Our Take

Charles Baxter has always been a writer of extraordinary precision about the interior life, and The Sun Collective applies that precision to something timely and unnerving: the way charismatic movements exploit the very real longing for meaning that runs through modern American life. The novel is not a polemic — Baxter is too careful a writer for that — but it does have an argument, delivered through accumulation rather than declaration, about what makes people susceptible and what they stand to lose.

The dual entry points of the Brettigan parents and Christina give the book a structural richness that keeps it from feeling like a single-thesis novel. Each character arrives at the Sun Collective through their own particular wound, and Baxter is attentive to all of them without excusing any. The Minneapolis setting is rendered with the specificity of a writer who knows a place well — grounded and particular in ways that make the novel's more unsettling elements land harder.

Readers who responded to Don DeLillo's White Noise for its portrait of ambient American dread, or to Richard Powers's The Overstory for its examination of people radicalized by genuine conviction, will find The Sun Collective a timely and disquieting companion. Baxter is one of American fiction's most underrated voices — this novel is a strong case for wider attention.