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Saul and Patsy: A Novel | 
| Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 809391
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0375410295
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375410291
ASIN: 0375410295
Publication Date: September 9, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Poor Charles Baxter, doomed to be forever thought of as a writer's writer. The languidly plotted Saul and Patsy hardly promises to be his long-awaited breakout novel. It's just too quiet. But for those of us who fervently admire Baxter's prose, that's a selling point. In this tale of a Midwestern marriage, there's lots of time and space for the author to show off his incisive style, studded with the kind of subtle observations that make you stop, laugh, and then feel oddly lanced somewhere in the neighborhood of the soul. Saul Bernstein has become a high school teacher because he feels a need "to contribute to what he called 'the great project of undoing the dumbness that's been done.'" He and his wife Patsy live in small-town Michigan, where their "love for each other had created a magic circle around themselves that outsiders could not penetrate. No one who had ever met them knew what made the two of them tick; the whole arrangement looked mildly fraudulent." There's a glitch in this idyll, though. One of Saul's students, a mildly retarded boy named Gordy, takes to haunting their house, maybe with malicious intent, maybe not. Gordy hangs around, Saul and Patsy have a baby, and then finally a crisis provokes Saul to decide what kind of man he'd like to be. The novel is, in the end, a portrait not of a marriage, but of an ambivalent, evasive, very funny man. Along the way, we get to know Saul's fed-up wife, his fraudulent brother, and his libidinous mother, who makes this observation of Saul: "As a father, he exhibited great tenderness, which had a touch of vanity in it." It's a classic Baxter aside, at first mildly funny, then barbed with the truth. --Claire Dederer
Product Description
Five Oaks, Michigan is not exactly where Saul and Patsy meant to end up. Both from the East Coast, they met in college, fell in love, and settled down to married life in the Midwest. Saul is Jewish and a compulsively inventive worrier; Patsy is gentile and cheerfully pragmatic. On Saul’s initiative (and to his continual dismay) they have moved to this small town–a place so devoid of irony as to be virtually “a museum of earlier American feelings”–where he has taken a job teaching high school.
Soon this brainy and guiltily happy couple will find children have become a part of their lives, first their own baby daughter and then an unloved, unlovable boy named Gordy Himmelman. It is Gordy who will throw Saul and Patsy’s lives into disarray with an inscrutable act of violence. As timely as a news flash yet informed by an immemorial understanding of human character, Saul and Patsy is a genuine miracle.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Is This The Same Charles Baxter? August 3, 2007
Okay potential reader looking at this review...please don't take my word for it. Read this book yourself and come back and let me know how you found it. People seem to dislike any negative reviews on this web-site. But isn't that the whole point of reviewing books...to share what your own perception of it was? Then you can look at what I like and say 'Hey I loved that too... maybe I'd like some of these other books that she liked as well'...? Right?
I'm not you, I'm me and this is what I thought of this book. It's my opinion, my perception, my feelings about it. It's certainly not the gospel truth. It makes me think about when I was back in high school and I would ask my best friends Lenore and Annie what their opinion was about my shoes...did they go with the outfit or not? (Very serious stuff back in the big 80s) And when they said they didn't like the shoes I often wore them anyway...because I liked them so much that it didn't matter what other people thought about them. I just had to test the theory, that's why I asked them what they thought. So it is the same with books. Just because I don't care for a particular book doesn't mean that you won't love it anyway.
To me a great book is like a marriage. That same wonderfully perfect and adored book can be someone else's dud. Part of what makes that book wonderful is what the reader brings to it, who you are is some of what makes you love that book, it speaks to you (and sometimes not to me).
So, I think you can see from my stars, just one, where I am going with this. I really did not like this book.
I found it hard to believe that this Charles Baxter was the same Charles Baxter who wrote The Feast of Love.
I saw that Saul and Patsy was originally two short stories and that's exactly how it felt. It felt like many different short stories that seemed very disjointed. The whole book seemed to have a stumbling rhythm, it wasn't smooth or fluid.
I didn't like these characters and I just didn't get them. I didn't get Saul's feelings, at all.
There were things that I didn't find believable and there was writing that I thought was just plain weird. I don't like to give away details when I review books so let me just offer these innocuous examples;
"He didn't like to fly because airport terminals and their long receding concourses reminded him of giant vacuum-cleaner hoses sucking him and everyone else into nullity."
