FEAST OF LOVE
by Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter's FEAST OF LOVE is not the Decameron you'd expect from the title-- it's more like a delicious snack of love.  Baxter does something here that's really more of a themed collection of short stories than a novel, although it does have an overarching structure.  The subject in question is love-- in several varieties, although primarily erotic heterosexual love.

Much better than Foer's comic-Russian tour guide POV is Baxter's punk chick Chloe, whose neologisms and tortured thought processes are funny yet sympathetic.

Baxter shifts POV throughout the book and does an unusually good job of keeping the characters' voices distinct.  He examines different styles of loving, but focuses on the ways in which love fails, which is, after all, the most interesting part.

Perhaps the best thing about FEAST OF LOVE is the fresh eye it casts upon contemporary life-- the most tedious aspects thereof, from shopping malls to fast food to traffic jams become curious, intriguing and strange when passed through Baxter's lens.

 --C. B. Coble