The sparks and romantic connections between various couples in Ann Arbor are the connecting thread in Charles Baxter's A Feast of Love. Most of them are connected through Bradley, a middle-aged man who owns a coffee shop in the mall but pursues his love of painting at home. Bradley's marriages, both of which end in divorce, are brought in, as are his young employees Chloe and Oscar, who are crazy about each other. His neighbors, a long-married couple struggling with how to deal with their drug-addicted son, are also players in the drama. The story is framed by the conceit that a friend of Bradley's, a professor and writer (meant to be Baxter himself), is interviewing all of the players one-by-one over a period of time.

There's not much in the way of a plot, per se. Each little story has its own rising and falling action...Bradley's first wife, who leaves him when she falls head over heels for another woman, is a bit player, but his second wife, who marries him mostly to spite the lover who refuses to leave his wife for her, has a larger role in the narrative. Chloe and Oscar's story, which appears steadily throughout the book and sees the couple dealing with his unbalanced father and a larger, more unexpected problem, provides probably the most straightforward structure in the whole thing. Also constantly recurring is the title, first as the name of Bradley's best painting, which then inspires the author-within-the-book to title his work in progress after it.

When this book is on, it has moments of real brilliance. The story I mentioned above, in which Bradley's first wife meets, falls for, and eventually divorces Bradley in pursuit of the other woman, feels alive with poignancy. A story Bradley relates about having to kidnap his own dog from his sister sparkles with dark humor. And as an Ann Arborite in exile, I love reading about the city. Allmendinger Park, post-game traffic, the mall...all of these are deeply familiar to me and make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to see on the page. The experience of seeing places that are meaningful to me depicted in print is something I didn't even know could be as powerful as I found it.

Now for the critical part. I feel like I've read several of these interconnected-vignette style books lately and perhaps I'm just tiring of that presentation, but all of them suffer from a lack of traditional plot and tension. This feels more like a piece of writing than a book, if that makes sense. It feels stylized and over-written, and part of the issue is that the character work is spotty. Bradley's clearly meant to have a particular personality but it never really feels honest or consistent, and the way Chloe is written was extremely off-putting to me. She's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl before that was a thing, insisting on a quirky pronunciation of her name and using some of the most cringey language to describe sex I've ever read. Anyone who writes a girl under 20 as using the phrase "lovemaking" to describe sex unironically has never really listened to a young woman talk about it, and that is far from the worst example. In the end, I just never really got invested in it. There's some very capable storytelling here, in parts, but it's not well-realized enough throughout to get an affirmative recommendation for me unless you're determined to read about Ann Arbor. ( )

there were parts of this that i quite liked, and that showed his writing ability really nicely, but i think that overall this was the kind of pretentious book that is too too pretentious to be good. the characters - in particular the younger characters - felt like the way an older guy would write younger people, not like real younger people. the women, too, actually.

the conceit here could have been interesting but overall i don't think it really worked all that well. but as i said, i did like some of the writing.

"My inner life lacks dignity."

"Driving me home, Harry told me -- how could I not know it? -- that Jackson Pollock had cut off the tip of his little finger at the ag of seven. Seven! Jesus Christ. Not even my pain is original."

"Hugging him, you kind of collide with his stomach before you get to his face, but that was okay. My dad's stomach is like the foyer to the rest of him."

"Chloe's enemy is now mine, however, and my feeling is:...I am ready for him. I am pleased to have an enemy who is not symbolic." ( )

Really a 2.5, rounding down for now -

I saw the movie adaptation of this at some point during covid, and it was pretty bad. Greg Kinnear was as he usually is, good enough but not very good, in one of the two lead roles. Morgan Freeman in the other lead role was visibly going through the motions. The story was cheesy in a touched-by-an-angel sort of way. I assumed it was just a bad adaptation, I had heard good things about this book and about Charles Baxter's skills in general so I decided I had to read the book and not leave my opinion tied to the film. So I read the book. The good news is that the movie adaptation really was not a bad adaptation, it was mostly bad in the way that the book was bad.

