Saul and Patsy

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Charles Baxter's follow-up to his National Book Award–nominated The Feast of Love is a quirky, thoughtful tale of a young couple whose complex marriage suffers through a series of tragic events after an obsessed teenager infiltrates their lives. The titular pair, Saul and Patsy, live out a simple dream life in the American heartland, until one of Saul's high school students commits suicide in front of them. Following that death, Saul becomes the focus of a group of disaffected teenage outcasts set on causing trouble.

A craftsman with the keen ability to transform the everyday into the exceptional, Baxter takes flawed, haunted characters and turns their dilemmas into electrifying, emotionally wrought drama. The author is skillful and evenhanded enough to delve into the customary questions concerning marriage, fealty, and obligations to one's neighbors; and yet he avoids the predictable narrative traps and clichés.

Saul and Patsy is sardonic and occasionally chilling in its depiction of madness and misfortune, but the novel is so well layered with wit and irony that it always remains a balanced, insightful tale of enduring love. Baxter is highly accomplished where disturbing twists, conflicts, and internal action are the essence of the human condition. Perceptive and involving, Saul and Patsy is a fascinating, satisfying saga you'll forever cherish. Tom Piccirilli

The New Yorker

It is rare that a novel, even a good one, manages to evoke contemporary life without being self-conscious about it. But that is what Baxter achieves here in his portrait of a recently married couple—neurotic, cantankerous Saul Bernstein, who has taken a job teaching high school in rural Michigan, and his wife, Patsy, who does her best to steady him. Saul rages at one point, “If you put a Vermeer on television, it stopped being a Vermeer and turned into something else on television.” Baxter’s painterly technique reverses this process: moments that in other hands would be merely sensational (one of Saul’s remedial students shoots himself on Saul’s lawn) here assume their rightful place in the continuum of a young couple’s experience and inexperience.

The Washington Post

At a time when we're all being goaded to buy into a shallow and stereotyped divide between the pundit-sired "red" and "blue" Americas, Charles Baxter reminds us that there is no regional monopoly on virtue and understanding, and no easy comforts for either self-appointed world-savers or smug populists. And for all those hard lessons, Baxter also manages to deliver Saul and Patsy into something astonishingly close to a happy ending. Such indeed is the glory of love -- and of fully realized fiction. — Chris Lehmann

Publishers Weekly

For the first quarter of this novel, even the talented John Rubinstein can't save it from sounding like Annie Hall Redux. The clash between Midwest WASP and East Coast Jew is better captured by Woody Allen in a single line. However, this quirky novel improves vastly when the none-too-bright Gordy, performed to slow-talking perfection by Rubinstein, stalks Saul's family, and the plot shifts into a different gear. Rubinstein subtly controls the voice of Gordy's aunt Brenda so that she sounds simultaneously greedy and grieving. He individuates Saul's friends and family and occasionally provides amusing sound effects-for example, Mad Dog inhaling pot and then speaking with his throat full of smoke. Rubinstein's well-paced narration extracts as much humor from the novel as possible. Unfortunately, the audio's production is far from perfect. Awkward silences separate the tracks, and each CD ends abruptly. Occasional bits of music seem randomly dropped in. Despite the technical flaws, Rubinstein's fine performance makes Saul & Patsya notable new audio. A Vintage paperback (Reviews, Sept. 28, 2003). (Aug.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

