In this latter-day ‘Midsummer Night's Dream’, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones.
In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fuelling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart. Crafted with subtlety, grace, and power, ‘The Feast of Love’ is a masterful novel.
Charles Baxter teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of seven other works of fiction, including ‘Believers’, ‘Harmony of the World’, and ‘Through the Safety Net’.