Murmur of the Heart

If you wake up one night in a darkened room and cannot remember who you are, if you find yourself seized by a mild sleepy terror (troubled perhaps by a book you have read or are writing), if you feel yourself somehow “glimmerless,” then write your name on a slip of paper and step outside. The city will connect you to your soul in many unexpected ways.

“Hey. . . . What the hell are you doing here?”

Bradley W. Smith sits with his dog in the park. It’s almost 2 a.m., and he’s been up for a while too. Why don’t you join him? He talks a lot and presumes even more, but he just might have a solution to your problems.

“I’ll send you people, you know, actual people, for a change, like for instance human beings who genuinely exist, and you listen to them for a while.” He rambles a bit, but he gets to the point, “Everybody’s got a story, and we’ll just start telling you the stories we have.”

The idea’s enough for “The Feast of Love,” and Charles Baxter--both the insomniac who opens these pages, glimmerless in a darkened room, and the writer who disappears behind them--plays it out brilliantly. Bradley sends him people he knows, a half dozen or so ex-wives, current lovers, some friends and neighbors living in Ann Arbor, Mich. The effect is part gossip, part confession and, in Baxter’s hands, wholly compelling.

As the stories dovetail, unfold and circle back to Bradley before moving on, they acquire a cumulative force. It all comes down to one thing, and that’s--according to Chloe, the beatific kid in the “RAGING HORMONES” T-shirt who works in the coffee shop in the mall--what people in the suburbs think about most, and that’s love.

“I think they’re stupefied, thinking about love, mostly, how they once had it, how they got it, how they lost it, and all the people they loved and didn’t love, how they ended up royally hating somebody, like, the weirdness and wetness of it. Bradley says they’re thinking about money, but I know they’re not. Love comes first.”

Yes, love, the weirdness and wetness of it, and its fantastic, sometimes misbegotten incantation, sex. Chloe (that’s Clow-ay not Clow-ee) knows, and Baxter gives her center stage, effortlessly capturing in her language (“freakazoidal”) and her postures (“I think I’m more of a visionary than he was. After all, I once saw Jesus at a party”) the toughness, vulnerability and lustiness of youth.

Chloe goes out with Oscar, the ex-junkie, stoner, oblivion chaser with that “calmed down zombie look.” Together, they’re “swoon machines.” She may be way under-pierced (at first), and he’s probably way over-pierced, but their dreams and desires, their invincible randiness for one another, could start small fires and be the envy of heaven. “[W]e had such good sex together”--this from Chloe--”we thought there ought to be a way to make some money out of it, to live off of our crazy ruinous love forever.”

As Baxter braids and unbraids Oscar and Chloe from dating to matrimony and beyond--as well as Bradley and his exes--you feel the sky lowering outside the bedroom windows, as if a summer storm were approaching, the air all ionized, near begging; and when the rain begins to fall, to Baxter’s credit, there’s no predicting: It will either be wonderful (as with Oscar and Chloe) or terrible.

The power’s out in the mall. The hail’s pummeling the skylights when Bradley meets his second wife, Diana. It’s an omen neither of them sees. She was his rebound; he was hers. He’s besotted; she’s nearly indifferent, and their honeymoon’s from hell. “We’re not compatible, you know,” she casually announces one afternoon before tearing into him. “It’s not compatibility,” he says, bravely unsuspecting. “It’s how you manage it. How loving you are.” If only it were that simple.

Baxter, who wrote a superb collection of essays last year on fiction, “Burning Down the House,” follows his rules with stunning effect. “With counterpointed characterization,” he explained--which is exactly what he develops here--”certain kinds of people are pushed together, people who bring out a crucial response to each other. A latent energy rises to the surface, the desire or secret previously forced down into psychic obscurity.” The measure of his skill is how this energy percolates up and how love becomes much more than love: It’s the hunger that defines the feast.

*

You see it everywhere--from the wandering sleeplessness in the opening to the insatiability toward the end that’s, sadly, Diana. After bailing on Bradley, she hooks up with an old flame, but “[o]ur lovemaking is so stormy and theatrical. . . . Sometimes what we do is more like fighting than love. We slam each other around. I think we’re trying to find each other’s souls, knowing they must be in there somewhere, close to our undernourished hearts.”

Soulless-ness in this world takes many forms. Two marriages gone, Bradley is hounded by pain, haunted by the invisible passion of others even after they’ve left the room. His next-door neighbor, a philosophy professor, sees it best, well-versed as he is in Kierkegaard, for whom love and misery made such happy bedfellows.

“Kierkegaard”--he waxes after charting his own heartache--”Kierkegaard himself says that the gods created humankind and its troubles simply because they were bored.”

No solace, and the price to be paid is dear. Yet strangely no one in “The Feast of Love” is daunted. All is risk; no fear of commitment, and love becomes an existential exercise, the stone to be pushed uphill no matter its course, a feat that gives all these encounters--Oscar and Chloe’s, Bradley’s and his wives’ and their lovers’--more courage than any mere fling. Of course, something far greater and more desired is at stake.

How else do you explain the effortless couplings, the attempted reconciliations, the longing and ache? How else do you explain, for that matter, Bradley’s masterpiece? He paints in his off-hours, and everyone agrees his best canvas hangs in the coffee shop. It’s of a table set with dishes, cups and glasses, suffused with light, as if “the appetite the guest brought to this feast was an appetite not for food but for the entire spectrum as lit by celestial arc lamps.” It is this light, perhaps ever present, that seems to sustain the drive, the force that draws us to one another time and again.

What do we talk about when we talk about love? We talk about many things, but mostly we talk about heaven and hell, and by marrying the two, Baxter comes close to defining the ineffable: “The problem with love and God”--the philosopher again--”. . . is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them. . . . We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up--wordless, inarticulate--by denying their existence altogether, and pfffffft, they die.”

Except in these pages. Except in Baxter’s hands.

Like Walker Percy (who had a similar affection for Kierkegaard), Baxter has a talent for making us aware of things--like love and despair--that we may not know about. His pictures are graceful, tough and strikingly even-handed. As sure as there is love, he tells us in the end, there is a God, and the celestial arc lamps burn around us whether we know it or not. The unexpected is always upon us, the philosopher tells Chloe. Believe it.