Understanding Nicholson Baker (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)

UNDERSTANDING

NICHOLSON BAKER

Understanding Contemporary American Literature Matthew J. Bruccoli, Series Editor Volumes on Edward Albee l Nicholson Baker l John Barth l Donald Barthelme The Beats l The Black Mountain Poets l Robert Bly Raymond Carver l Chicano Literature Contemporary American Drama Contemporary American Horror Fiction Contemporary American Literary Theory Contemporary American Science Fiction l James Dickey E. L. Doctorow l John Gardner l George Garrett l John Hawkes Joseph Heller l John Irving l Randall Jarrell l William Kennedy Ursula K. Le Guin l Denise Levertov l Bernard Malamud Carson McCullers l W. S. Merwin l Arthur Miller Toni Morrison’s Fiction l Vladimir Nabokov l Gloria Naylor Joyce Carol Oates l Tim O’Brien l Flannery O’Connor Cynthia Ozick l Walker Percy l Katherine Anne Porter Reynolds Price l Thomas Pynchon l Theodore Roethke Philip Roth l Hubert Selby, Jr. l Mary Lee Settle Isaac Bashevis Singer l Jane Smiley l Gary Snyder William Stafford l Anne Tyler l Kurt Vonnegut Tennessee Williams l August Wilson

UNDERSTANDING

NICHOLSON BAKER Arthur Saltzman

University of South Carolina Press

© 1999 University of South Carolina Published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press Manufactured in the United States of America 03

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Saltzman, Arthur M. (Arthur Michael), 1953– Understanding Nicholson Baker / Arthur M. Saltzman. p. cm. —(Understanding contemporary American literature) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–57003–303–X 1. Baker, Nicholson—Criticism and interpretation. II. Series. PS3552.A4325 Z88 1999 813'.54—dc21

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98-40225

for Dad who taught me how to stand

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CONTENTS

Editor’s Preface ix Preface xi Chapter 1 A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand 1 Chapter 2 The Mezzanine 15 Chapter 3 Room Temperature 32 Chapter 4 U and I: A True Story 49 Chapter 5 Vox 63 Chapter 6 The Fermata 82 Chapter 7 Uncollected Works 107 Chapter 8 The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber 131 Chapter 9 The Everlasting Story of Nory 166 Conclusion 179 Notes 183 Bibliography 198 Index 203

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EDITOR’S PREFACE

The volumes of Understanding Contemporary American Literature have been planned as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers. The editor and publisher perceive a need for these volumes because much of the influential contemporary literature makes special demands. Uninitiated readers encounter difficulty in approaching works that depart from the traditional forms and techniques of prose and poetry. Literature relies on conventions, but the conventions keep evolving; new writers form their own conventions—which in time may become familiar. Put simply, UCAL provides instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—identifying and explicating their material, themes, use of language, point of view, structures, symbolism, and responses to experience. The word understanding in the titles was deliberately chosen. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Although the criticism and analysis in the series have been aimed at a level of general accessibility, these introductory volumes are meant to be applied in conjunction with the works they cover. They do not provide a substitute for the works and authors they introduce, but rather prepare the reader for more profitable literary experiences. M. J. B.

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PREFACE

My interest in Nicholson Baker, like the interests that bloom into beautiful obsessions throughout his writings, began casually enough. I was browsing the shelves of the local mall bookstore, a locale as glossy and unprepossessing as any Baker might employ, when I happened upon a sleek new novel sporting an art deco dust jacket and, on the back, a photograph of its informally dressed author, posing congenially on what appeared to be a porch that opened out into a soft-focus expanse of glittering trees. I began reading about an office worker on his way to the escalators, Penguin paperback and stapled drugstore bag in tow: here was a narrator whose mundane privilege of self-conscious observation I shared that afternoon. My attention fell upon a footnote—a bit of an anomaly in a novel, after all—and the first sentence hooked me: “I love the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects.” I riffled through the next several pages, in which footnotes rose and fell like an underground tide, and I purchased The Mezzanine. To make a long story short—the opposite, it may be argued, of Nicholson Baker’s protocol—I found that I had my own little obsession brewing. Several references came to mind as I read: Stanley Elkin’s phrase “the strange displacements of the ordinary” (Elkin, 229); William Carlos Williams’s commitment to “the secret and sacred presence” that illuminates and poeticizes what we customarily treat as pedestrian; the title Microbe Hunters; those origami pages of instruction delineating the components of the cassette deck or how to assemble your child’s scale-model nuclear submarine (Williams, 980). But a novel

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whose main characters were brooms, coffee mugs, rubber stamps, drinking straws, windshield wipers, and shoelaces? Not exactly promising drama. Yet the fact was that I was savoring this stuff, the irremediably normal and the regularly jettisoned, which in Baker’s hands revealed their riches. The euphoria of lists and product histories, the elegiac quality of novelties grown obsolete, the quiet satisfaction of quotidian epiphany—Baker’s bemusement was contagious and (read him to believe it) charged with suspense. I wrote a piece on The Mezzanine a few years ago, which ultimately was incorporated into my book titled The Novel in the Balance. With each subsequent book, Baker has provided me fresh recognitions, parallels, and pleasures. Therefore, this study is meant not only as an introduction to a sublimely spirited writer but also as a systematic appreciation for the rewards I have enjoyed in his company. Most of my semester-long sabbatical leave from Missouri Southern was devoted to completing this study, and I am grateful to the college for the time and opportunity to undertake it. I owe even more to those friends and colleagues who, in a way that I suspect that the author of such oddly provocative little novels would approve of, grant me my idiosyncracies. Linda Haines Fogle at University of South Carolina Press has offered me unfailing good will and generous welcome. I especially wish to thank Joy Dworkin, who knows, consents, and relates; my parents, who support me beyond what I deserve or can repay; and my daughter Elizabeth, whose gift of wonder—miraculous thing—continues to grow. Nicholson Baker has been a kind supporter of this project,

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and I thank him for his permission to borrow illustrative passages from his writings. I also wish to acknowledge the following sources for allowing me to borrow from copyrighted works: A.R. Ammons, Garbage W. W. Norton & Company. Copyright 1993 by the author. Jorie Graham, “Erosion,” Erosion Princeton University Press. Copyright 1983. Permission granted by Princeton University Press.

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CHAPTER ONE

A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand

Nicholson Baker has established himself as contemporary fiction’s principal detective and dissector of epics that await the reader at close range. Thanks to Baker’s extraordinary attention to ordinary objects and processes, restroom paper towels and computer paper perforations have been accorded the same descriptive indulgence as Achilles’ shield; tying shoes and writing with a ballpoint pen on a rubber spatula rise to high drama; the fates of popcorn poppers and peanut butter jars are crucial planks in a private political platform, quietly alive with social implications. With unrivaled patience and meticulousness, Baker tweezes poetry out of a seemingly prosaic environment, which brims for him with compacted extravagance, ingrown gorgeousness. As one reviewer puts it, “Baker doesn’t just count the angels on the head of a pin; he does long division with the feathers in their wing tips.”1 In The Mezzanine (1988) and Room Temperature (1990) in particular, a studied intimacy presides; happily banished to contemplation, Baker offers the radiant residue of extended meditation. He is exquisitely fussy, drawing out the hidden heritage of a drinking straw or awakening the layered etymology of a neglected noun from the grave of casual usage. The following sample among the scores of reflections that constitute his first novel suggests the lush weave that Baker creates:

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Why can’t office buildings use doorknobs that are truly knob-like in shape? What is this static modernism that architects of the second tier have imposed on us: steel-half-U handles or lathed objects shaped like superdomes, instead of brass, porcelain, or glass knobs? The upstairs doorknobs in the house I grew up in were made of faceted glass. As you extended your fingers to open a door, a cloud of flesh-color would diffuse into the glass from the opposite direction. The knobs were loosely seated in their latch mechanism, and heavy, and the combination of solidity and laxness made for a multiply staged experience as you turned the knob: a smoothness that held intermediary tumbleral fallings-into-position. Few American products recently have been able to capture that same knuckly, orthopedic quality (the quality of bendable straws) in their switches and latches; the Japanese do it very well, though; they can get a turn-signal switch in a car or a volume knob on a stereo to feel resistant and substantial and worn into place—think of the very fine Toyota turn-signal switches, to the left of the steering wheel, which move in their sockets like chicken drumsticks: they feel as if they were designed with living elbow cartilage as their inspiration. (The Mezzanine, 27) And on and on he goes, zealously invested, utterly open to association, metaphor, and fresh diction (“tumbleral” and “knuckly” are particularly effective examples in the passage above), all in an effort to do justice to the little things, to get them right.

