THE SUN COLLECTIVE

In his sixth novel, Baxter looks into the timely question of how we might help ourselves and others in need.

As the book opens, Harold Brettigan, a retired bridge designer, boards a light-rail train to the Utopia Mall in Minneapolis, where he regularly exercises with a group of walkers. He is “shadowed” onto the train by a young couple, who sit across from him but keep to themselves, and he meets a man in a trilby who recommends a healing ritual involving a hand mirror. Harold’s wife, Alma, begins talking to their cat and dog after she has a small stroke. Their son, Timothy, is missing, maybe living on the city’s streets. The young couple on the train are Ludlow, who belongs to a local activist group called the Sun Collective, and Christina, who often takes a hallucinogenic called Blue Telephone. Some time later, Alma also meets the man in the trilby, who recommends a wish-fulfilling ritual involving two of her eyelashes. The Brettigans and the young couple are drawn together by accident and then by possible links to Timothy. It’s an uneasy relationship, which Baxter signals by using the word “shadowed” during that first encounter on the train. The prose throughout is graceful, the writing perceptive, resonant, and deeply sympathetic. With his small cast, Baxter explores gurus and charlatans and other responses to hunger, homelessness, destitution, and simpler woes. Skepticism vies with hope, fanaticism with fantasy. A Trump-like President Thorkelson and his Cabinet embrace the ideas of an Ayn Rand–like writer for whom “charity was a sin...because it encouraged losers.” A group of rich young fellows called the Sandmen are rumored to be killing homeless people. The Sun Collective provides clothes, food, and shelter, but it may be fueling terrorism. There are no easy answers, but there’s promise, even respite in the quasi-magical, the nearly miraculous.

An exceptional work.