It’s not often that I wish a book were longer– well, if it made more sense – but at 210 small pages, Charles Baxter’s new novel “The Soul Thief” (Pantheon, $20) lacks flesh and bone. Oh the details are beautiful, lovingly and acutely described, as we expect from Baxter, but the questions of identity and narrative into which the novel delves are too complicated to be dealt with so quickly. And far from being “creepy” — an adjective too many reviewers of the book have used — “The Soul Thief” merely skims the surface of the uncanny.

Baxter’s irresistible quality, well-known to fans of “The Feast of Love,” “Saul and Pasty” and other books, is a deeply imbued sense of compassion for his characters and their woeful, wounded lives, a compassion so complete and empathetic that it pervades every sentence of his narrative, every metaphor he deploys; the result is prose that is simple and straightfoward yet possesses remarkable limpidity and emotional resonance. In “The Soul Thief,” however, that prose leads the author close to sentimentality and to characters that feel shaped more by the strategies of television and movies than the inevitabilties of good fiction.     

Nathaniel Mason, an aimless graduate student in Buffalo in the early 1970s, balances affairs with two women, the beautiful, seductive, quirky and callow Theresa, and the intelligent, artistic, ambivalent lesbian Jamie. Nathaniel is also beset, hampered and persecuted by the eccentric and somewhat sinister young genius Jerome Coolberg, who not only insinuates himself into Nathaniel’s life but at first slyly and then more blatently appropriates the hapless Nathaniel’s life for his own, from stealing and wearing his clothes to confiscating one of his lovers.    

Years later, having lost contact with Jerome, Nathaniel, now a grant writer for a local arts agency, is married to the patient Laura, a dealer in quilts; at this point the novel switches from third-person to first-person narration, and the change in tone, from objective to personal is fatal to the enterprise. Nathaniel and Laura have two sons, Michael and Jeremy, and the way Nathaniel  describes the boys is sweet and clever and loving and way too cute for any reality other than a TV sit-com or a movie that stars Greg Kinnear (who as it happens was the star of the hapless film of “The Feast of Love).

Jerome, of course, shows up or erupts in Nathaniel’s life again. He is the host of an NPR interview program, “American Evenings.”  When he calls Nathaniel and Nathaniel goes to meet Jerome in L.A., he finds his old friend/nemesis living in squalor, perhaps on the edge of insanity. Jerome leaves a manuscript in his car for Nathaniel to find, which he does, and he opens it and reads … and when Baxter revealed that the heart of the novel is a narrative device, I said, “Oh, that old trick,” and wanted to drop-kick the book into the next county.