"They always reminded Patsy of two healthy animals who had mated almost without thinking. Their stories were always stories about the body; they never got past it."
Maybe you will read these same words and find them funny. Maybe you will bring something to this book that makes it your favorite and most loved of all time.
As for me I was disappointed and glad for it to be over when it was.
 Very relatable, but Feast of Love was better March 25, 2007
The best part of this novel was how accurately it captured early married life and having children. It conveyed a sense that Saul was just being buoyed by the current of his life, and not entirely sure where it was taking him or that he would end up happy. The only thing he seemed sure of was his love for his wife, which never seemed to waver despite his uncertainty about everything else in his life. I just thought it was very poignant, and there are lines from this novel that I still offer up to others because they encapsulate certain feelings so perfectly.
 I almost hate myself for this review March 4, 2007
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
I have no doubt that Charles Baxter will be noted as one of our most thoughtful and philosophic American writers of this time period. He has moved impressively from short story collections (my experience with his work started with _A Relative Stranger_) to a full-blown novelist. Even from his first novel, _First Light_, Baxter has shown a great mixture of a kind of old-school character depth, with high school teachers able to discuss railroad companies and quote classics in normal conversation, mixed in with a clearly modern sense of the world. His characters remind me somewhat of people who occupy Tony Hoagland poems--people who seem to be stuck in a netherworld of intelligentsia and down-home simplicity. _The Feast of Love_ was a good choice as a finalist for an NBA--perhaps it should have won, but I haven't yet read the competition and winner.
But this novel doesn't ring out like other works, and it seems to spend too long mulling about with little engagement. I almost regret saying these things, and almost feel that I need to rethink my priorities, that maybe I've become a jaded or oversimplified reader, for I very nearly put down this book after about forty pages because I was feeling that Baxter was a little more invested in the young couple that is the primary focus of this book than he was able to convey to me.
To tell the truth, the only thing that really brought me back to this book to gut it out and read through the rest is that the back cover promised some violence, something I would not have predicted from my initial experience in the reading.
Now I really feel ashamed. Baxter is such a wonderful writer, who is able to take the oft-used gimmick of quirkiness and use it to his advantage. Usually, his characters engage me me solely for their oddities that bring out their humanity rather than display their eccentricities. But even with the promised violence of this book, I remained unengaged to the end.
I think Baxter is a wonderful writer. Really. And it is the truly fantastic writer who gets the job done, who finishes a work even though lightning hasn't struck yet and do his job and get his efforts out there into the world.
But unfortunately, this one just wasn't one of his best efforts. But I shouldn't be the one to talk--after all, HE is the one who later put out _The Feast of Love_ and very nearly got one of the big prizes, and I just sit here typing this review.
Great first half July 18, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
"Saul and Patsy" starts off very well. Saul and Patsy are both interesting, flawed characters, and their interactions with Saul's intimidating student, who stands outside their house for hours on end, grab your attention. But about halfway through the story, the novel completely loses its steam.
Some of the novel was adapted from short stories about Saul and Patsy, and I think the novel would be more interesting if Baxter had just collected the stories and added a few more. The old Saul and Patsy stories are basically the best parts of the book. For example, Saul and Patsy's car accident and Saul's resulting obsession with an ex-student, of whom Saul becomes jealous. Great story about a flawed teacher not being the role model he thought and envying his student's contentment with life. Great character, great voice, and great internal conflict.
The plot of the novel falls apart shortly after the "act of violence." New, faceless characters are introduced whose only purpose is to give the reader information that I'm not even sure we need. A one-dimensional teenage girl is introduced more than halfway through the book (the first half is told completely by Saul and Patsy) and contributes nothing except meaningless actions and unbelievable teenage sentiment. She's completely useless. I can't believe that people would react this way to the "act of violence" mentioned in the book description. The town's reaction makes the whole story completely unbelievable.
I'd recommend purchasing Baxter's short story collections, like "A Relative Stranger," and sticking to the Saul and Patsy stories contained therein. You'll get the best slices of this novel, as well as some classic Baxter stories like "A Relative Stranger," about a jerk of a man who meets his long lost adopted brother and doesn't quite know how to react, and "Fenstad's Mother," about a conservative night school teacher who's embarassed by his mother's liberal points of view. Baxter works much better with short fiction.
