Variations on a soul

A graduate student in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., becomes the target of a soulless cipher who seems intent on leaching the very core of him.

By BRIGITTE FRASE

For the Minnesota Star Tribune
February 17, 2008 at 5:12PM

When I emerged from this novel, I felt haunted and disoriented, as if waking from a fever dream. Indeed, the protagonist, Nathaniel Mason, seems unable to distinguish between dream, hallucination and reality. Visiting the local museum, he enters a room made entirely of mirrors. It strikes him as monstrous, "meant to undermine the soul by wrapping it in reflections."

That's the theme of the book, played out in literal and metaphoric dimensions.

It is set in Buffalo, N.Y., in the early 1970s, where Nathaniel is a graduate student in English. Even though we are always looking through his eyes, the central figure is his friend/nemesis Jerome Coolberg, a young genius and spell-binding talker who seems strangely mutable, as if he had no core identity. "All his appearances had an illusionary but powerful electrical charge." At their first meeting, he already seems to know everything about Nathaniel and soon pops up everywhere, forcing a best buddy friendship on the initially befuddled and then more and more enraged grad student. Nathaniel becomes convinced Jerome is slowly leaching his identity, including his past, and taking it into himself.

Things begin to disappear from Nathaniel's apartment until one morning he wakes to a completely empty abode, a book by a forgotten poet the only thing left. Later, he sees Jerome on a park bench wearing his clothes. His girlfriend Theresa, who has "a vaguely empty character" and can't utter an un-ironic word, seems to be in league with Jerome.

The only person whose soul is intact is the artist Jamie, Nathaniel's friend and tender lover despite her lesbianism. She is punished brutally for possessing a soul, but by whom?

The present-tense narrative lurches from one experience to another, in the eternal now of dream time, and becomes ever more fragmented.

The novel's second half turns to the third person indirect. It is 20 years later, and Nathaniel is leading a life so conventional it's almost a parody of itself. After a horrific breakdown in Buffalo, he has slowly turned into a thoroughly unremarkable man with a good job, a loving wife, two well-behaved yet interesting children and a house in a New Jersey suburb. "You might not notice me. I am in disguise" -- until the day Jerome telephones.

In Los Angeles (the city of illusions), he hosts a radio show called "American Evenings," a sinister version of Ira Glass' "This American Life." He has been shadowing Nathaniel through the Internet, again somehow appropriating his identity. Nathaniel notes that every episode of the radio program points to "disappearances, things and emotions and rituals and forms that had once existed and no longer did, or soon would not."

He flies to Los Angeles to find out what the very important thing is that Jerome wants to show him. Jerome is as elusive and maddening as ever. The object he shows Nathaniel is the manuscript of a novel he's written, begun in Buffalo, called "Shadow." A man named Pierre Chadeau (oh really now!) is followed by a ghost. Nathaniel is cast as the devil in part three.

Several literary allusions are planted throughout the novel. Some reinforce the atmosphere of instability and lurking menace. Jerome bears some resemblance to the judge-penitent in Camus' "The Fall," an uncanny figure who accosts strangers and slowly makes them complicit in some sort of existential crime. He also resembles the shape-shifting devil of Thomas Mann's "Dr. Faustus," in which a composer sells his soul in exchange for musical genius.

Other allusions are teasing clues to interpreting the novel's multiple variations -- Baxter does lay it on a bit thick -- on the theme of identity. Nathaniel remembers his breakdown and recovery as similar to the knight's dream in the Keats poem, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." He and the knight awakened on "the cold hill's side." Coolberg means "cold mountain," implying that Jerome has something to do with death and transformation.

Though a much trickier and more cerebral book than his previous novels, this is a dandy psychological thriller in which proliferating mirrors will make your head spin. Baxter has given us the writer's version of that famous M.C. Escher print in which one hand is drawing the other.

Brigitte Frase of Minneapolis also reviews books for the Los Angeles Times.

about the writer

about the writer

BRIGITTE FRASE