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Baker acknowledges that he has always had this “cast of thought,” with its penchant for what governs things so small: “I would write in my notebooks about all these ambitions of writing enormous books, huge subjects for novels, but the only time I actually felt pleasure writing was when I had turned the lens a little bit and was focusing on something carefully and was able to revolve it in my mind. . . . What it feels like is that . . . I have some pressing point I want to make about the coils of a toaster.”2 Contemporary man lives amidst innumerable bits of manufacture; made things line every desk, shelf, counter, and pocket. As Henry Petroski writes in The Evolution of Useful Things, “Virtually all urban sensual experience has been touched by human hands, and thus the vast majority of us experience the physical world, at least, as filtered through the process of design.”3 Nicholson Baker is eager to disclose that rich tangle of invention, the vivid infrastructure that largely constitutes what and how perception is accomplished. As James Kaplan maintains in Vanity Fair, “In an American book-writing generation that seems to span the talent gamut from A to C, Nicholson Baker is out there at the end of the alphabet, quite alone. His unmistakable voice, his razor-sharp comprehension of culture high and low, his mighty-Wurlitzer skill with the language—all move him out of the lit pack, straight into suede-elbow proximity with the timeless ones, the echt practitioners.” “Pure-octane-wise, not many are in Baker’s league,” Kaplan continues, awed by Baker’s “broad, jaw-droppingly knotty matrix of usable reference.”4 Novelist David Shields concurs in a piece for the Village Voice, in which he attributes to this “artistically adventurous, passion-

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ately intellectual writer” the power of transfiguration: “He is a kind of literary Statue of Liberty: give him our wretched refuse and he’ll turn it into poetry.”5 From such a glamorous vantage point, calling Baker a master of trivial pursuit does a disservice to the wealth of all he coaxes out of anonymity. It should not be surprising, nonetheless, that responses to Baker’s writings typically emphasize his minor-key commitments. By virtue of the reception of his first two novels, Baker has occasionally been called a minimalist; to be sure, his uncompromising alertness to the discarded and the daily, coupled with (in a strictly traditional sense) the relative plotlessness of his books, may initially lead reviewers to unite him with writers like Raymond Carver. However, Baker will have none of the poverty that the term “minimalism” suggests. On the contrary, his is a persistent war on attenuation. Nor can he be accused of predictability, another charge that tends to be levied against minimalist fictions. Instead, Baker defamiliarizes the landscape by being so in-depth about his inventories, by providing such relentlessly exploded views. In this regard, the opening lines of Jorie Graham’s “Erosion” are most instructive: I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one simultaneous, cut clean of sequence. No, it is our slowness I love, growing slower, tapping the paintbrush against the visible, tapping the mind.6 When mechanisms are exteriorized, bowels butterflied, and anatomies flayed, nothing can be presumed usual anymore. Baker

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describes his goal in this way: “I mean, what you really want to be is strange. Because that feeling of strangeness is delightful. There’s a hundred ways that I could make you feel uncomfortable. But there’s only one or two or three ways that I could make you feel at ease. The whole premise of conceptual art—that you’ve got to make the viewer kind of worried—doesn’t seem very convincing to me. I want the reader to be happy. At some basic level, I want to be writing entertainment.”7 Novelist Steven Millhauser, a fellow traveler of sorts when it comes to concentrated mystery and compressed obsessions, provides a more accurate term in his assessment of the miniature, which he says “is an attempt to reproduce the universe in graspable form. It represents a desire to possess the world more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen. We are teased out of the world of terror and death, and under the enchantment of the miniature we are invited to become God.”8 Millhauser opposes the charms of the miniature with the awesomeness of the gigantic, which is intimidating because there is “something lush, profuse, unstoppable” about it.9 While Baker’s fiction definitely has more in common with the patiently, ornately furnished company of the miniature, as Millhauser uses the term, than it does with the spartan decor of the minimalist, it seems to contradict the idea that reduction of scope affords godlike control. In fact, it could be argued that Baker’s dilations prove the ungraspability of this world regardless of the size of the grafts that are taken from it. The puzzle is further considered in Millhauser’s Martin Dressler, a novel in which the hero chafes at every constraint, not excluding the accomplishment of a given vision: both giganticism and miniaturization, which equally tend toward “obsessive elaboration,” betray “a yearning for the ex-

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haustive, which was the secret malady of the age.”10 The Baker narrator is a similarly inverted Horatio Alger. Nevertheless, instead of finding refuge in the miniature because the world is too much with him, he is excited to discover that wherever he hunkers down there is too much world. The revelation is not terrifying but compelling, wonderful. Baker’s delightful, astonishing sensitivity to subtle textures accounts for only part of his reputation. Probably the majority of Baker’s following—certainly the greater share of the public awareness he has inspired—is due to his uniquely academic twist on the erotic novel, as demonstrated in Vox (1992) and The Fermata (1994). For some, these ventures are aberrations in a promising literary career, or worse, blatant (and, it turns out, successful) plays for bestsellerdom by an eccentric writer otherwise restricted to coterie tastes. Certainly these novels have not been uniformly appreciated by reviewers, several of whom have chastised Baker for chauvinism or sheer vulgarity. However, it seems that the connection between the passion for intricate detail in the first two novels and the intricately detailed passions of the next two does not really represent a departure after all. Voyeurism is a natural extension of other obsessive attentions; whatever the controversies occasioned by the explicit dialogues in Vox and the even more explicit sexual activities in The Fermata, the decision to embody the intrigue of specificity in the bodies of women does seem consistent with the way Baker loves to linger in the earlier works. True, the method may be pornographic by definition, its pleasures being at the expense of the “thingification” of women by an author who rather prides himself on breathing life into things. On the other hand, the reader

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may remember the argument of William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, that quintessentially metafictional erotic text, which equates the talents and dedicated observances of the assiduous reader with those of the good lover. This brand of allegiance is frequently given its due in Baker’s writings, as is seen, for instance, in the homage-within-a-homage in U and I: A True Story (1991), when Baker’s admiration for (and envy) of John Updike leads him to defend narrative “cloggers”—swollen descriptions that interrupt, reroute, or even displace, the horizontal flow of a given story: The only thing I like are the clogs—and when, late in most novels, there are no more in the pipeline to slow things down, I get that fidgety feeling, and I start bending the pliable remainder of the book so that it makes a popping sound, and I pick off the price sticker on the back and then regret doing so and stick it back on because it is a piece of information I will always want to have (a delight, as Updike memorably says of picking at a psoriasis lesion, thereby capturing a whole world of furtiveness we would otherwise not know about, that “must be experienced to be forgiven”). I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage- points of passage.11 Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether one can imagine a piece of information that Baker would not want to

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have, the reader can recognize in this reversal of ranks between central plot and accompanying description a consistent aesthetic. It is as though the caddy were taking the strokes while the golfer lugged the clubs. Or, to return specifically to Baker’s sexobsessed novels, it is as though foreplay were the play itself and not just the mandatory preface. Art for art’s sake lies at the heart of the style, subject matter, scholastic disposition, and comic outlook of Nicholson Baker. Baker is also a brilliant essayist, and here, too, the encyclopedic resolve of the novels is clearly operating. The Size of Thoughts not only delivers several versions of author’s creeds, focusing on industry’s unsung convergences with daily life, it is also replete with hymns to gadgetry, confection, and the minute architecture upon which people obliviously rely. If many of his subjects are sturdy components of today’s lifestyle—modest contributors which Baker has stand for the honor they deserve— others (like the library card catalogue) are threatened with obsolescence, and eulogies evolve into efforts to restore their status. This is not to say that Baker is a Luddite grumbling about the displacement of pure artisanship by soulless products of the factory. Quite the contrary, he celebrates with exacting sympathy the technological pastoral thriving everywhere in the vicinity. How things work, how things got there, what constitutes human musings and sensations, and any number of “those shaky curved lines . . . from A to Z” from which awareness is drafted12— Baker is consumed with fundamentals. From arriving at a drugstore, to getting the baby to sleep, to reaching orgasm, to rooting out the legacy of a plastic bottle or a bit of slang, he means to revise the very nature of literary adventure.

