The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

Contemporary

Literary Fiction

Suspense

352 Pages

"The Sun Collective gets under your skin slowly, the way real dread does. Baxter writes Minneapolis like it's a city on the edge of something — and by the end you believe him completely."

Synopsis

The Sun Collective begins with a disappearance. Tim Brettigan — once a promising actor — has vanished, and his parents are searching for him across Minneapolis in very different ways. His father believes he may have spotted Tim among the city's homeless. His mother moves through churches and storefronts and park benches until she stumbles onto a local activist group with an enigmatic leader and ambitions that are harder to read the closer she gets.

Meanwhile, Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming dependent on a boutique drug that produces feelings of blessedness and transcendence, is drawn toward the same collective by a man convinced he is on the edge of starting a revolution. As these four lives converge around the group — known as the Sun Collective — guilt, anxiety, and a feverish, misplaced hope begin to pull them all toward something they cannot fully see coming.

Set against the backdrop of contemporary Minneapolis, Charles Baxter's novel is a portrait of a society haunted by consumerism, fanaticism, and fear — and of the particular vulnerability of people who are still, despite everything, searching for something to believe in.

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.