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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

And today, I have the honor of having, as my guest, a writer who I think of as being one of the very best writers living in America.

That's Charles Baxter.

And we're talking about his new book, his sixth novel.

I think there are five books of short stories plus a collected book of short stories.

This new novel is called The Sun Collective, and it's published by Pantheon.

And it's really a remarkable novel.

Could you help me, Charlie?

What kind of novel do you think it is?

I went back and forth while I was writing it on the question of whether I was putting together

a realistic novel or one that was a kind of hybrid between realism and the fantastical.

And I finally came to feel that the world of the novel that I was constructing was a kind of wonderland, which is not to say that

it is a benevolent, heavenly place. Much of what does happen comes both out of the real world and out of another world, a kind of imaginary one.

I've read the book two and a half times, and that's because on the one hand, it is a family novel, and it's about a family that by the end has come back together and has enlarged.

There has been a marriage, and yet we've watched this family on the verge of falling apart again and again,

...