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A Writer in the Making Nicholson Baker was born on 7 January 1957, in Rochester, New York, to parents who had met as art students at Parsons School of Design: Douglas Baker, an advertising executive, and Ann (Nicholson) Baker. Evidently the analytical preoccupations of the author of The Mezzanine hark back to childhood, when Baker typically busied himself with applying personal modifications to model planes and cars; he claims to remember wanting to become an inventor when he grew up. His interest in the arts was encouraged by his mother, who would set him such tasks as drawing the interior of a pillow, and his father, who would accept suggestions from his son for his advertising campaigns. In school, Baker was attracted to music. Taking up the bassoon in fourth grade, Baker grew proficient enough to enroll at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in 1974 with his sights set on composition. He even performed for a short time as a substitute bassoonist for the Rochester Philharmonic. Music has remained an important concern in his writing, its prominence obvious in the titles The Fermata and “Playing Trombone,” as well as in some of the amiable digressions of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. After a year at Eastman, Baker moved on to Haverford College, where he received his B.A. in English in 1980. The switch from music to literature derived from several subtle inspirations, including Baker’s longstanding appreciation of the physical pleasure of books (commented upon by Baker in “Books as Furniture,” among other locations), the rewarding sense of books as repositories of information, and the growing belief, discussed in

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U and I, that “nothing is more impressive than the sight of a complex person suddenly ripping out a laugh over some words in a serious book or periodical. . . . I began increasingly to want to be a part of the prosperous-seeming world of books (prosperous in contrast, that is, to the grant-dependent and sparsely attended concerts for living composers, whose ranks I had up until then wanted to join), where there was money for screaming full-page ads and where success was quantified as it was on the Billboard charts.”13 Briefly held jobs as a Wall Street oil analyst and a stock broker—“I got very fired up about kind of mystical notions about markets and trading and everything. It was unlike anything I’d grown up with”14—preceded his moving to Berkeley, California, to live with Margaret Brentano, whom he would marry in 1985, and her parents. A writing workshop with Donald Barthelme at Berkeley helped to strengthen and validate this decision, as would initial publications in toney outlets like the Atlantic and the New Yorker. However, it would be some time before Baker would find his singular voice. After moving to Boston, he worked as a word processor (a job title whose resonance with his fictional eccentricities he would jokingly allude to in The Size of Thoughts) and a technical writer (a job shared by the narrator of Room Temperature), before devoting himself to writing full time by 1987. The breakthrough came when, in a realization comparable to John Hawkes’s infamous dictum about how the conventional components of narrative were in fact the enemies of true fiction, Baker figured that he would dispense with plot altogether: “But I’d start writing, and if the plot were, say, a foot long, I’d find

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I’d covered an eighth of an inch. So I got rid of the plot,” he told Harry Ritchie in the London Sunday Times. “I felt enormous relief that I didn’t have to pretend to do something that didn’t interest me.”15 From this conviction grew The Mezzanine, a book sustained almost solely by the hyperactive ruminations and ultramagnified examinations of a man on his way during his lunch hour to purchase new shoelaces. The combination of omnivorous concern, droll humor, and metaphorical richness characterized a technique that was in itself the most memorable event he had to offer. By 1990, with the completion of his second novel, Baker was well on his way to becoming known as one of the most intellectually satisfying stylists of his generation, having made, in Lawrence Norfolk’s words, “a rapid transition from experimental writer to writer of successful experiments.”16 Vox and The Fermata would follow, bringing both more controversial and varied reviews and wide popular success (including profiles in Esquire and Gentleman’s Quarterly). As of this writing, Baker lives in Berkeley with his wife and two children.

Affinities and Influences His literary debts and resemblances are a matter of considerable self-consciousness to Nicholson Baker. This is hardly surprising, given his dedication of an entire book to his worshipful speculation about (or jealous obsession with, or imaginative stalking of) John Updike. When it comes to models, Baker says, “every little guy like me has to be constantly doing this measuring process and comparing. When an interviewer asks you what was important to you when you were learning to write,

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what were the texts, you’re tempted to come up with people like Henry de Montherlant or the Brothers Goncourt. You don’t want to say John Updike because he’s commonplace and familiar and it’s not exciting. It felt excitingly provocative to write a book about commonplace, familiar John Updike.”17 In an on-line interview with Alexander Laurence and David Strauss, Baker also added the following list of writers he likes: “There’s Allan Hollinghurst, a gay novelist. I like Samuel Johnson. I like certain poets: Howard Moss, Stanley Kunitz. I’m reading Ronald Firbank right now. Flann O’Brien. I’m a terrible reader. Usually if I actually get to a point of reading a book, there’s enough stuff that I’ll like. I buy novels for the cover. Beautiful covers are like buying candy.”18 While he suspects that “imitation is a kind of theft” rather than a form of flattery, Baker acknowledges that “the great enterprise of literature doesn’t move forward unless each writer profits from all the different tiny discoveries made by all of his or her predecessors.”19 Clearly, Baker’s writings may readily be categorized with John Updike’s lyrical mannerisms and exaltation of the everyday; their shared interest in contemporary sexual mores and their poetic potential is another obvious point of comparison. Donald Barthelme, by virtue of his wit and insatiable appetite for cultural debris, is another connection; indeed, before “digressing” into the fascination with Updike that will come to dominate the book, U and I opens with the narrator’s decision to write a critical appreciation of Barthelme in the wake of his recent death. That book provides a grab bag of literary influences, ranging from the canonical to the pop cultural, which the narrator imagines providing in response to future interviews: “The

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Tailor of Gloucester, Harold Nicolson, Richard Pryor, Seuss’s If I Ran the Circus, Edmund Burke, Nabokov, Boswell, Tintin, Iris Murdoch, Hopkins, Michael Polanyi, Henry and William James, John Candy, you know, the usual crowd” (67). One could add Proust to the stew, as well as the effervescent excesses of Stanley Elkin, who makes what he refers to in Boswell as “an ethic of filled drawers”;20 Frederick Exley, who will also be noted in U and I for his ruthlessly funny confessional fictions A Fan’s Notes and Pages from a Cold Island; progressive rock groups like Talking Heads; and, it would be fair to say, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Any assessment of the achievement of Nicholson Baker must necessarily be a work in progress, for it traces the arc of an ongoing career, but his critical impact and popular appeal indicate a lasting presence. Yet in spite of the inventiveness and unpredictability of his writings to date, Baker has already crafted a signature style, which unites a jeweler’s intensity of focus, a forensic scientist’s ferocity for detail, a monk’s humble delight in private discipline, and a satirist’s sensitivity to oddities and errors. Best of all, despite the width and depth of his learning, Baker is not the starched, dry lecturer who sacrifices interest for information. It is useful to think of him as a sensual lexicographer or as an archaeologist foraging at the cellular level of contemporary culture. He is as alive to nuance and the pleasure principle as anyone writing today. There may be a handful of contemporary American novelists of his generation, including Richard Powers or William T. Vollman, who can compete with his intellectual wattage, but the great swaths they cut cannot be mistaken for Baker’s swift, intricate incisions.

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Baker’s fictions and essays plumb the inner configurations to deliver itemized awe. While the assault of the culture’s ephemeral spectacles goes on, conditioning viewers with brief blurs of fame, news flashes, and instant gratifications, Nicholson Baker slows sensation down. Wherever his attentions descend, they return unexpected, and unexpectedly precious, dividends.

