My
biggest problem with this Book is that I did not totally understand what
happened. Nathaniel Mason is a grad
student in Buffalo in the 1970s. At a
party he meets Jerome Coolberg, who weirdly seems to want to hijack Nathaniel’s
entire identity, including his family history and his possessions. Whether or not Nathaniel’s Soul is worth
stealing is debatable, since he doesn’t seem to be committed to much of
anything except his beloved lesbian friend, Jamie. Things veer into treacherous territory during
a nighttime Niagara Falls outing, but Nathaniel maintains his unflappable
acceptance of everything, even serving coffee to a burglar, until one of
Coolberg’s more grim predictions comes true. A revelation near the end renders the plot of
this book even more inscrutable, with several unanswered questions
remaining. On the plus side, I love
Baxter’s writing. Decades after
Nathaniel’s grad school days, he travels to Los Angeles to meet Coolberg again. The author’s descriptions of “the ritualistic
hostility of LAX” and the “emblems of four-star neglect” in a Sunset Boulevard
hotel are priceless.