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.

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.