Shadow Play: A Novel (Norton Paperback)

Not one of Mr. Baxter's best known books, but a big hit with our group.

Read this book. It's like listening to a really good jazz piece-- intense and light at the same time. It will knock your socks off. And if you ever get the chance to hear Baxter read any of his stuff live, he's a wonderful speaker and storyteller. One of my favorites.

This novel has enough guts, great writing and plot to fill three books. Relationships with family members, becoming an adult and tough decisions that come with it, love, insanity, suicide and redemption are all addressed. The amazing thing about this novel is it looks at all of these things, and never looses focus. The story circles around Wyatt, his looser brother, his wife who can do magic tricks and his insane mother. Also, He has an aunt who is writing he own bible. Baxter does a great job of interaction between characters, particularly in the dialogue. Mr. Baxter is more known for his short stories, but after getting reading this I can't help but hope he turns out more novels before he is done. This is that book you have to put is someone else's hand when you finish it, because you sometimes forget how much 300 pages can offer you.

I just don't know what to say about this book. The plot, writing style, and main tropes behind the novel are just so unique from anything else I've read that I really can't critique the book, because I can't compare it to other novels. The only authors I can compare Baxter to are Milan Kundera and Jonathan Carrol, and even then only lightly. The book, "Shadow Play", is a superbly written, idiosyncratic little masterpiece with ordinary characters that really aren't ordinary at all. The book jumps from character to character and from past to presnet with alarming suddenness, but that's not a fault. The prose sings. The moral questions are interesting and serious. The main characters are wonderful and real. Altogether, a perfectly written book that so thoroughly inhabits its own world that to grade it in terms of good or bad literature is just about impossible, for me, at least. Highest recommendation.