A life co-opted

Charles Baxter's delicious new novel, "The Soul Thief," is about identity theft -- the old-fashioned kind. The evildoer of Baxter's tale lifts his victim's personal profile elegantly, rather than electronically, through psychological manipulation.

Does this gambit sound familiar? It should, at least to fans of the late Patricia Highsmith. The anti-hero of Highsmith's crime noir series dubbed by aficionados "The Ripliad" is Tom Ripley, a jolly sociopath who murders a wealthy dimwit and then passes himself off as the deceased so he can enjoy a champagne lifestyle.

But "The Soul Thief" is entirely original in its inspired setting: an (unidentified) graduate school program in Buffalo, N.Y., during the 1970s. For those of us who suffered the experience firsthand, graduate school, in the humanities at least, was (and, doubtless, still is) a psychic cesspool of identity confusion where depressed young people were always quoting someone else, always affecting the mannerisms of their mentors and always trying to be as smart as (or smarter than) Hegel, Foucault or Woolf.

The reigning Smartest Guy in this grad-school fish tank is Jerome Coolberg. A fellow student named Nathaniel Mason recalls hearing legends of Coolberg long before he met him:

"(Coolberg) was given to public performative thinking. When his college friends lounged in the rathskeller, drinking coffee and debating Nietzsche, he sipped tea through a sugar cube and undermined their arguments with quotations from Fichte. The quotations were not to be found, however, in the volumes where he said they were. They were not anywhere."

Like spaghetti on a fork, Nathaniel finds himself dizzyingly twirled around, not only by Coolberg, but by two women: Theresa, a beautiful fellow graduate student, and Jamie, a sculptor and dancer who treats Nathaniel kindly but holds herself aloof since she's a lesbian.

An elaborate dance begins among this foursome. Wits are matched, information is gleaned, clandestine crimes are arranged. Slowly, too slowly, Nathaniel catches on that Coolberg has begun appropriating parts of his personal history. Coolberg even has the audacity to hire a drugged-out burglar to break into Nathaniel's apartment and steal his clothes -- which Coolberg then models before Nathaniel. This sick game can't end well. It doesn't.

"The Soul Thief" is so craftily constructed that to appreciate how liberally Baxter plants creepy hints of what's to come a reader should savor this short book twice.

Early in the novel, Nathaniel tells us he grew up in Milwaukee and enjoyed an unremarkable youth until his father died. Here's how Nathaniel describes the transformation that ensued:

"Once he was gone, his benign imperturbable self became painfully lovable and thus toxic. His monkey way of scratching his back, his unpleasant habit of picking his teeth after dinner ... all of it coalesced into the composite of an affable man who, in everyone's collective memory, gave nobody the advantage of having a case against him. ... His virtues came back, as virtues will, to haunt the living."

Throughout "The Soul Thief," Baxter riffs eloquently on how people become someone else -- either through death or the distortion of memory or the disintegration of aging. Lots of things out there lie in wait to steal our identities, he warns. Sure, vampires like Coolberg are to be avoided, but how can we hope to escape the more mundane monsters of time and change?