Book Reviews
Gloriously done.... It's like watching fire slowly travel up a curtain, waiting for the moment the whole cloth will be engulfed.
New York Times
Delicious.... Entirely original.... The Soul Thief is so craftily constructed that to appreciate how liberally Baxter plants creepy hints of what's to come a reader really should savor this book twice.
Washington Post Book World
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.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Examines love and lust and the various permutations and cries in between.... Few American writers handle those compelling subjects with a more sure touch or more worthy insight.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
With a prose style lyrical, accessible and warmly humorous, Charles Baxter has been quietly building a reputation as one of America's favorite literary authors.... His newest novel teems with the same good-natured empathy and wry humor that imbues his earlier works.... [I]t surely will delight.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Opening in gritty, nineteen-seventies Buffalo, Baxter’s suspenseful fifth novel concerns a mildmannered graduate student, Nathaniel, who falls under the spell of a cerebral but affected outsider, the aptly named Coolberg. Drawn to Coolberg’s sneering persona (and to that of his girlfriend, Theresa, who relishes Coolberg’s performances), Nathaniel begins to unravel when he learns that Coolberg is appropriating his identity: a burglar steals clothes from Nathaniel that Coolberg ends up wearing, and Coolberg begins claiming Nathaniel’s history for his own. Baxter’s talent for creating uncanny settings and telling details and his inventive way with language (a similarly dressed couple are "umbilicaled") are both on display here, but the conceptual twist at the novel’s end feels unequal to the dramatic tension that precedes it.
The New Yorker
Critics’ reactions depended on how well they tolerated [Baxter's] inventiveness. Those who enjoyed it found The Soul Thief a compelling investigation into how identities are lost and found over a lifetime. Those who were less patient...left the novel feeling robbed of solid characters.
Bookmarks Magazine
The author of the National Book Award–nominated The Feast of Love, Baxter returns with this ninth book, an assay into the limits of character, fictional and otherwise. The first half of the novel follows the brief arc of Nathaniel Mason's graduate career in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., which centers on his friendship with the sexy but self-dramatizing Teresa (which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were French) and her lover Jerome Coolberg, a virtuoso of cast-off ideas. Coolberg, obsessed with Nathaniel, begins taking his shirts and notebooks, and claiming that episodes from Nathaniel's life happened to him. Coolberg drops a hint that something bad will happen to Jamie, Nathaniel's sometime lover; when it actually comes to pass, Nathaniel's world begins to collapse. In the novel's second half, decades after these events have occurred, Coolberg enters Nathaniel's life again for a final, dramatic confrontation. Baxter has a great, registering eye for the real pleasures and attritions of life, but the book gets hung up on metafictional questions of identity (the major one: who is writing this first-person narrative?). The results cheat readers out of identifying with any of the characters, perhaps intentionally.
Publishers Weekly