CHAPTER TWO

The Mezzanine

An exceptionally meditative young man has an unexceptional day. He breaks a shoelace and heads off for the local CVS store during his lunch hour to replace it, stopping for a carton of milk and a cookie on the way, then returns to work—in a process covering 135 pages and inspiring exceptional reviews. Robert Plunket announced in his New York Times review that the “razor-sharp insight and droll humor” of this first novel demonstrated “a first-rate comic mind at work.”1 While admitting that the book “peddles no unifying vision,” David Gates contended in Newsweek that its consistent ability to “show us our lives afresh” was more than most writers ever accomplish.2 Robert Taylor promised in the Boston Globe that its “plot might in summary sound either banal or absurdist, when in fact it is a constant delight.”3 Barbara Fisher Williamson congratulated Baker in the Washington Post Book World for his “verbal ballets of incredible delicacy” and deemed the book “the most daring and thrilling first novel since John Barth’s 1955 The Floating Opera.”4 Meanwhile Steven Moore, writing in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, complimented the treatment of “technical advances not as threats but as gifts, ones that we have taken for granted for so long that Baker has had to rewrap and present them anew in the form of an irresistible novel.”5 The art of The Mezzanine, as these reviewers agree, lies in Baker’s unique talent for maintaining (to borrow adjectives from the reviews) the “gripping,” “thrilling,” “daring,” and “lyrical” impacts of narra-

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tive in spite of the radical elimination of plot, theme, and character. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that The Mezzanine redistributes these conventional narrative elements in unconventional ways. Plumbing the neglected crevices of common experience, Baker modifies the understanding of what things count as “pressing errands.”6 For example, the dynamics of drinking straw design constitute a crisis in engineering and a threat to the very quality of life (4–5); a broken shoelace causes a “curse of incredulousness and resignation” (13); whereas coming to the end of a roll of tape is reason for “shock and grief”; and the stapler’s running out of staples is a vile “betrayal” (14). In fact, the opening ten pages of the novel treat the following “isolate flecks” (to use a favorite term of William Carlos Williams’s) as the crux: escalators, whose rubber handrails wavered slightly “like the radians of black luster that ride the undulating edge of an LP” (3); straws; paper bags; office carpeting versus linoleum (a conflict that merits extended debate and personal research); adhesive tape, as well as other assorted office supplies; and competing philosophies regarding how best to put on socks. Meanwhile, the typical onward business of narrative is put aside, so absorbing are the distractions: “A bag for the milk allowed for a more graceful solution: I could scroll the tops of the cookie bag, the CVS bag, and the milk bag as one into my curled fingers, as if I were taking a small child on a walk. (A straw poking out of the top of the milk bag would have interfered with this scrolling—lucky I had refused it!)” (8). A major lesson of the novel has to do with what earns italics and exclamation, as well as with what minor concerns fire metaphor. Howie, the narrator of The Mezzanine, treats his noontime errand at the nearby CVS

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pharmacy as a pilgrimage; he finally arrives there to find an inventoried Eden, displaying as it does “a whole Istanbul of the medicine cabinet” (114). By the time the picaresque tale is told about a tonearm stylus journeying along an LP like Huck down the Mississippi, the reader is ready for an emotional climax like this: You rode the last grooves as if on a rickshaw through the crowded Eastern capital of the music, and then all at once, at dusk, you left the gates of the city and stepped into a waiting boat that pulled you swiftly out onto the black and purple waters of the lagoon, toward a flat island in the middle; rapidly and silently you curved over the placid expanse, drawing near the circular island (with its low druidic totem in the middle, possibly calendrical) but never debarking there; now the undertow bore you at a strange fluid speed back toward the teeming shore of the city— colors, perspiration, sleeplessness—and then again back out over the lagoon; the keel bumped first one shore, then the other, and though your vessel moved very fast it seemed to leave only a thin luminous seam in the black surface behind you to mark where the keel had cut. Finally my thumb lifted you up, and you passed high over the continent and disappeared beyond the edge of the flat world. (68) “I had not intended to buy a bag of popcorn,” begins chapter 13 of The Mezzanine (105). The line has the effect of an ominous launch, full of dramatic freight. The wonder turns out to be that, in the context of a novel that so thoroughly inverts

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conventions of value and plot significance, the diminutive crises and victories to come prove to be no anticlimax.7 Howie anticipates his critics by questioning whether his is the mind of a genius or an autistic. Just as he is available to practically any subject, Howie does not shy from evaluating his own idiosyncracies. At one point, he sums up the nature of the man he is unveiling here: “I was the sort of person who stood in a subway car and thought about buttering toast—buttering raisin toast, even: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heat-blimped forms of the raisins, and when if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be” (54). A confession and a warning: do not expect a more substantial brand of wisdom here. Still, there is something disingenuous about the narrator’s remorse, coming as it does at the end of a lovely, loving description about buttering raisin toast. And later in the novel, Howie does construct a more favorable interpretation of his nature, aligning himself with translators for Penguin and other amateurs, in the literal sense of that word. He salutes “that excellent low-key sort of man who achieves little by external standards but who sustains civilization for us by knowing, in a perfectly balanced, accessible, and considered way, all that can be known about several brief periods of Dutch history, or about the flowering of some especially rich tradition of terra-cotta pipes” (123). Moreover, in the spirit of consecrating what is “often thought but ne’er so well expressed,” Howie tends

19 THE MEZZANINE

the language with which he presents toiletries and raisin toast as assiduously as he does the things themselves. So Howie has moved from apology to assumption of sublime responsibility. If God is in the details, so, apparently, is the complex destiny of human community. Nor is Howie kept by his initial misgiving from continuing to analyze issues of lesser “magnitude” throughout the rest of the novel, with equally engaging results. Thus, when he calculates that approximately twelve percent of his current thoughts are childish (59), it is impossible for the reader to decide which of the thoughts that crowd The Mezzanine should be relegated to that lower rank. According to Ross Chambers, Baker’s fiction has landed the reader firmly in the realm of “loiterly” literature. The pleasures of extenuating circumstances, of periodic (or, in the case of this novel, chronic) vacations from a controlled, go-ahead goal-orientation, constitute what Chambers calls a “paradigmatic lingering”: a willing suspension of destination, as it were. Its implication is that “we live in a culture of mediated connectedness that is ‘structured’ (i.e. unstructured) like a list, or a set (a list) of lists, while our attention is illegitimately solicited by, and given to, the constructions of narrative history.”8 The illegitimacy of linear narrative convention is critical, for it concedes to footnotes, tangents, and digressions the same potential for justifiability as main plot points would usually be granted. In other words, the overriding standard for inclusion and focus in The Mezzanine is interest. Put another way, thanks to Baker’s “transvaluation of the trivial, or the philosophizing of the contingent,” there is really no such thing as digression, insofar as any association can be rendered relevant if it is delivered artfully.9 The

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litmus test for inclusion is not logical consistency or good taste, but fascination. Baker seems as intent as a writer can be about refusing to edit any marvel from the book. The disruption of the hierarchy between the crucial and the tangential is most obviously seen in the way that footnotes are handled in The Mezzanine; specifically, it is paralleled by how the main text of the novel is often overwhelmed by the surging, insurgent footnotes. As in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which uses a similar technique, the reader bears witness to a war for the reader’s attention—it is hard to know how to organize the progress through the novel as one’s eyes shuttle up and down like the office building’s escalators do between floors—which imitates the war for priority between so-called principal incidents and trivia. (In one triumphantly self-sustaining instance of the device at work in The Mezzanine, a footnote spawned by a comment about footnotes proceeds along a tributary into a note about feet [121].) In Howie’s estimation, as provided, of course, inside an overstuffed footnote, “the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of ‘ibid.’s’ and ‘compare’s’ and ‘see’s’ that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. . . . Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library” (122–23). The broken shoelace, which is the precipitating “conflict” of the novel, is like an emblem of departure from linear duty. Its scholarly manifestation is the swollen footnote; at Howie’s workplace, it is spending time in the corporate