 Charles Baxter: upinmichigan.org review April 2, 2006
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Charles Baxter, Saul and Patsy
reviewed by Cynthia Brandon
With such relatable characters, genuine introspections, and vivid prose, the only thing left to do after putting Baxter's book down, is to thank those who fought for its reincarnation. What is true fiction? Is there such a thing? How can there be when the definition of fiction is something that has been invented, something artificial? In Saul and Patsy, Charles Baxter manages to portray a couple-and a community-that is more real than many discussed in newspapers. Despite its fictitious birth, Saul and Patsy grew into fact because it is able to generate concrete thoughts, uncertainties, and reactions-those that many people would be uncomfortable to reveal. Wrapped up in this fascinating tale of a developing marriage, are convincing events and characters that introduce challenging ideas of guilt, jealousy, and self-worth.
The plot consists of a married man, who despite his mother's strong advice against doing so, moves him and his wife to a small Michigan town-a town that his opinionated and materialistic mother vows will only waste his potential. While unconventional, the blissful couple discovers a form of living where their college degrees are used only to acquire inferior employment. Saul obtains an unfulfilling teaching job, while his pleasant wife, Patsy, easily adjusts and takes on employment at a local bank. For this ostensibly perfect couple, the adjustments they are forced to make prove to be quite interesting. Despite their isolation from city life, and most family, they experience multiple complex incidents which lead to dramatic shifts in their initially faultless relationship.
When Saul and Patsy's tale was first composed, two decades ago, their story ended in death. With twenty years passed, Baxter had realized there was much more of this fascinating pair to be disclosed. Baxter remembers one reader's reaction to their deaths, "Several readers protested; one did so in public, physically grabbing my lapel." Thus, obeying the demands of his readers, Baxter gave his characters life again. In the second attempt at this story, instead of dying in a car crash, Saul and Patsy survived it-something that sat well with many of Baxter's fans. With such relatable characters, interesting introspections, and descriptive writing, the only thing left to do after putting the book down, is to thank those who fought for its reincarnation.
After reading his novel, it was apparent how he had accumulated so many admirers. Identifying with his characters, however strange they may be requires no effort. Without overstating them, Baxter includes concrete examples of realistic feelings. We are able to perceive the character's feelings without being told of them. Jealousy is a great example. When Saul finds himself constantly returning to a new couple's home, it is clear he is envious of their genuine relationship. Later we read "I was always as real as they were, Saul thought. I always was." Baxter confirms our observations with sentences such as this. In this case, implications made are far more powerful than any forthright statement could be.
Along with perfectly capturing his character's feelings, Baxter challenges thoughts of the vast differences between rural and city life. Being from the country, it is easy to empathize with the opinions he displays, but his feelings are so well explained, it seems the absurdities of city life could be made logical to anyone. His combination of comedy and truth create realities understandable to all.
They wore their success on their huge muscular sheet-metal fenders. Darwinian, emotionally Republican even if they were registered Democrats, they had acquired German sedans or American SUV's that looks like staff cars for Rommel, or they had huge spotless V-8 pickup trucks with nothing, ever, in the cargo bed-that would spoil the effect, like a suntan that ended at the shirt collar-and most of them drove with one hand, the other hand on their cell phones relaying news to the home front on how the battle was going.
Here laughing at the image created is unpreventable, but we also grimace at his sadly accurate portrayal of human life. Comments and visuals like this trouble the reader, making it appear as if Baxter has acquired these accurate opinions straight from their own thoughts.
Honesty, a major product of this novel, is one of the main elements that give it purpose. Even when marriage is discussed, there are comments made that most people would never admit: "His joy was manufactured for her benefit--she could instantly tell-but manufactured joy was better than none at all, and she admired his efforts to be glad on her behalf." When Baxter's characters or his own narrative reveal thoughts, they seem real and uncreated. Straightforward comments, like the one above, create an extremely believable couple-no matter how eccentric they may be.
Mostly because it is uncommon, such honesty in Baxter's words lures in readers. Saul and Patsy is not a sentimental romance that ends with one direct, comforting answer; but a process of actions and thoughts that breeds compelling questions within the reader. Hesitant to reduce his works down to symbols, I give Baxter's book a justifiable 5/5 stars. This thoughtful novel quickly generates an addiction, one that will not be cured until the last page is reached.
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