Review: The Soul Thief

    Readers who enjoy metafiction, fiction that is about storytelling itself, will have more than a little fun pondering Charles Baxter's newest novel. This is not his first book to call attention to the circumstances of its own creation. A Feast of Love begins with, guess who, Baxter himself out for a late-night walk while trying to get his next novel started. He comes upon a friend who suggests the title and the content of the first chapter. In The Soul Thief, things are more kinky. The story starts with the protagonist's college days in the 1970's, when he meets a particularly annoying but mesmerizing trickster. Soon articles of clothing disappear from the narrator's apartment, and eventually we contemplate the question of if, when, and how his soul has been stolen as well. Who is he, and, as David Copperfield wondered before him, is he the hero of his own story? At its best, metafiction is both comical and disturbing, as when Baxter seems to ask what, after all, this thing called identity is. In Tristam Shandy, the narrator struggled to get himself born, which only happened half way through the book. In Calvino's, If on a Winter Night a Traveler, the reader stepped in to write the story. Charles Baxter's The Soul Thief is a wonderful companion to these earlier novels in the metafictional tradition.

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