The Feast of Love: Love, Heartache, and the Whole Darned Thing

This epinion was written as a part of the 2001 Valentine’s Book Write-Off, hosted by jenni1396. Please also read the contributions of my colleagues: AinsleyJo, arnamenta, beckish, dandj, grumpifrog, jenni1396, lkvanvoorhis, jankp, mtbat, pacbaystat, TazzyFoxy. Thank you for reading.


Love is one of the strongest drives of the human heart. It propels us into acts of near madness, elevates us to the heights of ecstasy, wounds us unimaginably, and renders us breathless and stunned.

Charles Baxter takes the reader through all the colors of love in his novel The Feast of Love. He borrows the structure of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream," beginning his story with an insomniac writer’s night terror. This insomniac, Charlie, goes for a walk to exorcise his neurotic demons, and he encounters Bradley, kept company by his dog Bradley. As their conversation progresses, Bradley (the man) suggests that Charlie tell his story, of his loves gained and lost.


The Cast of Characters

Charlie is the audience for the oral histories of each person Bradley identifies:

Bradley: by day the owner/manager of Jitters coffeeshop, by night a tortured artist, first married to Kathryn, then married to Diana, faithfully shadowed by his dog Bradley

Chloe and Oscar: punk/hip teens who work at Jitters, naïve and reckless, furiously in lust and in love

Kathryn: Bradley’s first wife, of apparently mutable sexuality

Diana: Bradley’s second wife, an emotionally stony attorney who is in love with David, a married man

Harry and Ethyl Ginsberg: Bradley’s neighbors; he, philosopher, and she, a biochemist; now living in the empty nest phase of their marriage

Each of these characters meets with Charlie and tells their story. The various characters fall in (and sometimes out of) love and cross one another paths, like a braid composed of many strands.


The Writing

The Feast of Love is written with conversational ease. Baxter magnificently adopts uniquely different voices for each character. Chloe’s voice is casual and colloquial, capturing her youthful “f**k and alas” outlook. Bradley is largely moody and hang-dog, with occasional spikes of romantic brightness. Harry makes frequent references to Kierkegaard, using his philosophy as insulation for his troubled heart. Diana clearly acknowledges her emotional unavailability and propensity for lawyerly analysis, as though that insight were sufficient salvation.

The narrative is a compilation of the reflections and experiences of the characters. These are not action-packed stories, but rather a litany of musings by each character as they retrospectively understand how they came to find (and sometimes lose) love. The pacing follows a slow upward curve that accelerates sharply at the novel’s end.

Although Bradley is central in the identification of characters, it is the story of Chloe and Oscar that gives the novel its energy. These impulsive adolescents are crazy in love, and most of the other characters become drawn into their lives. They are swept away by their limerance and delusions of immortality, jet-propelled into sexual and romantic union.


The Themes

Each of the characters is transformed, or “mutated” as Chloe reflects, by love. The unexpected seductions and heartbreak of love have a gradual healing effect on each. Chloe’s voice is noticeably more mature in the final pages of the novel.

Baxter uses ordinary personalities and physical settings to convey a sense of universality. These are not glamorous celebrities in distant lands; these are your neighbors, and this is your neighborhood. This is love and heartache the reader knows.

The complementarities in the novel create balance. The relationship of Harry with his ne’er-do-well son is balanced by that of Oscar and his ne’er-do-well father. The youthful romance of Chloe and Oscar is contrasted with the mature marriage of Harry and Ethyl. Bradley’s best artwork, titled “The Feast of Love” is a study of light and dark. The characters connect and disconnect, are devastated by betrayal and surprised by attraction. Harry reflects “The unexpected is always upon us.”

The Feast of Love portrays love as difficult and rewarding. Love transforms profoundly, sometimes through the most ordinary circumstances.


The Author

Charles Baxter is the author of eight previous books, including two novels (Shadow Play; First Light) and four collections of short stories (A Relative Stranger; Believers; Harmony of the World; Through the Safety Net).

The Feast of Love was a 2000 National Book Award finalist. It was also named by Amazon as one of the top books of 2000.


This Reader Reflects

This novel is an extraordinary journey through the varied terrain of love, taking the reader through as many moods as the transformations through which the characters undergo.

I am left with an enormous sense of optimism and resilience about love, a belief in its ubiquitous presence and its magnificent power. I will miss these characters, their personalities having been drawn so sharply by Baxter’s words. As I close the pages of Feast, I must turn now to the ordinariness of my own life, hopeful that there, too, I will find love and transformation.