The Sun Collective, Charles Baxter’s novel about a retired couple searching for their missing adult son, has a question at its heart about human reliance on belief. Brettigan, a retired structural engineer, and his wife Alma live a comfortable life of music, cooking, and walking in Minneapolis. Their relationship has settled into benign tolerance of each other, but they’re pleasant and satisfied with life, save for the unexplained disappearance of their son. Timothy, who burned too bright even as a child, detached himself from technology and his parents after playing Estragon in an intense performance of Waiting for Godot. Brettigan and Alma watch for Timothy’s face everywhere, especially among the city’s growing homeless population.
The couple’s search for Tim leads them to a mysterious, cult-like group of activists called The Sun Collective, a gathering of people who want to serve as angels for people in need while they destroy an inhumane, capitalist society from within. Alma and Brettigan’s lives become intertwined with two young people from the collective: Ludlow, a freewheeling Luddite who speaks his mind too openly, and his girlfriend Christina, a drug-addicted bank employee. The closer Brettigan and Alma get to the core of The Sun Collective, the more questions they have about its purpose.
The world in The Sun Collective is akin to our own: a ranting demagogue, President Thorkelson, whips people into a frenzy by stoking the fires of conspiracy theory on social media, and a capitalist system that remains aloof from widespread homelessness and disenfranchisement. The Sun Collective is ambitious, if disorganized. Brettigan first encounters the collective when he finds their homemade manifestos littering the floor of the mall where he and his friends walk each week. He refers to their ideology as “vulgarized Buddhism combined with a Pop Warner School for Revolution tone.” “No more utopias,” they proclaim, saying “[i]n the absence of theory, we will still act.” But act how? Like some progressive groups, The Sun Collective has trouble determining what they want to be about. This presents a challenge for the narrative, too. “We shall be invisible, always,” proclaims The Sun Collective’s flyer. But Brettigan and Alma can’t determine what they’re up against– and the reader shares that uncertainty.
Baxter’s prose is artfully subtle in the way it links one character to another. Some are mistaken for twins of others, or appear to be a reflection of another character. When Christina meets Ludlow, for example, his description both seems to fit Brettigan’s earlier description of the missing, blue-eyed Tim, and also seems to awaken something in Christina, who fell in love with Tim as an actor on stage. “You didn’t see eager faces like that often anymore,” she says upon meeting Ludlow:
“… at least not on men. He possessed two raffish blue eyes, widely separated, and, below the high cheekbones, what used to be called a strong jaw, but the sum total of this faces was that of an innocent warrior, a boy in a man’s body, because the eyes looked out at the world with a warrior’s fierceness but were also blank, as if he didn’t know what he was fighting for and possibly didn’t care.”
Brettigan sees his son’s face in the city’s homeless, while Alma remarks that Tim and Ludlow are “alike somehow: like reflections. Mirrors.” There’s a duality to the narrative; not just for these dual descriptions and repeating faces, but for Christina, whose “blue telephone” drug allows her to feel like she can be of two worlds. Brettigan has a moment when he breaks down and comes to believe that realism is over and that he’s living in an approximation: “It had crumbled. This was the world we had now — this duplicate, the realm of unlikeness … nothing solid remained, and bogus birds shrieked in the cardboard trees.” Baxter suggests that a revelation is to come. Yet as the couple continues their search, the reason for the pairings remains, like the Collective, unclear.
Baxter makes some astute revelations about the intimate interactions of family. As Brettigan and his wife ponder why their son took off, their reflections reveal Baxter’s sophisticated awareness of the family dynamics. “[Tim’s] absence from their lives had a quality, Alma thought, of simmering rage that children sometimes felt toward their parents when a grievance couldn’t quite be spoken aloud or even described.” The relationship between Alma and Brettigan, too, relies on Baxter’s careful analysis of how love evolves over the decades of a marriage. Brettigan’s love for his wife is a kind of post-love, or love that has moved beyond motivational forces into a kind of known:
“He would never let her go, not for anything in the world. Nothing she could say to him would ever change his feelings about her, that she had been his rescuer, just as he had rescued her, that indeed they had rescued each other from their separate deserted islands where the unloved and uncared-for waited out their time.”
This might seem insensitive; in fact it’s the opposite. Alma and Brettigan rely on each other for a kind of sustenance the latter makes analogous to water. Their bond is strong, and the pain they share over losing their son unites them in an almost unspeakable ache, but it also allows Brettigan to muse about the nature of the relationships between all adult fathers and sons.
The search for the meaning of Timothy’s disappearance and the meaning of The Sun Collective’s actions eat at Brettigan and Alma from the outset. Without giving anything away, Baxter reveals in his final chapters just how he’d like his readers to understand them. He wants us to challenge our assumptions of what makes a satisfying story. The Sun Collective is heavy with literary and mythological allusion — blind prophets, people who can talk to animals, characters blinding themselves when they come to great realizations, twins, curses from spurned lovers, and Brettigan and Alma, waiting. Godot only gets a brief mention in reference to Timothy’s disappearance, but it’s a clue to Baxter’s game, as is another brief discussion about MacGuffins, the “thing that gives meaning to everything else.” Baxter’s characters and readers face the same question: why do we need to believe in a bigger idea, a mission, or a god or gods in control of our actions, in order for a story to make sense?
The Sun Collective is an ekphrastic novel disguised as a teleological mystery. The problem of a son’s disappearance and his affiliation with an opaque, unfocused cult is just the vehicle for characters like Brettigan to ponder the meaning of their actions and the ontology of human existence. For this reason, The Sun Collective challenges the reader as life itself does – at times postponing gratification, at other times brilliantly illuminating what is actual.
[Published by Pantheon on November 17, 2020, 336 pages, $27.95]