21 THE MEZZANINE

restroom; it may also include woolgathering of any sort. (Significantly, Howie, ever the intellectual opportunist, is not aggravated when the lace breaks but intrigued by the invitation to detailed analysis.) It is Nabokov, too, who champions the “fondling” of details in his lecture on “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in which he maintains, “There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected.”10 Taking this assignment to unusual extremes, Baker’s novel looks exclusively to trifles for illumination, grinding down our society into its syllables. From this perspective, it is significant that Howie has a job on the mezzanine, a hiatus between main floors, which most would pass by on their way to more pressing destinations but which for him is a destination in its own right. Chambers suggests a contrast between the methodical process of meditation in Descartes and the “pathless and apparently random inventorizing” in Baker, an awareness of which leads Howie to be chagrined by not having matured into a man of greater magnitude.11 A more cheerful outlook might be possible, whereby The Mezzanine is likened to Jorge Luis Borges’s garden of forking paths; instead of pathlessness, “pathfulness,” or the availability of numerous contemplatable seductions, prevails. All roads lead somewhere, and “Rome” is a title conferred through passionate, highly developed speculation. “Under microscopy, even insignificant perceptions . . . are almost always revealed to be more incremental than you later are tempted to present them as being” (8–9). Accordingly, Howie elongates his concerns so as to imitate, say, the measured transi-

22 UNDERSTANDING NICHOLSON BAKER

tion of the escalator ride, with its “almost botanical gradualness” (59). Truly, so peculiar is the vantage from which he observes that objects are transformed into characters and people into sociology; so defamiliarizing is his patience that the reader may suspect that he is producing instruction manuals for Martians. He spends page after self-approving page on how he developed his shoe-tying facility as though he were recounting an athletic victory or a scientific breakthrough; he deems it an honor to have textured paper towels to use in the company bathroom instead of having to deal with their questionable successor, the hot-air blower; he discusses ice-cube-tray filling and extraction processes with the meticulousness of a demolitions expert. It is as though The Mezzanine were constantly breaking a film into frames or mass into component molecules. Here, for example, the narrator turns his lens upon the secretary’s chrome date-stamper: “It was a self-inking model: at rest, the internal dating element, looped with six belts of rubber, held its current numerology pressed upside down against the moist black roof of the armature. To use it, you set the square base of the machine down on the piece of paper you wished to date and pressed on the wooden knob (a true knob!)—then the internal element, guided by S curves cut out of the gantry-like superstructure, began its graceful rotational descent, uprighting itself just in time for landing like the lunar excursion model, touching the paper for an instant, depositing today’s date, and then springing back up to its bat-repose” (32). By way of contrast, his girlfriend is simply acknowledged as “L”!12 Happily, their compatibility is assured by the fact that they are secret sharers of the geometric appeals of sweeping their respective apartments and by her will-

23 THE MEZZANINE

ingness to participate in his bedtime earplug ritual, not to mention several optimistic intersections in their respective lists of “interest periodicity” (130). If poetry is proved in part by how it makes a fast reading slow, The Mezzanine fits the prescription in two basic ways. Howie has a knack for metaphorical associations, ranging from the “brontosaural” qualities of early staplers, to the “anemone splayings” of the fingers of the drugstore worker opening a bag, to the way a shirt came back from the dry cleaners with its arms folded as though it were concealing a present, to the “holy expression” of women applying makeup in mirrors, to invocations of Alexander Pope in the course of delineating the procedure for tying shoes and of Gerard Manley Hopkins in response to the braided waters of the corporate bathroom toilet. All exemplify for him the “renewing of newness” (93), a desire that echoes Ezra Pound’s dictum about the role of poetry but which is here made to relate to the marvels of a pinball falling into place in the ejection channel or a fresh rectangle of Pez rising to the top of the dispenser. Here he describes the spill of sunlight from thermal glass onto the lobby: “I felt myself rise into its shape: my hand turned gold, coronas of stage-struck protein iridesced from my eyelashes; and one hinge of my glasses began to sparkle for attention. The transformation wasn’t instantaneous; it seemed to take about as long as the wires in a toaster take to turn orange” (103). The revelatory setting is fraught with connections to biology (protein) and, more pedestrian still, to domestic industry (oranging toaster coils). The wonder of The Mezzanine is that instead of dampening ecstacy, the combination elevates the commonplace.13 (Meanwhile, Howie does balk at unearned or vul-

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gar efforts by Madison Avenue to appropriate transcendence, as seen in his peevishness toward shampoos with names like Suave, Silkience, Herbal Essence, and Finesse [114].) How few are those perceptive enough to find the closest things to Platonic forms within easy reach each day? Even more prominent among Howie’s poetic virtues, however, is his rebellion against the usual concision of office and lunch-hour habits, as seen in his addiction to dilation, his unflinching willingness to linger: I remembered that when I was little I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth, or any kind of clean background. . . . This clean-background trick, which I had come upon when I was eight or so, applied not only to things I owned, such as a group of fossil brachiopods I set against a white shirt cardboard, but also to things in museums: curators arranged geodes, early American eyeglasses, and boot scrapers against black or gray velvet backgrounds because anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention. (38) Anything looks like a gem in the right light, when it rests in precise splendor upon a plush jeweler’s pad. Whether its status demands beautiful language or whether its beautiful language grants it status, a rusted railroad spike or dented Rolodex, when

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deftly set against a swept surface (or a white page) may endear itself as effectively as a lover’s eyes. In short, Howie is a fastidious cousin of Leopold Bloom, assailed like James Joyce’s “average sensual man” by numberless phenomena but having a special predilection for “mechanical enthusiasms” (36) and smaller structures; he is also rather more formal about his fetishes than Bloom, if equally arousable. I am, he seems to say, because I am enmeshed by thousands of anonymous, efficient enterprises. This reasoning probably accounts for the eight ingredients selected for Howie’s list of major advances in his life: 1. shoe-tying 2. pulling up on Xs 3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying 4. brushing tongue as well as teeth 5. putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed 6. discovering that sweeping was fun 7. ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make bill-paying more efficient 8. deciding that brain cells ought to die (16) In this limited resume of accomplishments, three of the eight center upon tying shoes. Some are satisfying, yet dismissible, gimmicks—minor finds instead of major advances, at any rate— yet the reader is advised that number five, a discovery that made him feel like Balboa or Copernicus (51), struck him as proof that he had reached adulthood. The last entry introduces a som-

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ber, philosophical note, but the heaviness lifts when he learns that “connections continued to proliferate in the midst of neural carnage,” which is to say that Howie need not fear for his obsessive faculties. To be sure, the epiphany ignites a sizeable set of correlations of its own.14 Howie’s documentary zeal for “the rhythms of microhistory” (47) represents not only his indulgence of private pleasures but also his concern for the protection of the daily terrain, which is continually being altered or eroded by the latest innovations, or by neglect. Milk bottles, paper stoppers, library card shutter-box stampers—these and innumerable other particulars are endangered species. Some are already extinct, as any parent will realize when his or her child looks quizzically at a 45-rpm record or, for that matter, a stack of IBM computer punch cards, so swift are the forces of technological evolution. In other words, an author is an archaeologist, a folklorist, a curator, and a conservationist as well; they are all, in a sense, artists on whom nothing should be lost. Call the strategy prenostalgic: cherished for their evanescence, things are missed prior to their disappearance, mourned in their protracted procession out of stores, kitchens, desks, routines.15 Not that Howie does not falter on occasion in this faith. He admits that it was somewhat more difficult for him to take the theories of certain distinguished philosophers (Spinoza, Hobbes, and Wittgenstein) seriously in view of their sometimes embarrassing or downright queer pastimes, an admission that suggests that Howie may be tarnished by some of the peculiarities he confesses about himself. But his craving for detail always revives him and makes even inglorious facts worth having (121).

