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Nicholson Baker

Wavid

New Member
Nicholson Baker is an author of small books about small subjects. What he applies to these books, though, is a huge imagination, and a vast talent for writing. For more about the man himself, the Guardian provide a very thorough profile here. It's where I first heard of him, and inpsired me to go out and buy his debut novel - Mezzanine - a tale of one man's (a thinly disguised Baker) lunchtime. It's less than 200 pages long and even then is padded out with footnotes - but still takes a good while to read. The reason for this, as well as my own difficulties with short books, is because Baker's prose is such a joy you find yourself rolling his sentences around your brain, trying to think of conversations where you can use one of his jokes or turns of phrase. I'd offer some examples, but as I'm writing this at work and haven't got the book with me, I can't. Sorry. The delight that Baker takes in the everyday is at once entertaining and endearing, and the frustrations that confront him (and us) on a regular basis open the reader's eyes to a world which is taken for granted, and never questioned. Why, he asks, does one shoelace always break before the other? Why did fast food restaurants switch from cardboard straws, which retain their place in a cup of fizzy drink, to plastic ones which float absurdly on the top of the liquid?

I haven't read any of his other novels, all of which sounded rather mucky (that's a bit of extra information rather than a reason, by the way) until my sister presented me with a copy of his latest, A Boxful of Matches. There's even less action in this that in Mezzanine. A man gets up early everyday, lights a fire, makes a cup of coffee and ruminates for a few pages. The next day, he does exactly the same. The reader is treated to 33 chapters of this, 33 mornings, over 176 pages of double line spaced text. He talks about the way that having holes in your socks only irritates when you wear them in bed; about Fidel, the long surviving last ant in his ant farm; about the trials and tribulations of raising a duck in freezing conditions; about the delight and despair he takes in his children growing up.

There is humour here, then, and there is dejection. But the constant is the quality of the writing, and the genuine thrill that Baker takes in the mundane. The former carries you through the book, mesmerised. It is best savoured, rather than read through quickly - each day/chapter is so short they can easily be read two or three times over. You are constantly reminded of brilliant passages, which you just have to flick back to and enjoy over and over again. As for the everyday pleasures of life, well, you can't help but be infected by Baker's worldview. I constantly irritate my girlfriend and her brother with the smug satisfaction I take from putting on my slippers after work, which are infinately comfier than my work shoes - the joy this act brings me is totally lost on these non-Bakerites.

There are two more reasons to love this book and its author: 1) the book itself is a joy to behold, perfectly proportioned and stunningly well bound and designed, with the box of matches theme beautifully realised; and 2) Stephen King hates Baker and his work, claiming it to be "fucking toenail clippings". What King doesn't realise is that whilst his work is reliant on tight plotting and character, good writing can stand on its own without any props at all.
 
Thanks for that, Wavid. I'm a Baker fan from way back but was put off this one - and his last, The Everlasting Story of Nory - by all the mediocre reviews.

Baker is probably most famous - if that's the right word - for being the author of Vox, a novel about telephone sex which Monica Lewinsky gave to Bill Clinton during their affair. Vox is a mannered and not particularly erotic book consisting, like Gilbert Adair's slightly (but only slightly) less ho-hum A Closed Book, entirely of dialogue with no points of reference outside the speechmarks.

But the first book of his I read was - and the temptation here to write "in a neatness that would surely be appreciated by one of Baker's own narrators" is overwhelming, but I will resist... - his first book, The Mezzanine, which Wavid has amply summarised above. However unlike him I do have to hand - or rather to screen - some extracts so I will expand my thoughts.

The Mezzanine is, as Wavid says, the story of one corporate man's lunch-hour, or rather the thoughts that pass through his head during that time. At 140 pages it's short but as an examination of a one hour period - well - quite long enough. However it's never boring, as it's beautifully written and has had me flitting repeatedly across that narrow strip that divides "I'm glad I'm not sad enough to have think about things like that" from "I wish I'd thought of that!" Because yes, we are in the world of the severely anally-retentive, borderline obsessive-compulsive personality. Baker's narrator - what am I saying? it's Baker, it's Baker - riffs for four-page-long-footnotes on topics such as why plastic straws float to the top of a fizzy drink, and the "nuances of signature placement" on office farewell cards. This is truly the unexamined life, but brought brilliantly alive by Baker's combination of impeccable prose and a relentlessly logical working-through of ideas. One of my favourite passages is on the demerits of hot-air hand dryers in public washrooms as opposed to paper towel dispensers:

Are people truly content to be using the hot-air blower? You hit the mushroom of metal that turns it on and, as the instructions recommend, you Rub Hands Gently under the dry blast. But to dry them even as thoroughly as a single paper towel would dry them in four seconds, you must supplicate under the droning funnel for thirty seconds, much longer than anyone has patience for; inevitably you exit flicking water from your fingers, while the blower continues to heat the room. In case you do decide to stand for the full count, the manufacturer (World Dryer Corporation) has provided a short silk-screened text to read to pass the time. It says:

To Serve you better --- We have installed Pollution-Free Warm Air Hand Dryers to protect you from the hazards of disease which may be transmitted by towel litter. This quick sanitary method dries hands more thoroughly prevents chapping --- and keeps washrooms free of towel waste.

