The Sun Collective by Charles Baxter
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My Pillow Guy Dreams

If you’ve won a first-prize trip to Minneapolis (second-prize was, of course, two weeks in Minneapolis, replacing Philadelphia entirely as a holiday destination), this may be the book for you. Yes, folks, that land of arctic winters, mosquito-infested lakes and tick-strewn meadows has much more to offer within the city limits of that gem of the mid-West.

There’s the Martin Olav Sabo Pedestrian Bridge over Hiawatha Avenue (if it hasn’t popped it’s moorings again, but you can’t beat that for excitement); the Mall of America (8 million square feet of tribute to American consumerism; don’t be confused by the designation as ‘Utopia’ in the book which is merely aspirational); and the Minnehaha Falls (a sort of state-run theme park which has absolutely nothing to do with the Longfellow poem). These and many more tourist highlights form the heart of The Sun Collective.

But enough praise. The prose is ponderous. Plot is elusive. The pace is tedious. The magical realism is Disney not Isabel Allende. And the characters (who come and go largely without explanation) are all but invisible behind a mist of backstory and political commentary. Perhaps this is the form that Minnesotan literary satire takes given that the My Pillow Guy and Jesse Ventura set a certain level of expectation. If so, it’s a genre I can do without.

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