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Whether by instinct or design, Howie is compiling an anthology of the subtle trinkets and behaviors of the age. There still remains the question of whether elaborate considerations of microhistory come at the expense of macrohistorical motions. Philip E. Simmons writes that Baker’s version of the past in The Mezzanine is so exclusively personal and mundane “that any larger historical frame . . . is gestured at only through the irony of its absence.”16 For Simmons, Baker’s novel stands as a model of the postmodern historical imagination, a phrase that, by virtue of the purging of more profound context, contradicts itself: postmodern play and disdain for hierarchy may jeopardize more profound historical impact. There is no denying that whereas modern literature typically bewails the spread of mass culture and the accompanying diminution of meaningful selfhood—Simmons’s example is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer—Baker celebrates the rule of surfaces, tending to define history as the history of purchases. By way of modification, it could be said that The Mezzanine does not feature the vanquishment of historical nostalgia, as Simmons contends, so much as it alters its course; it does not eliminate depth per se but posits “deep surfaces.” Howie is fascinated by the shine off the escalator’s black handrail, but he also plumbs the mechanical, aesthetic, and historical networks where that pleasure is harbored. Simmons is right in his conclusion that “the narrator of The Mezzanine makes a home in the heart of the mass cultural machine”—a residence Simmons finds politically unsatisfying, its literary charms notwithstanding.17 Yet it should be noted that while Howie is a quintessential consumer, he is not an unreflective automaton. The investment

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of emotion within immediate, local products is, from one point of view, “ironized complicity with a dominant culture whose own relentless self-ironizing is a necessary hegemonic strategy.”18 Indeed, such an interpretation involves the comedic ingenuity of the novel in the general cooptation of the reader, who presumably languishes, smiles in recognition, and dreams contentedly away, politically inert. From another point of view, public conviction may begin in private rumination, by which logic the loves and losses traced in The Mezzanine, by enabling people— readers, office workers—to appreciate some personal stakes in historical forces, may raise consciousness. Thus the novel may be redeemed as a generative site for ultimate political efficacy. As he goes “antiquing” through the workplace, Howie is moved to rhapsody as well as to elegy. A Proustian whiff of a box of Band-Aids or a bottle of Caladryl sets him vigorously off. He appreciates the wedding of function and aesthetics represented by grooves—in records, on the ice rink, along the underside of blue whales—or delivers a paeon to the enchantments of perforation: Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired white pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber. Yet do we have national holidays to celebrate its development? Are festschrift volumes published honoring the dead great in the field? People watch the news every night like robots, thinking they are

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learning about their lives, never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported, on the zip-lock perforated top of the ice cream carton, in reply coupons bound in magazines and on the “Please Return This Portion” edging of bill stubs, on sheets of postage stamps and sheets of Publishers Clearing House magazine stamps, on paper towels, in rolls of plastic bags for produce at the supermarket, in strips of hanging file-folder labels. . . . Why isn’t the pioneer of perforation chiseled into the facades of libraries, along with Locke, Franklin, and the standard bunch of French Encyclopedists? They would have loved him! (74–75) Epochal, indeed, and lying close to the nose. Why reserve elegies for the passing of presidents when old-style vending machines are nearly extinct? “And when two years later I walked down that hall and discovered that the cigarette machine—the primary trunk of original innovation from which all the rest of vendition had branched, closely allied with the clinking Newtonianism of the gumball machine and the parking meter— had been replaced . . . I grieved piecemeal over the loss once a day for about a week” (80). Continuity nourishes. Howie sees it operating in the cardboard backings of the shirts he gets back from the laundry— cardboard backings like the ones his father used to get and which he gave his son to draw on; through “proper” doorknobs on contemporary doors he validates his memory of his parents’ house. In this way, in terms of the trappings of an individual life, the quaint can be climactic. When applied with deliberation, such

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nostalgia is an act of conscience. So it is fitting that when Howie finally opens the paperback he has been carrying about—the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius—he finds himself at a passage he is anxious to refute: “Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes” (120). Admittedly, he is attracted to the book for at least two reasons: it comprises the thoughts of a man extraordinarily willing to open his inner life to view, and the paperback itself has an alluring vinyl-like gloss.19 But The Mezzanine is nothing if not a campaign against the maladies of transience and triviality. The novel approaches what must be the acme of self-consciousness when Howie establishes a preliminary chart of his thought frequencies (127–28). There are some reminders of penchants that he has already discussed, revealed here as more or less regular topics for him; there are also some new insights to ponder, including three telling references to issues of friendship (in descending order of frequency, that he has no friends, that he envies people who sustain friendships, and that prospective friends are unworthy of him). If Marcus Aurelius is right in counseling his readership that the time is ripe for philosophy, it is a strange version that Howie engages in here, one that, presented as a list, seems more like accounting or personal hygiene. There is at once something tragic and intrepid about his noting that shoelaces will likely rank higher than Marcus Aurelius when all is said and done. Meanwhile, it is left to each reader to decide which is more unsettling: that on the Howie-scale Immanuel Kant rates on average only half a thought per year and is outstripped by the smell of dry-cleaning fluid and zip-lock tops, or that Earl Butz has all of them beat.

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As the poet Albert Goldbarth suspects, although “it isn’t easy to walk through a day of fists and kisses, paychecks, diaperstains, tirejacks, and our building block aspirations with the mind fixed on infinity,” it may come to pass that “infinity isn’t discovered along a timeline of gathering progress, but by certain sensibility, no matter where it lives.”20 That sensibility is at once benevolent and profligate, in that it discovers illumination and bestows concern everywhere. Were Howie to turn his attentions to heraldry, the closing image of the novel could adorn his coat of arms: “A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside” (133). The Mezzanine is chock-full of slum honey industriously derived from humble fascinations, and it is all the more delicious for the surprising places in which it is hidden.

CHAPTER THREE

Room Temperature

Baker’s second novel actually screws the reader’s concentration still tighter by moving from the occupational—the outer world, however eccentrically pressurized its itemized contents may be in The Mezzanine—to the domestic. In Room Temperature Baker continues the pioneering empiricism of his first novel but under greater confinement. With a kind of Beckettian groping for “lessness,” Baker further abridges the brief action of The Mezzanine, so that in Room Temperature not even so modest an adventure as Howie’s lunch-hour outing is allowed to interfere with the luxurious business of meditation. (In fact, the slim hour allotted to Howie, Mike’s fellow minutiae-man, has here been shaved to twenty-minutes.) Certainly the conditions are especially conducive for this narrator, Mike, who is a part-time technical writer and reviewer of television commercials living in the Boston area, to allow his mind to wander: bottle-feeding his six-month-old baby (affectionately nicknamed “Bug”) while his wife is away at work. As the title of the novel indicates, this fiction is predicated upon a relaxed status quo—Shakespearean “sessions of sweet silent thought,” as it were. Room Temperature depicts a gently punctuated doze. The baby’s soft clamor, the serenity of ritual, and the relaxed regard confined to a single familiar room unite to provide a haven for introspection and Baker’s trademark germination of humble observations, a situation that most parents appreciate as one of the basic, most grati-

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fying reinforcements of the nuclear family. Thus Mike has, if possible, greater room and leave to ruminate than did Howie, who, as the matchless curator of the miscellaneous, is readily perceived as Baker’s prototypical narrator.1 By recycling the general features of its precursor, Room Temperature serves as something of a sequel to The Mezzanine. Like Howie’s itinerary, Mike’s room is “astir with history.”2 Also like Howie, Mike is a habitual overdeterminer. Witness, for example, his excessive description of the sounds the floor makes beneath his rocking chair, complete with an array of calibrated hyphenations to simulate the teeter-totter action: “the nail-shank knuckle-pops, the load-bearing grunts, the Curly ‘nyuck-nyucks’ and the crow-barrings of polite inquiry that in forward and backward sequence made up a unique rhythmic bar code for every possible permutation of rocker placement, compass bearing, center of gravity, and level of humidity that could arise in the room” (9). Once again, contemplation laminates its objects as though preserving visions for deep storage. For validation of the way he manages not to squander any of the peanut butter in a jar or to neglect any precinct of bread as he spreads it, Mike refers the reader to the Kalahari Bushmen, “who had a use for every part of a felled antelope and ate even the wax in its ear canals” (97). His analytical procedures seem just as ravenous, just as relentless, as theirs or Howie’s. Furthermore, even though they tend to depart from Howie’s governing emphasis upon mechanical engineering and officerelated technology, the digressions in Room Temperature, winsomely daisy-chained by analogy—for instance, his baby’s breathing joins air pumps to Sir Robert Boyle’s General History