There is one thing that the book did better than the movie. In the film they inexplicably moved the setting from Ann Arbor, MI to Portland. OR. The Ann Arbor setting is quite important to this story, and there are aspects of A2 and of midwestern life more generally that Baxter really nails. Those things, the embrace of "normal", the prepackaged family values, worrying about what the neighbors will think, the ways people need to twist themselves to be successful shop rats and how that impacts their families and communities, the expectation that no one around you will do anything or go anywhere, make less sense when superimposed on the live-and-let-live highly transient denizens of Portland. Though the books gets credit for setting the scene, it had a big problem that totally overshadowed the deft portrait of this midwestern college town.

The characters in this book were so poorly drawn I started to wonder if Baxter had ever actually had a conversation with a live woman or any person without education at a good college. Baxter's women are tropes. The worst is Chloe (pronounced CLO-WAY because she decided to customize it. This was so annoying. I kept thinking of "cloaca" and no one wants others to think about a bird's combination of rectum and vagina every time their name is used.) She is the sex loving uneducated woowoo shit-spouting manic pixie dream girl. She careens between being dull-witted in a standard way and appearing to have taken large doses of thorazine spiked with LSD. She feels the need to explain how she learned certain words by seeing them once in a book or hearing them at the coffee place she works at. "Mellifluous" is one of those words. And yet, without remark, she uses other words that this character would never use. "Misogynist" comes to mind. She is the personification of every mediocre boy's dream. Always ready for a tumble, loves to define herself totally by her love for her man, demands nothing of her moronic drug addled boyfriend but that he be in love with her. She has no friends, and no family relationships, and no interests, that could muck up her total focus on her man. She is a great contrast to Diana, who is a heartless harridan (the personification of that misogynist trope, the "career woman" - think Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl) propelled forward by professional ambition and her quest for full body orgasms. Every time something happens she behaves with depraved indifference and self-interest, and it is always explained by the narrator pointing out that she is a lawyer. When one character is in extremis, near death, the only thing she thinks about is whom she might sue. There is Kathryn whom we immediately learn loves softball, so of course she is a secret lesbian. It goes on and on. The one-dimensional thing is not limited to women. No, just as trope-y is the next door neighbor, Harry. He is the Jewish intellectual, a philosophy professor whose thoughts about Kierkegaard were the only parts of the book that interested me at all. Of course he was the central casting intellectual Jew. Whenever he and his wife were featured it was like somehow Hal Linden and Lainie Kazan were dropped down into this midwestern town. These people were too intellectual to say Kaddish after the loss of a parent but believed in dybbuks. The uneducated men, Clo-WAY's and Oscar's fathers, are beer swilling slack-jawed losers. And there are a lot of nauseatingly precious elements. Our narrator is named Charles Baxter, just like the author, and so he gives our main character. Bradley a dog also also named Bradley for a kind of parallel to that. Cute!

A lot of this "cute" is the problem. I am not a huge fan of cute, but Baxter clearly is. There is a lot of cute stuff going on here. Cute is a convenient substitute for real. The book made me feel like I had been covered in syrup. I raced through this book mostly because I wanted to get it over with. When I turned the last page I immediately chucked the book into my giveaway box. I hope the next owner likes it better than I.. ( )

It's a re-re-read Keeper -

Even with parts I love and parts I skip... ( )

Story of neighbors in a regular college town whose lives intersect with lots of trouble but with great love , who are first connected by their walks around and in the college football stadium in the middle of the night. The protagonist is an ordinary but somewhat alienated guy who owns a coffee store - shop in a mall.who names his dog with his own name. He marries an attorney who he meets after his first wife leaves him for a woman. The second wife leaves him too - and he seems to eventually find love with an African American doctor. Working for him at his coffee shop are two working class young rebellious couple who are deeply in love . Both are estranged from their parents who have rejected them for their drug use, tattoos and because their parents are either judgmental or mean.

The protagonists next door neighbors are an older professor and his wife whose young adult son threatens them with his own suicide, disappearance and is the torment of their lives. A very good read.