The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

From the National Book Award finalist and "one of our most gifted writers" ( Chicago Tribune )--a timely and unsettling novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears

Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places--churches, storefronts, benches--and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader who will alter all of their lives. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who's convinced he may start a revolution. As the lives of these four characters intertwine, a story of guilt, anxiety, and feverish hope unfolds in the city of Minneapolis.
A vision of modern American society and the specters of the consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and the violence that punctuate our daily lives.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Audiobook, Contemporary, Magical Realism, Unfinished

322 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17, 2020

About the author

Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Baxter is the author of 4 novels, 4 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction and is the editor of other works. His works of fiction include Believers , The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), Saul and Patsy , and Through the Safety Net . He lives in Minneapolis.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 2 out of 5]

My Pillow Guy Dreams

If you’ve won a first-prize trip to Minneapolis (second-prize was, of course, two weeks in Minneapolis, replacing Philadelphia entirely as a holiday destination), this may be the book for you. Yes, folks, that land of arctic winters, mosquito-infested lakes and tick-strewn meadows has much more to offer within the city limits of that gem of the mid-West.

There’s the Martin Olav Sabo Pedestrian Bridge over Hiawatha Avenue (if it hasn’t popped it’s moorings again, but you can’t beat that for excitement); the Mall of America (8 million square feet of tribute to American consumerism; don’t be confused by the designation as ‘Utopia’ in the book which is merely aspirational); and the Minnehaha Falls (a sort of state-run theme park which has absolutely nothing to do with the Longfellow poem). These and many more tourist highlights form the heart of The Sun Collective.

But enough praise. The prose is ponderous. Plot is elusive. The pace is tedious. The magical realism is Disney not Isabel Allende. And the characters (who come and go largely without explanation) are all but invisible behind a mist of backstory and political commentary. Perhaps this is the form that Minnesotan literary satire takes given that the My Pillow Guy and Jesse Ventura set a certain level of expectation. If so, it’s a genre I can do without.

[Ari Levine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A giant swing and a miss at writing a novelistic first draft of the contemporary American berserk. A toothless social satire almost entirely without wit or even irony, muffled by Upper Midwestern niceness, guilelessness, and conflict-avoidance. A woozy and punch-drunk tone that I found bemusing and baffling rather than emotionally or intellectually engaging. A political novel loaded with characters' radical screeds and liberal soliloquies on/against neoliberalism, digital surveillance, and consumerism, and the slippery slope towards fascism, but whose own politics, either oblique or just obtuse, are impossible to pin down. Not a lengthy novel, but the narrative flows haltingly, like ketchup (that most American of condiments) caught in a bottleneck.

Through the inner monologues an old married upper-middle class liberal white couple in their early seventies and a younger set of 20-something hipsters, Baxter is at his best when he describes the micro-dynamics of long-term cohabitation. But this seems to be more about the fragmentation of a shared American reality into two mutually-unintelligible languages of delusion and fantasy: collectivist eco-utopianism and xenophobic fascism, even though Baxter explores the former and indirectly illustrates the latter.

The novel is set in a magic-realist (or slightly askew alternate-universe) version of lily-white Minneapolis-- most definitely not George Floyd's-- in which we are supposed to see our own world mirrored. Beyond the eponymous loosely-organized political resistance movement that might be gentle organic gardeners or a mind-control cult or a terrorist cell or maybe all three, Baxter invents a designer drug that induces quantum uncertainty, a talking dog and cat with names cribbed from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, right-wing death squads called Sandmen targeting the homeless, and a Trumpian president named Thorkelsen who might be even more moronically appalling as the real one.

But as I struggled to finish this, I kept thinking that Jonathan Franzen would have done this sort of thing with more brutal honesty and directness.

