I reviewed this novel for the Star Tribune when it first came out.. My review can be read at the link below.

Another good one from this esteemed author. Engaging plot and easy to read story line make for an enjoyable read.

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 and conflict-avoidance. A woozy and punch-drunk tone that I found bemused 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 Minneapolis-- most definitely not George Floyd's-- in which we are supposed to see our own mirrored. Beyond the eponymous loosely-organized political resistance movement that might be a mind-control cult or a terrorist cell or maybe both, 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.

This may be my favorite fiction book of the year. Charles Baxter is one of our great underrated authors. In The Sun Collective, he has written a novel that highlights the issues confronting us in the United States. Examining a family, a long term marriage and the social ills that are sickening our society he is able to weave together a tapestry that encompasses humor, wit and pathos. The characters are believable in their human portraits, showing their flaws and strengths as they live out their lives. This is a book not to be missed.

Like a skilled magician, Charles Baxter, author of The Soul Thief has written a supernatural thriller that messes with reality just enough to transport the reader into an ominous fog of "tomorrow-plus-today." It's a place sone characters visit that makes them unable to distinguish between what is in the present of the past. The challenge is to figure out what actions match what time. Mistakes can have horrible consequences. The Sun Collective, a cultist new age movement, has taken root in the modern-day city of Minneapolis. The evils of Capitalism have created an impoverished population for middle-class do-gooders to feel better about themselves. It’s a precarious social balance with tensions brimming below the surface.

Timothy, a young actor, psychologically fractured by the stress of his craft, disappears into the dark bowels of the city, looking for his "rock bottom" among the hungry, the homeless, the addicted. His father, Harold Brettigan, a practical retired engineer, paces the Utopian mall lost in time and space, afraid he may be a cold-blooded murderer. His mother, Alma, is a naive woman with telekinetic tendencies and a suggestible nature. Not a good combination. Both are desperate to find their son.
We meet Brettigan taking what seems to be a regular subway ride to the mall. But mysterious characters suddenly appear from the fog, leaving clues that will bring Brettigan and his wife closer to the Sun Collective's inner workings. Enter a peculiar man named Dr. Alver L. Jefferson, who just happens to be on the same train as Brettigan and announces he studies proton-analytics. What? In a bizarre exchange, he gives Brettigan instructions for conjuring a spell to improve his medical condition. That advice has paranormal consequences- which in the hands of any other writer would seem campy- a daring literary move.

In the mall, Brettigan finds a forbidden pamphlet on the ground called "The Survival Manifesto." The Sun Collective is actively recruiting members. He thinks nothing of it, shoves it into his pocket, and joins his friends on their weekly mall walk. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, his wife looking for answers is becoming deeply involved with the same underground group drawn to their mandates of love, charity, and peace. Is it possible someone has heard of or seen her son?

As the Collective grows with a sinister purpose, we meet a new recruit, a sexy, smart bank teller named Christina. She is a white-collar junkie addicted to a drug called Telephone that leaves her unable to distinguish between the past, present, and future. Unpredictable and conflicted, she lives in the world as a haphazard seer.

Christina meets an urban nomad named Ludlow, a wannabe anarchist teetering on the edge of "what can be” and lost in a system that has dismissed his values as worthless because they have no economic value. He is dangerous and delusional, but he’s got a point. Something’s gotta give.

As tensions rise, the couple finds themselves at a dinner party at Brettigan’s home. Author Charles Baxter ( a master of conversation between couples) brilliantly juggles all four characters as they discuss their political and personal relationships and their commitment to the Sun Collective. No one is on the same page. Timothy is still missing. Timelines diverge.

When the government fully commits to blend the immoral aspects of Capitalism with dictatorship rule, the characters are forced (along with the reader) to look inward and ask themselves; How long do I wait till I act? What action do I take?

There is an eerie sense of urgency to this novel. It’s timely and suspends us in "tomorrow-plus-today." But questions remain. Where is Timothy? And what is the Sun Collective hiding?
I highly recommend it. Read.

There were a few times when I thought "The Sun Collective" would pull me in, but ultimately, it never did and I did not finish it. There's a point where characters think they can understand what cats and dogs are thinking, but they're not thinking anything very interesting.

I've loved a few of Charles Baxter's novels --"The Feast of Love" and "Saul and Patsy" particularly, but for all it's promising premise, the "Sun Collective" does not fit in that category.