A NEW YORK TIMES 2021 NOTABLE BOOKA timely and unsettling novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears—from the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune). Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she … him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places—churches, storefronts, benches—and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader who will alter all of their lives. 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 who’s convinced he may start a revolution. As the lives of these four characters intertwine, a story of guilt, anxiety, and feverish hope unfolds in the city of Minneapolis.
A vision of modern American society and the specters of the consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and the violence that punctuate our daily lives.
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Only the supremely talented Charles Baxter could write a novel that combines blistering social critique with humor, mysticism, passion, and grief. The Sun Collective speaks directly to the unsettled time in which we live. The characters in this brilliant, beautiful, and deeply insightful book will live on in your imagination for years.
A strange and wonderful novel! It begins in comic realism, then becomes dream-like and spooky, mixing the mundane and the fantastic. Imagine an American Murakami, wildly inventive yet full of real emotions and recognizable human beings. This is Charles Baxter’s best novel since The Feast of Love, with a subtle political bite that is original and timely.
We don’t really know where bombers come from. What is it exactly that makes a Timothy McVeigh or Muhammed Atta or Ted Kaczynski? Muhammad Atta heard from a mentor of his just before the 9/11 attacks who alluded to a past trauma of Atta’s, saying he must continue to pray for peace regarding “that calamity of yours.” Criminal profilers will tell you that bombers and poisoners fit the same basic mold. Charles Baxter’s fifth novel THE SUN COLLECTIVE takes up these questions. It’s a novel about crazy that features a pair of young anti-income-disparity radicals named Ludlow aka Mark Atherton Bagley and Christina. Christina is a wonderful character to inhabit for a while because she’s often altered on homemade acid known as Blue Telephone, so her experience of reality is far better than the real thing. The book also manages to meditate extensively on the long marriage, a kind of marathon-run many marriages just aren’t up for. The long marriage in question is that of a retiree named Brettigan and his wife Alma. Baxter likes to explore such extremes in confined spaces and does so here by placing a youthful bomber’s hatred up against septuagenarian love. He has treated this ying and yang of hate and love in shorter form, as he did in his story “Kiss Away” from his 1997 collection BELIEVERS. The point is, we really need to know what makes people cut ties with our ordered reality and plant bombs. Because it could be related to why Christina wants to be on the Blue Telephone all the time. In the context of the novel, that terrorist tool known as divorce is also a form of molotov cocktail Brettigan and Alma can never seem to entirely put down or stop stirring, despite their umpteen years together. Mark’s stolidly rural Christian parents turn up later in the book, after some tragedies have occurred, to explain as best they can how they raised up and unleashed a crazy bomber in our midst. But they can’t explain. Though one thing Mr. Bagley says is chilling in its sheer understatement: “We never had many of the advantages, but we don’t think we’re superior to anybody, but then nobody’s superior to us, either.”
What a spectacular book this is. A parable for our ominous times, it has revolution, murder, young love, magic, and marital squabbling in its pages — a novel of ideas in sly and modest Baxter form. Quite amazing.
I’ve been reading, with intense and escalating admiration, Charles Baxter’s novels and stories and essays for decades, but nothing quite prepared me for the radical brilliance of The Sun Collective. It’s as if Sherwood Anderson finally made manifest what was always there: his inner Samuel Beckett. That very real despair is here but also transformed into something else, by book’s end. The dialogue about Hitchcock’s MacGuffin is my single favorite thing Baxter has ever written.