Thanks to Knopf Doubleday and Netgalley for providing an ARC in return for an honest review.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Charles Baxter, and the fact that this dream-like satire was set in the town I've lived in for over 40 years just added to its pleasure. A number of Goodreads readers objected to this book on the grounds that it wasn't realistic and didn't really provide answers to the challenges and societal problems it repeatedly brought up. But I found the satire gentle (something both satirical and open-minded is very hard to pull off) and the style such that you knew from the outset that practical solutions would not be given. Several characters are very mysterious, prophetic, angelic or demonic, appearing and disappearing at will. Or possibly they're just eccentric people whose comings and goings the main characters didn't sufficiently attend to. Here's a short example of the tone--a wedding taking place at the Conservatory in St. Paul:
The bride wore white, a gown resembling the snow falling onto the glass above them, and the handsome groom, wearing a dark blue tuxedo, red cummerbund, and tennis shoes, was now stumbling through his homemade improvised vows as he held the bride's hands in his. "Edie, I promise you that I'll always for sure be there for you, in like sickness, and, um, health also," he said in a nervous monotone, staring into her eyes. "Because I love you and the love we have for each other is, like, cement."
I laughed out loud at that one; but the importance of love is affirmed over and over, near the end (with an air of finality) by a telepathic dog who conveys to its worried mistress, "Loyalty and love. What else is there?"

[Trin · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are some beautiful observational sentences, but no one in this book thinks -- or speaks -- like a normal human being. This is a new-to-me but respected author, yet I found the dialogue bafflingly bad. And the political commentary -- the vaguely Trumpish president, the Ayn Rand analogue, etc. -- struck me as thin and almost juvenile. Not for me, I guess.

[Kathie Giorgio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, first I want to say that I love Charles Baxter. I have loved all of his books, and Feast of Love is in particular my favorite. When I saw there was a new book out, I was thrilled and bought it immediately.
I hate to say I'm disappointed. But I am. The book is a mishmosh of confusion. There's never a clear storyline, there's never a plot, there's not a resolution. I noticed in the acknowledgments that Baxter mentions all of these books by other authors that he "alluded to" in this one. And I wonder if that was the problem. He was so busy incorporating, mixing, "alluding" to other stories, he forgot to tell his own.
So this is the problem. I finished the book. I closed it. And I realized I had absolutely no idea what this book was about. If someone asked me, I wouldn't be able to describe it. This is a collection of words made into sentences that, put together, should tell a story. But they don't.

I'm so disappointed. I'm going to reread Feast Of Love again, just because.

[Susan Tunis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just dashed off half a dozen book reviews, knowing exactly how I felt about each book. This latest from Charles Baxter is a little tougher. Anyone who's read his acclaimed novel A Feast of Love knows he's got the literary chops.

This novel looks at a family, a community, and a nation in... Disarray? Distress? Disaster? The family is now just the parents, older, retired. Their only child, once a successful actor, has disappeared. (Another "dis-" word!) And he appears to have disappeared voluntarily. While they keep their eyes peeled for him, they encounter some other young people that exist at some point in a Venn diagram of activists, cultists, and vagrants. Most of the characters in this book are searchers of one thing or another, and the methodologies they employ have varying degrees of distruction. Of themselves, of others. For sure there is interesting commentary about the state of the world going on, but in the end, I'm not really sure what was said.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not going to finish this novel. I still think highly of Charles Baxter (especially for First Light, Shadow Play, and Burning Down the House), but reading this made me feel uncomfortable. I am acquainted with some of the un-housed people in my neighborhood, and Baxter's portrayals didn't read right (accurate) for me.

[Karl Oestreich · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book for the times

This is such a surprising, delightful and disturbing tale. Lots of similarities to current times. Keeps your interest from beginning to end.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Odd.

[Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I really really enjoyed this book, even though it unnerved me a lot, I think mostly because it was set in Minneapolis and therefore felt more realistic. There was this deep sense of unease because you could tell that the political climate and the atrocities happening in the world were different from ours and a lot worse and also a bit of magical realism (one of the quotes on the back said Baxter is the American Murakami).

[Emma Strawbridge · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book sucks it’s not making any point at all. the only redeeming factor is that christina drives a saab. magical realism just totally doesn’t fit with anything. adding also that the way they talk about homeless people is just a little bit strange

[Kelly Sokol]

killed my love for reading.