Despite its title, this searching, reflective novel is less concerned with couplehood than it is with the fretful inner life of one half of the eponymous married pair. Saul Bernstein, a literary descendant of Bellow's Herzog, is a transplanted Baltimore Jew, observing his newfound hometown-the "dusty, luckless" fictional city of Five Oaks, Mich.-with an ill-at-ease hyperawareness. Young-marrieds Saul and Patsy move to Five Oaks from Evanston, Ill., when Saul is hired to teach at the local high school. They rent a farmhouse, where they make love in every room and even in the backyard, settling into the rhythms of domestic life. Patsy, a former modern dancer who finds work as a bank teller, gives birth to a daughter, and with infinite patience tolerates her "professional worrier" of a husband. The narrative is dense with quotidian detail, precisely charted shifts of consciousness and pitch-perfect moments of emotional truth, but Baxter (The Feast of Love; Believers, etc.) doesn't have full control of the novel's architecture. The narrative crests occasionally on signs and wonders (early on, Saul has a spiritual epiphany after sighting an albino deer), but turns on the inexplicable suicide of Saul's illiterate, inarticulate student, Gordy Himmelman. Blamed by some for the boy's death, Saul must struggle against real community hostility instead of imagined anti-Semitism. Resolutely, he refuses to give up on his adopted Midwestern hometown, bringing this luminously prosaic if sometimes meandering novel to a quietly triumphant conclusion. (Sept. 9) Forecast: This is Baxter's first novel since The Feast of Love, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2001. His wider name recognition and the cumulative strength of his steadily growing body of work will benefit this solid effort. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Verily, as Baxter has now discovered, to be known as a "writer's writer" is both a blessing and a curse. Saul and Patsy, his eighth published work of fiction, has further enhanced his reputation as a consummate stylist and wordsmith if not brought him the breakout commercial success that has eluded him thus far. Set in the small fictional town of Five Oaks, MI, Baxter's acutely reflective novel queries the bonds and braids of marriage and obsession. Our eponymously named young married couple is solidly ensconced in the Midwest, where Saul is a high school teacher and Patsy, a former dancer, works for a bank as a loan officer. A displaced Eastern big city Jew, Saul is brooding and exceedingly self-aware. The narrative linchpin is the Bartleby-like presence in the couple's life of one of Saul's students and the far-reaching implications of emotional bondage in this life and beyond. With its subtly shifting perspectives and narrative voices, studied pace, and textual imagery, the story could easily take the back roads to listener "listlessville," but in Tony-award winning actor John Rubinstein's capable narration the tale is immediately and consistently engaging, especially when narrated in Saul's voice. A strong choice for audio collections emphasizing contemporary fiction.-Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

What seems like a safe haven for a loving young couple is shattered by a high-school dropout's suicide: Baxter's latest follows The Feast of Love, an NBA finalist in 2000. Saul and Patsy met at Northwestern, where they quickly fell in love, animal passions blending with a rare intimacy of mind and spirit. Now here they are, young marrieds, still passionate, living in semi-rural Michigan; Saul is a high-school teacher in a featureless city. Though an angst-ridden urban Jew, Saul enjoys the "indifference" of the Heartland; besides, he's on a mission to undo "the dumbness." How ironic, then, that he rolls the car after some serious drinking. He and Patsy find refuge in the home of a former (dumb) student, already married to his high-school sweetheart. Saul admires their simple ways and becomes a voyeur, detouring past their "damnable house of happiness," never dreaming he will soon acquire a voyeur himself. Patsy has had a baby girl and Saul takes some baby pictures into his remedial English class, whose dumbest student, Gordy Himmelman, plainly loathes him. Gordy starts showing up on their front lawn, staring, immobile; one time he produces an unloaded gun. Saul drives the parentless Gordy back to his aunt Brenda, a benighted hag-like waitress, but Gordy keeps returning until one day, with the storybook family watching, he blows his brains out. In death, Gordy becomes the object of a high-school cult. Kids bleach their hair and call themselves "Himmels." Saul, who has figured out that Gordy was "offering himself . . . for adoption," becomes a scapegoat. The climax comes on Halloween when eight kids drive up, arson and worse on their minds. Saul, drawing on dramatic and parenting skills henever knew he had, brilliantly defuses the crisis. Baxter is a master of stealth, easing us by degrees from a world shaped by love toward a creepy nihilism. His deft fusion of a love story with a post-Columbine psychodrama is a major achievement.