THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 29WHAT TO DOwith all of this anxiety?
That question hangs over Charles Bax-
ter’s tense, wry and ultimately touching
new novel, “The Sun Collective,” which
vividly recreates the oscillating sense of
dread familiar to anyone who hasn’t spent
the last four years in a coma, or in Canada.
Set in Minneapolis during the reign of a
brutish and banal president named
Thorkelson, “The Sun Collective” is the
story of the retirees Harold and Alma Bret-
tigan, whose search for their missing son
leads them to the group that gives the nov-
el its title. Along the way they pass many
other signs and wonders of our parlous
present.
There are shadowy right-wingers called
Sandmen who might be killing street peo-
ple. And someone is causing the comically
apt deaths of the wealthy (this one impaled
on a sundial, that one drowned in a seren-
ity pool). Manifestos are being thrust upon
senior members of “the Thundering Herd”
while they walk their power laps at the
“Utopia Mall.”
The Brettigans mostly just hear rumors
about this stuff, but it’s enough to put them
in a constant state of worry and agitation.
And not just about their missing son, a
charming onetime stage actor named
Timothy. Harold feels such guilt over his
well-off, liberal entitlement that he jerks
awake in the middle of the night dreaming
he’s committed a murder. Alma seems to
be having mini-strokes. Their pets are try-
ing to tell them something. And every-
where they go — the light rail, the park, the
Skyway — they seem to meet mysterious,
monologuing strangers.
What bedevils the Brettigans and their
neighbors can feel a bit amorphous, but
this could well be Baxter’s point. Or it could
be the times. The effect of President
Thorkelson’s trickle-down dread neatly re-
calls that of the Trump years, although the
two presidents are not entirely analogous.
For one thing, Thorkelson writes and pub-
lishes a monthly poem — Baxter’s point be-
ing, perhaps, look, things could have been
worse.
Baxter is the author of five other novels,
along with several story collections and
books of poetry and essays. His terrific,
dog-eared books on writing, “Burning
Down the House” and “The Art of Subtext,”
might intimidate a lesser reviewer into
feeling as if he’d been asked to assess the
light-saber technique of a Jedi master. (As
one character says in the novel: “The oli-
garchs love it when you use the passive
voice.”)
There is plenty of artful subtext in “The
Sun Collective,” and a burning house or
two. But, as with his sumptuous 2000 novel
“The Feast of Love” (a finalist for the Na-
tional Book Award), Baxter’s true gift is in
describing the tender complexities of a re-
lationship. Here, it’s the wistful, at times
contentious, “post-love” of Harold and
Alma, whose real problem might not be the
times, but time, and their own senescence
and mortality.
“Everything you have to tell me, you’ve
told,” Alma says to her husband not long
after noticing him watching a young cou-
ple in the park. In a remarkably moving
moment, she interrupts Harold’s youthful
daydreams by putting a hand on his arm.
“We were like that,” she reassures him.
“You didn’t miss out on anything.”
That younger couple, Christina and Lud-
low, will become the Brettigans’ genera-
tional mirrors, and their entry point into
the Sun Collective. If they are sketchier
characters, both in Baxter’s depiction and
in the reader’s eye, that may again be Bax-
ter’s point. Or it may be the times.
Are they brainwashed anarchists? De-
signer-drug-crazed criminals? Sweet hip-
pies? Hard to say. Similarly, the Sun Col-
lective itself comes across as fuzzy, or, as
Christina describes it: “kinda anarchic,
with some universal basic income prosely-
tizers and democratic socialists... urban
farmers, 12-step groupies, you know, activ-
ists for this and that.”
This and thatsounds about right. The
Sun Collective’s mysterious leader, Wye,
talks like a Buddhist with anger issues.
And is there a worse form to read than the
manifesto, that dull fusion of crazy and
vague? “Stop bad love,” this one insists.“Bomb this bad love and get right with
your hearts. Bomb the power. Bomb the
plate glass, bomb the store dummies,
bomb the consumers, bomb the bankers,
the businessmen, the hucksters, bomb the
oligarchs, the thieves. The mall is a dis-
ease.”
This is one of the dangers of writing fiction
that aims to capture the current moment.
The current moment is a slippery bugger,
not inclined to wait for publishing schedules.
After a summer of actualriots, of racial and
social unrest over the very real and non-
fuzzy, heart-rending issue of police violence
against Black Americans, the simmering re-
bellion of the Sun Collective feels like a half-
hearted thought experiment.
There is no shortage of action involving
the perpetually stoned Christina, the slip-
pery Ludlow and the other anarchists, and
Baxter delivers a satisfying resolution to the
story line of the Brettigans’ missing son, but
lingering questions about the effectiveness
and the ethics of such resistance — let alone
what they’re really up to — never go much
deeper than the manifesto.
Luckily, there are always Harold and
Alma to return to, and they anchor the
story because of Baxter’s generous eye
and keen observational humor. They are
charming and ingratiating, clearly in love
and genuinely baffled that they’re still to-
gether. “She bit into another small square
of roast and chewed thoughtfully. Because
it hurt him to watch her consuming so
much salt, he thought he probably still
loved her.”I’m not sure if their relationship really
does represent post-love, or exhausted
love or overwhelmed-by-the-state-of-the-
world love or just plain love, but their well-
meaning suburban angst is gently sati-
rized and perfectly drawn: “When she was
out running errands, Alma left the radio on
to deter break-ins. Burglars hated NPR,
she believed.”
Their observations about the modern
world sometimes have a Hey-you-kids-get-
off-my-lawn quality (“What is it with
young people and noise?”), but the novel
continually builds poignancy by revealing
that what Harold and Alma really long for
is themselvesat that age, when they had
the passion of those young people cavort-
ing across the park.
Harold keeps picturing his wife when
they met, “beautiful in every possible way... untouchable in her grace,” and at one
point Alma finds herself telling Christina
and Ludlow about another boy she once
liked, as if age has stripped away the need
to protect her husband from this story.
“ ‘You loved him, a little,’ Brettigan said,
once again finishing her sentence for her,
the words emerging like stones.
“ ‘I loved him a little,’ ” she admits.
The ability to decipher the enigmatic
motivations of these young ideologues is
just one more thing that old age is taking
from them, and it hurts as much as the rest
of it does. Harold tries desperately to con-
nect with his 1960s Vietnam-protesting
self, but it’s clear this is not his fight. He
and Alma are left only with confusion and
worry, and the kinds of quiet, late-night
conversations that might sound familiar to
many readers.
“Sometimes I can’t bear it,” Alma tells
Harold quietly at one point. “Any of it.”
“I know,” he replies. “But we have to.” 0
The Path of Most Resistance
A quasi-anarchist group is at the center of this novel about an aging couple’s search for their missing son.
By JESS WALTERTHE SUN COLLECTIVE
By Charles Baxter
314 pp. Pantheon Books. $27.95.
GABRIEL ALCALAThe parents’ real problem might not
be the times, but time itself and
their own mortality.JESS WALTER’Slatest novel is “The Cold Mil-
lions.”