sandmen are rumored to be killing homeless people. The Sun Collective provides clothes, food, and shelter, but it may be fueling terrorism. There are no easy answers, but there's promise, even respite in the quasi-magical, the nearly miraculous. An exceptional work.
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