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of the Air, to vacuum-sealed peanut butter jars, to French horns, to secret interiors of pillows, to childhood breath-holding contests, to the repugnant effects of sucking Bic pens, to the “uvularly hoisted” voice of comedian Pee Wee Herman, to the aerodynamic properties of his pregnant wife’s body, to flatulence, to a dozen or so additional airy concerns raised by “the real pneumatics of the parental sensation” (11)—could have come from the same files out of which The Mezzanine was constituted. And yet, the reviews of Room Temperature were somewhat more uneven. “Where The Mezzanine was filled with breathtaking similes, this book . . . tends more toward the labored discussion of similes,” wrote Wendy Lesser in the New York Times Book Review. “Many of the endearing qualities of Mr. Baker’s earlier narrator—his intense inward focus, his philosophical dilettantism, his willingness to expose himself to our ridicule, his physical awkwardness—have here become irritating characteristics.” Lesser mourned the absence of particularized context in this case, whose historical embeddedness she thought that Baker unwisely sacrificed for the universal appeal of paternal love.3 Michael Dirda was also equivocal: while he found Room Temperature “altogether more lighthearted, airier” than The Mezzanine and cheered it for being “a show-stopping coloratura aria made up of the quirks of memory and the quiddities of daily life,” he concluded that it was finally “less sheerly innovative than its more clinical, austere predecessor.”4 Leaving aside Dirda’s suggestion that solemnity lies at the core of a novel that sacralizes desk supplies, the reference to “aria” is key. For one thing, several of the conjunctions among Mike’s thoughts have to do with music. Bach, Debussy, and Joni

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Mitchell are particular touchstones, representing a range of taste and acumen that typically characterizes Baker’s writing; also befitting Baker’s well-established impatience with conventional hierarchies, their variations earn no better than a draw when they compete in Mike’s mind with the evolution of peanut butter jar styles. Yet while Mike’s silent disquisitions on behalf of typography, model airplanes, and nose-picking buoy the book as Howie’s did The Mezzanine, the real musical equivalent of interest here is probably the fugue.5 Mike introduces the relevance of the fugue as a structural metaphor almost immediately during his prolonged description of the sweater that his wife Patty had given him for his birthday: “a brown monster stout with various fugal inversions and augmentations of the standard cable knit, and consequently glutted with insulational dead air, its corona of lighter outer fibers frizzing out three-eighths of an inch or more from the slubbed and satisfying clutchable weave that formed the actual structure underneath, so that the sweater, along with me, its wearer, appeared to fade without a demonstrable outer boundary into the rest of the room, as tuning forks or rubber bands will seem in their blurred vibration to transform their material selves into the invisible sound they generate” (4–5). The description continues for another one hundred and fifty words or so, but the interrelatedness of the fugue, the sweater, and the book has already been illustrated. “Inversions and augmentations” play off the regular weave in a contrapuntal rhythm of departure and return, randomness and regulation.6 When strings of ideas stretch from, say, lullabies to rocking chair rhythms to buggy whips to bicycle tires to traffic efficiency, it is hard to complain too much about the bumpiness of so dizzyingly clever

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a journey. If the “irregular topography of the floor” on which Mike’s chair rocks delivers a pleasing sensation to the baby in his arms, why should the reader be surprised that a “lumpily tangible chiasmus, rather than simple back-and-forth oscillation” can make for an enticing ride, too? This tendency logically derives from the creed with which Baker culminates his essay “Changes of Mind”: “I want each sequential change of mind in its true, knotted, clotted, viny multifariousness, with all of the colorful streamers of intelligence still taped on and flapping in the wind.”7 Mike’s depiction of his sweater enables Baker to entertain a lightly self-deprecating definition of the way his work is “glutted with insulational dead air” (Lesser’s deference to his “breathtaking” performance is ironically deflated here) and of how it goes “frizzing out.” These comments anticipate reviews that will worry about the threadbare plot in Room Temperature, but the declared effect of that “frizzing out” is not the evaporation but the natural expansion of consequence—a haloing effect, perhaps—as subtle vibrations enlarge the room as they are absorbed into it. As she drinks her formula, the baby lets her free hand rove “in search of textures” (5): she finds her father’s consoling sweater, which happens to consolidate symbolically that very penchant. Perhaps it is fitting that the squirmy infant is nicknamed “Bug,” which could mean to bother (Mike is exceptionally “bothered” throughout this narrative, of course) and to wiretap (as Mike plugs into reveries). Like father, like daughter. Mike’s feeling that “everything in my life seemed to enjamb splicelessly into everything else” (92) puts the book’s philosophy plainly even as it may deceive the reader as to the density of

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the associative circuitry in the novel. Significantly, this realization arrives during Mike’s forecast of a potentially “statusraising” study of the history of the comma.8 In a representative descant, Mike slathers the comma’s “oasis of respiration” (yet another approved instance of atmospheric interests in Room Temperature) with likenesses. Commas “recalled the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiraling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas, half-spent tubes of antifungal ointment, falcon or airplane wings in cross section,” all in graceful contrast to “the Euclidean austerity of the full point, or period” (66). Because it testifies to ongoingness, because it is the principal mark of the conductive tissue of language, and because it anonymously sustains the ramifying, qualifying, unspooling continuities among thoughts, it is no wonder that the comma is dear to his heart.9 (Indeed, several of the novel’s featured topics—musical instruments, nostrils, airplanes—are gathered in this paragraph to honor “this civilized shape.”) Not for him the “stiff-jointedness” of prose held forever in march formation, much less an imagination stripped of variety (71). This comma-morated avidity for connection is further realized by the fact that there are so many surrogates for Proust’s madeleine to ignite the studied dream. In Room Temperature, hosted by another Baker narrator who is “primed for awe” (52), any touch can strike hidden amplitudes, and any casual interest can inspire a glittering spawn of relations. Mike returns to the notion in earnest when, exchanging listening to Debussy for actually carrying a tuning fork with him “in order to make random objects amplify its unworldly A,” he discovers, “my life, like the flaring sheet of water that once in a

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while will unexpectedly fly up out of the sink if, as you are rinsing some dishes, you allow the tap’s strong singular flow to fall accidentally onto a spoon licked clean and left there earlier so that the water is U-turned without an appreciable diminution of force by that single small soffit—that my life, my energies, colliding with the silver spoon of overindulged distraction, had sent me since then in a spray of dissipative directions” (113). Once again, Mike insists that diversity derives from a “strong singular flow.” If the novel is guilty of “diffusion,” as some reviewers regretfully claim, its stitched recurrences imply that it is, in keeping with the fugal conception, a supervised diffusion, all of whose imaginative promiscuities turn out to be bracketed in Room Temperature by initial and ending allusions to fraction marks on glass jars. And hence, another definition of “fugue,” which has to do with a pathological amnesiac condition in which an apparently conscious person later has no recollection of his actions, proves ironic in the case of both The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, in the sense that both are ardent campaigns on behalf of retention. So goes fascination’s Butterfly Effect, as one may be borne (or born) backwards by the tide of linked thoughts, or carried forward, as small intrigues incite scholastic debaucheries. Or, to employ an analogy from another branch of science, Mike believes that the DNA of one’s lifetime mental experience is such “that with a little concentration one’s whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would