[Kiara · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf at 42% - i genuinely tried to finish this book but it is straight up just pretentious, upper-middle class, wannabe liberal, white feminist bullshit

[Linden · Rating 4 out of 5]

The characters all have a connection to the Sun Collective, an activist organization involved in community improvement. Or possibly a terrorist organization. The setting is Minneapolis with lots recognizable landmarks, which made it more enjoyable for me.

[Andrea · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's no doubt that there was some fantastic writing included in this book, however as the story began to progress I grew less and less impressed with the style and overall monologue. The characters in the book were (and I am saying this nicely) irritating to say the least. The dialogue between the characters and the naïve ideology of the "Sun Collective" was completely unbelievable. I understood the connection between current events and the dangerous implications of being passive bystanders in this upside-down world, but let's be real, no start-up community founded by a complete whack job filled with absolutely idealistic followers (so idealistic as to lose their sane thinking) is ever going to benefit real change in these times. Perhaps I am being too pessimistic about the turnout, but I have experienced these grassroots efforts for myself and lived in parts of the world where these revolutionary stances are powerful amongst the community, at times I have even been a part of them, and there is absolutely no way that what is depicted in the book is even remotely possible. At times, laughable. I won't give it away, but just wait until you see what happens towards the end of the novel with Christina. That's when the book was really done for me. I just laughed at the complete lunacy of the whole thing.

[Kim McGee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stunning collection of average people living in Minneapolis tied together by a slender thread - their connection to a group of passive activists calling themselves "The Sun Collective". They take in everyone - the lost, homeless, bored and curious with their goal of making the world a utopia. Brettigan and his wife are among the lost searching for more meaning in their golden years and the son who disappeared from their lives seemingly overnight. Both feel he is close by and conduct a daily search even if they aren't aware they are doing it but they are coming up empty. Alma has a medical event and when she starts getting advice from their cat and dog as well as getting more cozy with the collective, Brettigan starts to worry. The young couple from the collective seem harmless but much is unknown about Ludlow, a homeless illegal house sitter and his new girlfriend, Christina who is a drug addled bank teller. As all their lives become more intertwined more speculation is made about the members of the Sun Collective and their true intent. Told with snippets of dry Minnesotan humor, THE SUN COLLECTIVE is an interesting look at being lost and found. My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.

[Noah Sanders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I’ll just put it out there: I didn’t get Charles Baxter’s new book The Sun Collective. Baxter is a bit of a literary legend and though I love his debut novel from 30 years ago - First Light - it’s been a while (since he wrote it and I read it) and I didn’t really know what to expect. The Sun Collective is a scattered story of an older couple, their missing son, a cultish group of benevolent anarchists, another younger couple and how they sort of all touch upon each other. But, yeah, it never really came together for me. There’s ideas and ideas and ideas to riffle through but I never figured out what any of it meant or where the book was dragging them to. Baxter’s a talented writer so it’s not a hard book to get through, it just never sunk in.

[BooksRgood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I plowed thru this quickly and enjoyed this novel- the Minneapolis setting, the relationship of the long married couple at the center of the story; the thinly veiled caricature of a Trump-like-President, the humour and the wonder and the general sensibility about things wrong that the Sun Collective would like to change... worth my time but overall just OK. Not like what I recall from Baxter's award winning Feast of Love...

A few passages that got me good:

"The book, with it’s fables and aphorisms, had his number and was selling for $24.95. He had checked the price. Somebody had stolen his dreams and had put them into this book. The unconscious never takes a vacation. And capitalism sniffs out your secrets. It knows all of them by now and has lists with your name on them matched to a facial recognition file.
Whenever you go online, the Big Computer knows what you want before you want it. It’s ready for you and waits patiently, humming. It knows where you will be tomorrow and what you’ll be doing and it carefully calibrates the shame you carry with you in hopes that you will buy some thing to restore your peace of mind."

