The sun collective A novel

Charles Baxter, 1947-

Book - 2020

"From National Book Award finalist and "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), Charles Baxter, a timely and unsettling new novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears. Brettigan's son, a once promising actor, has gone missing, and despite the fact that his wife, Alma, knows he left on purpose, she has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places, churches, storefronts, and benches, and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man w...ho's convinced he's found direction, named Ludlow. As these five characters cross paths, a story of guilt, anxiety, and feverish hope unfolds in suburban, middle-class Minneapolis. A send-up of modern American society and the specters of its consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and violence that punctuate our daily lives"--

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Subjects
Genres
Political fiction
Urban fiction
Published
New York : Pantheon Books [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Charles Baxter, 1947- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
313 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781524748852
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

When he's out-and-about in Minneapolis, Harry, a retired structural engineer married to Alma, a former music librarian and school principal, always hopes to spot his son Tim, who is living rough and out-of-touch. Harry gets close the day he notices a young, curiously mismatched couple. Christina, overly reliant on a risky designer drug, Blue Telephone, came to Minneapolis because of handsome actor Tim, becoming entangled, instead, with self-described revolutionary Ludlow, a member of the Sun Collective, which, despite its cheery name and positive community initiatives, is actually a shadowy, increasingly sinister assemblage of anarchists. Fiction virtuoso Baxter's artistry and merciless insights are in full, intoxicating flower in this sinuous, dark, and dramatic tale of the assaults of age, a hard-tested marriage, alienation, entrenched social inequality, hijacked activism, altered states, and convictions turned violent. As abrupt mental shifts strike like lightning, pitching Baxter's intricately portrayed characters dangerously off course, the country convulses under the authoritarian rule of an unhinged president. Baxter has brilliantly choreographed a wholly unnerving plunge into alarming aberrations private and public, festering political catastrophe, and woefully warped love.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Baxter's first novel in over a decade (after The Soul Thief) juggles satirical social critique and family drama, resulting in a messy yet engrossing tale of activism and aging. Retired Minneapolis engineer Harry Brettigan spends his days searching for his adult son, Tim, who fell out of touch months earlier, and sweetly bickering with his wife, Alma. After Alma faints one day, she starts talking with their pets and is drawn to the Sun Collective, a community group that offers resources to homeless people. There, she befriends a younger couple, Ludlow and Christina, and Harry balks when Ludlow details his homicidal vision for "effective microviolence" against suburbanites to achieve the Sun Collective's full potential. As Harry reckons with his relationships to Alma and Tim, he also travels down the rabbit hole of the Sun Collective to parse its true intentions; along the way, Tim reappears as a saved Collective member; the Sandmen, an extremist group that allegedly murders vagrants, emerge; and there's a series of mysterious deaths. Throughout, Baxter smartly lampoons America's political state and adds enough odd details to offset the occasionally murky plot threads. Readers willing to wade through the diversions will find a thoughtful study of anger, grief, and hope. (Nov.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Alma and Harry Brettigan are gutted by the disappearance of their son Tim, an aspiring actor who has inexplicably slipped into the anonymity of life on the streets of Minneapolis. Unable to talk through their pain, each separately searches for Tim, and each crosses paths with an enigmatic young couple, Ludlow and Christine, who volunteer at the Sun Collective, an ostensibly idealistic organization committed to ending poverty, hunger, and homelessness--at least according to the manifesto they surreptitiously plant at that ultimate symbol of capitalism, the Utopia Mall. Sometimes with tongue in cheek but more frequently with deadly seriousness, Baxter plumbs the depths of Alma and Harry's 40-year marriage while tackling global issues such as the warming environment, rampant consumerism, and the fine line between activism and fanaticism. As the story unfolds, homeless people disappear, Ludlow grows more deranged, animals offer opinions to their humans, and a mounting sense of dread permeates the narrative. VERDICT Fans may be surprised at the dark tenor of his latest novel, but Baxter--poet, essayist, and National Book Award finalist for The Feast of Love--masterfully captures the zeitgeist of our country as we navigate multiple crises, some he could never have predicted. This is truly a compelling book for our times.--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In his sixth novel, Baxter looks into the timely question of how we might help ourselves and others in need. As the book opens, Harold Brettigan, a retired bridge designer, boards a light-rail train to the Utopia Mall in Minneapolis, where he regularly exercises with a group of walkers. He is "shadowed" onto the train by a young couple, who sit across from him but keep to themselves, and he meets a man in a trilby who recommends a healing ritual involving a hand mirror. Harold's wife, Alma, begins talking to their cat and dog after she has a small stroke. Their son, Timothy, is missing, maybe living on the city's streets. The young couple on the train are Ludlow, who belongs to a local activist group called the Sun Collective, and Christina, who often takes a hallucinogenic called Blue Telephone. Some time later, Alma also meets the man in the trilby, who recommends a wish-fulfilling ritual involving two of her eyelashes. The Brettigans and the young couple are drawn together by accident and then by possible links to Timothy. It's an uneasy relationship, which Baxter signals by using the word "shadowed" during that first encounter on the train. The prose throughout is graceful, the writing perceptive, resonant, and deeply sympathetic. With his small cast, Baxter explores gurus and charlatans and other responses to hunger, homelessness, destitution, and simpler woes. Skepticism vies with hope, fanaticism with fantasy. A Trump-like President Thorkelson and his Cabinet embrace the ideas of an Ayn Rand--like writer for whom "charity was a sin...because it encouraged losers." A group of rich young fellows called the Sandmen are rumored to be killing homeless people. The Sun Collective provides clothes, food, and shelter, but it may be fueling terrorism. There are no easy answers, but there's promise, even respite in the quasi-magical, the nearly miraculous. An exceptional work. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Bracing herself, and involuntarily bunching her shoulders together, she walked forward out of the conservatory and into the snowstorm outside, following a path that led into the little zoo. Almost no one was here. She saw one maintenance worker clearing a path on the sidewalk, and, ahead of her, a tall forlorn solitary man, though certainly not Wye, wearing a stocking cap, a red scarf, and a long brown winter overcoat, approaching her. The guy was walking with his head down, his hands in his overcoat pockets, past the pri­mate cage. Another lost soul, she thought, somebody killing time by wandering through the zoo in November. Seeing Christina, he turned toward her and waved, a gesture of pure loneliness. Snow covered the lenses of his eyeglasses and was nestling in his eyebrows, though he must have seen her somehow, because, after all, he had waved at her. He coughed. What the hell: she waved back. Putting her hands back into her pockets, Christina plunged ahead, the snow now getting under her cap into her eyes and sticking to her eyelashes, as she walked into the Primate Building. Inside, the little monkeys, or whatever they were, were crouched in pairs grooming each other, and after studying their solicitous behavior, she walked out the other side of the building toward the western edge of the zoo where the wolves were caged. ### Their outdoor pen was about half the size of a football field. The wolves, like the snow, were white, and one of them was pacing back and forth at the edge of the opposite side near the high fencing. Each time the wolf reached the corner, it would turn and head back in the direction from which it had come. It seemed to be trying to solve a problem. The animal appeared to be thinking. What, Chris­tina wondered, was it worrying about? Maybe the problem it was trying to solve was What am I doing here? How did I get here? And how do I get out? Christina projected her thoughts into the wolf's mind, and thoughts from the wolf came back to her. There must be an answer, the wolf believed, in wolf-thought. In wolf-world, everything had a purpose, except being in a zoo. All caged and imprisoned creatures were forced to mull over such questions. For a moment, looking at the height of the fencing, Christina imagined herself inside the enclosure, and the wolf outside, free. On this side of the cage, only half-visible in the storm, stood Wye. He wore a bright blue parka matted with snow, thick mittens, and a woolen cap on which snow had already accumulated. His dark glasses, the ones that he customarily wore, had a curtain of snow over them, and more snow was accumulating in his scraggly beard. He looked like a sage in disguise, a snow-bespectacled shaman. As Christina approached him, she heard him muttering instructions to the wolves. "This is where the magic happens," Wye said, studying the pacing wolf. "What? What magic?" Christina asked. "I don't see any magic." "You have come here," Wye continued, still not turning around to acknowledge her--it was one of his gifts to know when people were nearby him, given his creepy extrasensitive human radar--"you have come here to ask about your boyfriend, Ludlow, and about the other one, Timothy." "Yes. How did you know?" "Wolves don't like human beings, did you know that?" Wye asked. "They detest and avoid us. They can't stand the way we smell. Our smell offends them. Even when starving, they will not come into a city. If they come near us, it is against their nature." All at once he let out a whistle, followed by a high keening cry, an ai-ai-ai that made both wolves regard him slowly and suspiciously, as if he'd spoken the password but mispronounced it. In response, however, the two wolves ambled toward Wye and Christina, on their side of the metal fencing. On the back of each wolf was a layer of snow. Wye reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of candy, a Skittle, but instead of feeding it to the wolf, he popped it into his mouth. It was a territorial gesture. "Wye, I think Ludlow is in some kind of trouble, and I--" "Oh, he's not in any trouble, Christina dear. Don't you worry. Anyway, I wouldn't call it 'trouble.' " "I think he's constructing a bomb or something." One of the wolves was still approaching the two of them, seemingly not afraid. "He won't talk about it. I don't know for sure, but I have this intuition. It has me worried. He talks in his sleep." "Did you know that the Aztec god of the sun was Huitzilopochtli?" Wye's voice was phlegmy. "He was also the god of war, and so he did double duty. Tlaloc was the rain god. Both bloodthirsty gods required human sacrifice. It was the source of their power." His narration grew soft and tender, at a bedtime-story level. "Thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children. Those being sacrificed--well, their beating hearts were sawed out with an obsidian knife and then burned, right at the top of the Aztec pyramid. Imagine the flow of blood down the steps, the great pools of blood at the bottom! Children, too, were sacrificed, their little hearts cut right out of them. The gods require terrible, unthinkable actions from us. They give themselves that particular permission. That's why they're gods. Gods don't make requests. They make demands. You know: Abraham and Isaac. The Old Testament God was like that. Implacable." "I wonder if there's a god of winter." "Ullr," he said. "In other mythologies, Boreas." "Wye," she asked, as both wolves edged closer, "why are you telling me this? Why are we here? I'm freezing out here." "Because, my dear," he said, turning his dark glasses toward her, "the gods are about to ask something terrible of you, some actions that traditionally would cause fear and trembling, but now, in the modern age . . ." His voice trailed off, or perhaps he was still speaking, and Christina couldn't hear his words because the snow continued to fall even harder than before, muffling his voice, and she was growing inattentive because, to her astonishment, the wolves continued to come nearer to them, as if Christina and Wye were their prey, but what was most odd about their presence before them was that their white fur had been camouflaged, subsumed, by the thick snowfall, producing a moment when, looking through the lattice-pattern fencing, all Christina could see of the wolves were their gray eyes seemingly floating in midair and fixed directly on her. It was the strangest sight, those eyes in the midst of the snowfall, focused on her like suspended beams of light asking her a question to which she did not yet have an answer. "What will be asked of me?" she said, still watching the animals. "What am I being called to do?" "That would be telling," she thought she heard Wye say, but when she turned toward him, he seemed not to be there any longer. Excerpted from The Sun Collective: A Novel by Charles Baxter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.