In the corner of this statement, World has printed the small Greek letter that looks like a hamburger in profile, the symbol of the environmental movement. But does the environmental movement have anything to do with the reason why the Wendy's restaurant that I stood in on September 30, 1987 had installed this machine in its men's room? No. Is it, in fact, an efficient, environmentally upright user of the electricity produced by burning fossil fuels? No - there is no off button that would allow you to curtail the thirty-second dry time - you are forced to participate in waste. Does it prevent chapping? Dry air? Is it quick? It is slow. Is it more thorough? It is less thorough. Does it protect us from the hazards of disease? You will catch a cold quicker from the warm metal public dome you press to start the blower than from plucking a sterile piece of paper than no human has ever held from a towel dispenser, clasping it in your very own hands to dry them, and throwing it away. Come to your senses, World! The tone of authority and public-spiritedness that surrounds these falsehoods is outrageous! How can you let your marketing men continue to make claims that sound like the 1890s ads for patent medicines or electroactive copper wrist bracelets that are printed on the formica on the tables at Wendy's? You are selling a hot-air machine that works well and lasts for decades: a simple, possibly justifiable means for the fast-food chains to save money on paper products. Say that or say nothing.

If it all sounds very frivolous or inconsequential, well, it is. But at the same time it's a rich detailing of all those thoughts and experiences that we never bother to think about, even though they take up more time cumulatively than the big issues that other books address. It's also entirely original and unique, and Baker did himself no favours by trying to replicate it in his second book Room Temperature (which Martin Amis has praised as being the most gloriously prosaic title ever to grace a novel), which did the same sort of thing for an afternoon spent with his baby.
 
After that came U & I, a memoir about John Updike, written when Baker had neither met Updike nor indeed read most of his books. Like most of Baker's books, it's short (180 pages) but so packed with detail, reflexive thoughts and sentences that turn back on themselves and inside-out that you frequently find yourself dabbing your brow and flicking forward through the pages and thinking How long can he go on like this?

And he does go on. In U & I Baker has written a memoir and critical study of John Updike as a "closed book examination," almost on a whim, without re-reading any of his books or having any of them to hand for reference. He thinks he is entitled to do this because although he may not have read any Updike in years, he thinks about him and his work all the time. It's a typically Bakeresque undertaking: arrogant to take it on and presume anyone would be interested in the ramblings of someone who shares little with Updike except psoriasis and having read just eight of his 30-odd books in full, and humble enough to constantly apologise for such arrogance and to expect to fail ("What I was doing was creepy. Updike could react, feel affronted, demolish me, ignore me, litigate. A flashy literary trial had some fantasy appeal, except that I knew I would burst into tears if cross-examined by any moderately skilful attorney").

He doesn't fail, although typically enough his success is in revealing more to us of Nicholson Baker than of Updike and his works (of which I know as little now as I did when I started U & I. Because of his closed-book approach, Baker allows his errors of quotation and identifying the wrong book to stand, and only adds little riders in square brackets after each such blunder). In some ways U & I is a brilliant comedy of embarrassment, such as when he asks his wife "Do you think I'm a better writer than Updike?" Dissatisfied with the response, he asks his mother the same question.

There was a silence.

"But you have to think that!" I said. "I need you to think that."

Even worse are the two occasions when he meets Updike, once at a signing (naturally, he brings his mother) and once at the offices of the Harvard Lampoon, when he casually mentions to Updike a story he had published a while back.

"A lovely thing," said Updike. He also praised something else of mine that appeared in The Atlantic. And he said that I should keep writing because I had a gift. Should I not be including this pronouncement here? Is it self-serving? No, because mainly it shows Updike to be civil and generous in person, which is a thing worth knowing, and because it could easily be nothing more than the "mere babble of politeness," as Henry James called some of his letters, and because my patently self-serving inclusion of it shows me to be even less likable than I might possibly otherwise have seemed. (Who will sort out the self-servingness of self-effacement?) Anyway, how can I not retain Updike's moment of encouragement, when it is one of the very few events I have to offer in this whole plasmodium? It isn't as if Updike said, "Nick Baker! Holy moly! Congratulations on being you! You're going to fly!" It isn't as if what he said was anything like what Schumann said about Brahms. Still, "a lovely thing" was a lovely thing for him to say - it helped me; it altered my opinion about that story, which I now will certainly include if I ever put out a book of stories. But did it also, I now found myself wondering - and even my suggestion of such a possibility should serve as a warning to all eminent and tolerant writers not to be nice to people who pounce on them at parties - did it also lower him ever so slightly, in the Groucho Marxian manner, in my estimation, since I can see, rereading the story now, that it is replete with false touches? Why didn't he see through it? I wonder; in seeing through it myself I suspect for a minute that I have found a blind spot in him to the kind of cheapness it exhibits - when really he was simply doing what he knew I wanted him to do, which was to recognise my existence as a writer, to bless me by remembering who I was.

U & I, despite its pathologically narrow frame of reference, certainly has wider relevance and force for anyone who has ever had a literary hero, or ever hoped to become a literary hero. And that fact that Baker has done it, and in the process himself become a literary hero of a very minor sort, means that the rest of us don't have to - or, if we're Bakerish enough ourselves, are maybe more likely to.

As I mentioned above, I haven't read his more recent stuff, The Everlasting Story of Nory or A Box of Matches. The last thing of his I read I think was The Fermata, another 'mucky' one, about a man who finds he can stop time and - naturally - uses it to indulge in a bit of semi-inspired winky wanky woo over desirable ladies. He never actually interferes much with them of course, which would bring all sorts of moral questions to the fore, so the book is half whimsy and half quite-good-in-places erotica. As though he had one hand on the tiller and one on - well. Go figure.
 
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