"Young people were beginning to look generic to him. What individuality they had didn’t matter anymore."

"Yoga studios always had this apparitional sexiness, this heat; you could feel it. On either side of Christina and in front of her were the solid-citizen-in-tights brigade, the svelte young women who looked as if they could command the world with their power and strength and suppleness and beauty, and then there were the guys, always in the minority, typically rather wiry and stubble bearded and New Agey and lacking authority, but given to the occasional sidelong wolfish predatory glance, especially when upside down."

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think The Sun Collective is one of the most unique and offbeat novels that I've ever read. That said, there's stuff here that works, the domestic scenes with an eerie Shirley Jackson intensity, and stuff that doesn't, the major events that happen offscreen and are dryly summarized (especially in the final stretch).

Characters are prisms that shift when Baxter changes perspectives, which is intriguing and mostly works. Unfortunately, the character of Christina just never came into focus for me, which is a problem. The Sun Collective, a decentralized sinister(?) cult(?), is called a McGuffin by one of the characters, but it's Christina who is only a tool of the plot with no real center of her own.

Strongly disagree with reviewers here who found it too pretentious/not pretentious enough, but that's the danger of truly unusual art that doesn't fit in the usual boxes. Definitely an odd duck of a book, though.

I will read more by Baxter.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I haven’t abandoned a book since senior year but sometimes ya gotta do it. it was hard to connect to the characters for me (seemed very surface level) and it was taking a long time to get to the point so it nearly bored me to tears when I picked it up. I gave it 2 stars bc I really liked the cover and I appreciated the descriptiveness of the setting and *sometimes* emotions, but that’s really it 🤷‍♀️

[Todd Hogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book encourages a re-examination the idea of a normal society. Set in Minneapolis, it follows a single small family as they deal with an inconstant life. The patriarch, Harry Brettigan, and his wife Alma have raised successful daughter, Virginia, who has moved to the South with her own husband and children. She calls her parents occasionally. Tim Brettigan is a son who was a promising actor until he disappeared; only occasional sightings convince Brettigan and Alma that he is safe and healthy. So, we have a fragmented family introduced in the first act. Alma and Brettigan have been together since college, and one nice part of the book is the description of memories that they have of their romance over the years. Lately, the romance may be missing, but is that age or circumstance?

Alma and Brettigan stumble upon an amorphous community action group named the Sun Collective. The group's goals are unclear despite a published manifesto. They help the homeless and those in need, while there is also a suggestion that the group plans a domestic terror action. A character named Christina, an addict of the schizophrenic drug "Blue Telephone," is attracted to one of its members, Ludwig, a mysterious man who shares her bed but not his thoughts. Christina works at a bank, but supports an overthrow of the system in a kindly manner. She accepts Capitalism, but wants a change. She falls in love with Tim Brettigan, whom the Sun Collective saves from his loss of identity (he got too deeply into his acting roles.)

Alma and Brettigan have health issues, normal for older couples. She may have had a stroke and converses with their pet cat and dog. Brettigan has heart issues. His overweight doctor, with whom Brettigan powerwalks at the mall on a weekly basis, suggests he not overtax himself. His advice to Brettigan and people his age is to "Lie in the sun and accept the applause," a curious prescription for anyone not yet giving up on life.

The last act of the novel explores the end of life. Brettigan notes that Goya's painting "Self-portrait with Dr. Arrietta" on display at the Minneapolis Art Museum is the most valuable thing in the city. The subject is an ailing Goya being treated by his physician while three indistinct figures observe from the shadows. It foreshadows the death of a couple of characters and a sacrifice made by another. The novel concludes but the story is not ended. Life will continue in unpredictable ways.

Because I'm an older reviewer, I identified more with the older couple than the younger ones. In some ways, their love affair mirrored what my wife and I have experienced during our lives. Like Alma and Brettigan, we've never been divorced, spending our entire lives together. The portrayal of the younger couples shows that our kind of relationship is very unusual. In the same way, the life we lived will be unusual to our children and grandchildren. Things we took for granted about the American way of life are changing. No one knows what will replace them.

