Book Alert / The Soul Thief

The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter, Pantheon '08, $20, 210 pages, ISBN #0375422528.

Before the advent of identity theft, few of us probably thought much about our own identities. We simply are who we are. Novelist Charles Baxter, a National Book Award nominee in 2000 for The Feast of Love, plays off our new sensitivity to identity in his newest book. Nathaniel Mason, his protagonist, is a graduate student who is drawn to the mysterious and compelling Jerome Coolberg:

"Not only cryptic about himself, he (Coolberg) seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. It is Jerome who seems to trigger the events that precipitate Nathaniel's total breakdown, and Jerome who shows up thirty years later -- Nathaniel having finally reconstructed his life -- to suggest, with the most staggering consequences, that Nathaniel's identity may not in fact be his own."

In a brief interview, Baxter talks about the writing of the book:

Q. What's the Soul Thief about?

A. It's about crazy love versus domestic, ordinary love. Ever since The Feast of Love, my subject seems to have been the arrival of mania in daily life; I can't seem to get away from the subject of love and fixation.

Q. Who were your influences here?

A. Patricia Highsmith (there's a quick hommage (sic) to her in the book) and Dostoyevsky (two to him, which alert readers might notice). Also Hitchcock. Highsmith wrote a novel called This Sweet Sickness about erotic obsession, and of course the Ripley novels are about exchangeable or fungible identities. Hitchcock made a movie of Highsmith's Strangers on a Train. In a way, this is my Hitchcock novel. There are references to Psycho everwhere in it."