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Saul Bernstein has become a high school teacher because he feels a need "to contribute to what he called 'the great project of undoing the dumbness that's been done.'" He and his wife Patsy live in small-town Michigan, where their "love for each other had created a magic circle around themselves that outsiders could not penetrate. No one who had ever met them knew what made the two of them tick; the whole arrangement looked mildly fraudulent." There's a glitch in this idyll, though. One of Saul's students, a mildly retarded boy named Gordy, takes to haunting their house, maybe with malicious intent, maybe not. Gordy hangs around, Saul and Patsy have a baby, and then finally a crisis provokes Saul to decide what kind of man he'd like to be. The novel is, in the end, a portrait not of a marriage, but of an ambivalent, evasive, very funny man. Along the way, we get to know Saul's fed-up wife, his fraudulent brother, and his libidinous mother, who makes this observation of Saul: "As a father, he exhibited great tenderness, which had a touch of vanity in it." It's a classic Baxter aside, at first mildly funny, then barbed with the truth. --Claire Dederer
Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the story collections Gryphon, Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. The stories “Bravery” and “Charity,” which appear in There’s Something I Want You to Do, were included in Best American Short Stories. Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780375709166
Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune), Saul and Patsy is "stunning, never predictable, glimmering fiction, full of mischief and insight" (The Los Angeles Times).Five Oaks, Michigan is not exactly where Saul and Patsy meant to end up. Both from the East Coast, they met in college, fell in love, and settled down to married life in the Midwest. Saul is Jewish and a compulsively inventive worrier; Patsy is gentile and cheerfully pragmatic. On Sauls initiative (and to his continual dismay) they have moved to this small towna place so devoid of irony as to be virtually a museum of earlier American feelingswhere he has taken a job teaching high school. Soon this brainy and guiltily happy couple will find children have become a part of their lives, first their own baby daughter and then an unloved, unlovable boy named Gordy Himmelman. It is Gordy who will throw Saul and Patsys lives into disarray with an inscrutable act of violence. As timely as a news flash yet informed by an immemorial understanding of human character, Saul and Patsy is a genuine miracle. Five Oaks, Michigan is not exactly where Saul and Patsy meant to end up. Both from the East Coast, they met in college, fell in love, and settled down to married life in the Midwest. Saul is Jewish and a compulsively inventive worrier; Patsy is gentile and cheerfully pragmatic. On Saul's initiative (and to his continual dismay) they have moved to this small town-a place so devoid of irony as to be virtually "a museum of earlier American feelings"-where he has taken a job teaching high school. Soon this brainy and guiltily happy couple will find children have become a part of their lives, first their own baby daughter and then an unloved, unlovable boy named Gordy Himmelman. It is Gordy who will throw Saul and Patsy's lives into disarray with an inscrutable act of violence. As timely as a news flash yet informed by an immemorial understanding of human character, Saul and Patsy is a genuine miracle. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780375709166
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Brand New! This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # 0375709169
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. reprint edition. 317 pages. 8.00x5.25x0.75 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # x-0375709169
Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition 0.57. Seller Inventory # bk0375709169xvz189zvxnew
Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. This item is printed on demand. New copy - Usually dispatched within 5-9 working days. Seller Inventory # C9780375709166
Book Description Condition: New. Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the story collections Gryphon, Believers, A Relati. Seller Inventory # 897911320
Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.57. Seller Inventory # Q-0375709169