Just like the Sun Collective group, the values that shape American life are little understood or controlled. This novel helps the reader explore these changes.

[Bronwyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m somewhat bewildered by this book. There was an awful lot stuffed into a small container, and none of it felt fleshed out. A mild domestic drama? A lightly ironic take on our current unreal circumstances? A gentle reproach against liberal fecklessness? A hallucinatory dream from an afternoon cat nap? What even was this?

Still, it held my interest, and I never knew where it was going (in a mostly good way). I dunno. Huh.

[Cara Forgione · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn’t put it down. To be in the heads of the characters in this all-too-real dystopian setting was fascinating and eerie. I will read more works by this author.

[BookTrib.com]

For those who enjoy thrillers, action and mystery with a healthy dose of political tension that incorporates dystopian and supernatural elements, THE SUN COLLECTIVE is a must-read ... highly recommended.

Read our full review here:
https://booktrib.com/2020/11/17/brimm...

[April Bank · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t get it, I guess. Or maybe I just didn’t like it? All of the characters are nuts.

[John Vanderslice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very engaging book, one of Baxter's best novels. Now that he is getting older, it's no surprise that he explores the life and marriage of a retired couple (along with a lot else). There are some quintessential Baxter moves and characters here, but they all seem fresh to me.

[Nell]

ive been a fan of charles baxter for the long haul. i think he can write things about whats its like between two people that are true but not known until he gets it down on paper for us. this book made no sense. at the end of a career, there are no more editors? moments of little small good things, otherwise utterly chaotic and inchoate

[Bmb · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book creates a ragged sense disturbance as it shifts between scenes of geriatric exercise and deranged, seemingly violent anarchists. The plot unspools very much like a dream, with extended detours into the addled interiors of main characters that are followed by swift and unexpected resolution of plot points. The descriptions of Minneapolis are precise and carefully observed, yet the more ominous elements of the plot are deliberately left out of focus. The portrayal of the brittle marriage of the aged couple at the center of the story (for whatever reason) is more harrowing than any of the book’s many hints at political unrest or impending attack. Overall, a unique and unsettling story that I suggest my niece read if she feels nostalgic for descriptions of her former college town.

[John Kelleher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully written and deeply affecting.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the reign of President Thorkelson, a banal, brutish leader who takes to writing his own once-a-month-poem and reads it on national television, and embraces the ideas of an Ayn-Rand type writer who counsels that charity is a sin because it encourages losers, there live the Brettigans, Harold, a retired bridge designer, his wife Alma, their cat Behemoth, and dog Woland. They have a married daughter outside Ashville, NC. They have or had their son, Tim, a handsome actor, who has gone missing from their lives but has been seen back in Minneapolis, and their search for him leads them to the Sun Collective, a group of activist do-gooders, building community gardens, clothing, feeding and sheltering the poor, etc. There is also Christina, addicted to Blue Telephone, a hallucinogenic that allows one to live in multiple dimensions simultaneously, who long purposeless, thinks she might have found her purpose with the Sun Collective, and with one of its members, Ludlow. Rumors about the shadowy Sandmen abound, rich young men who ostensibly are driving around Minneapolis in their SUVs hurting, then killing, the homeless. Various wealthy citizens meet their deaths in what could be or could not be terrible accidents. A novel grappling with the constant state of worry and agitation of the present times, questions about how best to help the poor, the hungry, the downtrodden, the discriminated, in what most would perceive as the tame Midwest. Written before our recent actual season of social and racial unrest and protests against police violence, the Sun Collective's mission seems more than just fuzzy but also quaintly antiquated. But that doesn't deter the pleasure in reading this novel. Baxter explores, with a small cast of characters, long-time marriage, the worry that attends even middle-class privilege, the skepticism and the fleeting hopes about how to bring an end to the suffering of so many, the gurus and charlatans, how even those trying to do good often discover its ultimate futility.