THE SOUL THIEF by Charles Baxter

My biggest problem with this book is that I did not totally understand what happened.  Nathaniel Mason is a grad student in Buffalo in the 1970s.  At a party he meets Jerome Coolberg, who weirdly seems to want to hijack Nathaniel’s entire identity, including his family history and his possessions.  Whether or not Nathaniel’s soul is worth stealing is debatable, since he doesn’t seem to be committed to much of anything except his beloved lesbian friend, Jamie.  Things veer into treacherous territory during a nighttime Niagara Falls outing, but Nathaniel maintains his unflappable acceptance of everything, even serving coffee to a burglar, until one of Coolberg’s more grim predictions comes true.  A revelation near the end renders the plot of this book even more inscrutable, with several unanswered questions remaining.  On the plus side, I love Baxter’s writing.  Decades after Nathaniel’s grad school days, he travels to Los Angeles to meet Coolberg again.  The author’s descriptions of “the ritualistic hostility of LAX” and the “emblems of four-star neglect” in a Sunset Boulevard hotel are priceless.