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proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest—every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness—could be at least glancingly covered” (41). Actually, given Mike’s readiness to confess at length about his least savory habits and private crimes against hygiene, the “cloning” Mike imagines would be even more comprehensive than the ambition based on “autobiographical interest” would require. It must be noted, however, that Mike develops this belief with reference to his memory of a picture he had seen as a child of a frog replicated out of “idioplasm sucked out of a single intestinal cell of another frog.” Unfortunately, impressive as it may be to deduce the self from a single cell, the yield may suffer from so unnatural a procedure. In the case of the frog experiment, the artificially created duplicate was undeniably “complete and froglike,” but “it wasn’t an exact replica: it had a disturbing and somehow gastrointestinal pallor in its mottling, and an unhealthy, pear-shaped, I-was-raised-in-a-petri-dishand-know-little-of-mud-and-reeds type of body that betrayed its origins” (41). In other words, not only did the choice of fundamental cell affect the whole proceedings, but also the contrived conditions under which creation was mimicked inevitably resulted in a diminished thing.10 One could say that any story must begin somewhere, choose its focuses, usher some details into prominence while relegating others to the background or omitting them entirely. Every story is a distortion. The ultrathin plot and hyperprecise observations of Room Temperature, instead of overcoming this injunction, ironically accent its force. Especially when he tries in vain to ascertain something that his wife is thinking or composing with-

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out asking her outright, Mike himself defers to the inability to know or tell it all; there are going to be “negative spaces” in the account, as well as the occasional “mild loss of contentious momentum” (21). Similarly, he does not purge his opening metaphorical flourish of objections or disclaimers: “Half a mile away, some dark birds, not gulls or crows I don’t think, were on their way toward Boston. Their flight reminded me strongly of something . . . ” (4). Stumbling like this is very much out of character for one usually so deft and beaming about his coinages. Indeed, those same birds are almost instantly redeemed by figures: “I realized that the movement of their wings as they turned this way and that, negotiating big chunks of wind, was remarkably similar to the flapping of a small dog’s ears as it ran at full speed in excited zigzags across a field. I was extremely pleased that the sight of several far-off birds could remind me of the yapping frolicsomeness of a puppy—it seemed a tricky lateral sort of comparison, in which the two terms threaten to be insufficiently disparate in some respects for the connection to work properly, as if you said that the sun was in some way or other like the moon. Other birds, much farther away, rested stilly against the haze like flakes of ground pepper” (4). The reader notices that Mike’s last simile, partaking of the advice against being too predictable and “insufficiently disparate,” is self-consciously, even conventionally, poetic (“rested stilly against the haze”) and that it does provide a greater surprise in the comparison of terms (the birds compared to flakes of ground pepper). No less important in regard to a novel that is predicated on the artistic legitimacy of the most typical of activities, the simile relates the sublime to the domestic. The reader may think of what Keats does with his

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nightingale or Stevens with his pigeons in Sunday Morning— and here is Baker, urging his birds toward the kitchen condiments. However, figurative inventiveness alone does not warrant the understandings it spurs. Admonitions against absolute faith in metaphorical associations have a strong pedigree in American literature. Mike’s comment about the “tricky lateral sort of comparison” he has been coaxing from his setting echoes William Carlos Williams’s suspicion of “an easy lateral sliding,” which, by overestimating “the associational or sentimental value,” threatens to blind us to the unique character of an object—its “peculiar perfection” as a thing immune to coincidence or equivalence.11 By this reasoning, swaddling a given item in correlations the way little Bug is snuggled by his dream-drunk Dad could smother instead of sustain it; gilt may not only cheapen but choke the lily. A related point is made by Robert Frost in “Education by Poetry” when, even as he appreciates the qualities of the vehicle, he counsels against relying exclusively upon it for transportation: with metaphor, you need to know “how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down.” 12 Early in Room Temperature, Mike explains about his youthful hybridization of model airplanes with portions of model cars, an effective analogy for the harsh, innovative yoking on which poetry routinely depends. (In the Machinery section of The Size of Thoughts, Baker further develops the seductive properties of model airplanes in an essay exclusively devoted to them.) For Mike, reassembly heightens the affection, for the imperfections at the point of fusion inspire “a bond stronger than mere possession” (29); it may be said that those metaphors whose

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linkages are strained are sometimes the ones dearest to their maker, for whom love drowns out the rasps. But selfcongratulation must face down the willful pillaging and random damage done to the true nature of the thing at hand. In short, Mike has to temper any confidence coming from his working as a technical writer for a medical imaging company—the pun offers a wholesome spin on the lust for imaging—with an awareness of the renegade properties of images. (Meanwhile, his wife works for an advertising firm, symbolizing, perhaps, if not an antidote to Mike’s poetic temperament, a counterbalancing at-homeness in a more prosaic district of the marketplace.) Happily, Room Temperature breeds more optimistic linkages to mitigate the artificial frog, the most telling being the mobile that hangs before Mike and the baby. A loose amalgamation of components that still retain their individual identities and significance, the mobile may be viewed as a metaphor for the novel’s fixed yet flexible pattern. To return to the concept of the Butterfly Effect, Mike considers how breath he had released many moments and pages ago only now demonstrates its effects upon the mobile; in fact, seeing the mobile move, he has to remind himself how the motivation for that response originated. This casual example of distant, delicate causation gives him a useful model for how the disparate constituents of his imagination revive, coalesce, and otherwise color one another over time. Baker has stated that the only real structure he has is a loopy “nonstructure” whose recombinant effects are not contained by strict linearity or predictability. He trusts instinct: “The only plot I find satisfying is: what previous thoughtlet led to a mental climate that would potentially give rise to another minor

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thought? I don’t have another way of proceeding, so it doesn’t feel uncomfortable at all. It probably should, but it simply feels like the only way to go”.13 Furthermore, it would be difficult to invent a better manifestation of poetry’s combination of form and randomness, integration and discreteness, purpose and playfulness than the mobile.14 And when Mike considers how Bug is his civilizing force, his comma, who “had introduced a quiet, golden, shade-pulled moment of retrospective suspension in my life that elevated the whole undistinguished serial succession of years that preceded it into something that made sense, something with the unity and introductory springiness of the first clause in a complete sentence” (76–77), he unwittingly (if ever an unwitting interval were able to invade such a narrative) summons together several of the novel’s landmark subjects via the traits they share—suspensiveness, elevation, springiness, and flexible unity. There is also meaning to be found in the bits chosen to constitute the mobile: quality-control inspection slips gleaned from his belongings. Here, too, we see testimonials to regimentation salvaged from that context and disrupted, or translated into something personal, changeable, even frivolous. We may be reminded of Howie’s urinating on the company premises in The Mezzanine, which gave him comparable enjoyment. Perhaps the manner in which Mike is struck by the oddly subjunctive quality of the technical writing that one finds on such slips, produced by the “demimonde” of “people who wanted their language to free itself of all messy contingency and rise into the timeless sphere of pure procedural abstraction” (14), inspires his own amputation of these signs from their signifying duties, which transforms

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them from ordinary messages into household art. There is a fictional analogy available here as well: the way a successful novel balances order and surprise, instruction and delight, the mobile appears to have struck a pleasing harmony. A suspensive memorial, it moves almost imperceptibly with the textures of the air, much as the chosen miscellaneous concerns of Baker’s novels turn slowly in the mind. In fact, coasting along those invisible channels, the mobile returns the reader to the novel’s quoted excerpts from Boyle’s History of the Air regarding its “elastical particles” and “associated effluviums of a multitude of corpuscles of very differing natures” (52). At the same time, the mobile correlates with the alchemical seal of Hermes, which serves as progenitor for Mike’s glosses on diaphragms, jars, and frozen peas. A “separate world, with its own atmospheric effects of fluxion and refluxion and calcination” (75), could also approximate the mobile’s negotiation between motion and stability, and, arguably, the self-contained microcosm of the novel itself. The motions of the mobile inspire Mike to recall, among other things, the early days of his marriage and to wonder how accurately he and Patty might be able to guess at one another’s thoughts. Of course, whereas Howie was an inveterate loner in The Mezzanine, as hermetic in his preoccupations as the vacuum-sealed peanut butter in the glass jars that Mike prefers, Mike is a family man. The question arises as to how relationships, which require reciprocal appreciations, will be affected when they include a man so regularly prone to reverie. As one comes to learn in Room Temperature, there is ample reason to be hopeful, for Patty is compatibly alert to the same sorts of things that absorb her husband. One very hopeful sign is that it is she who configured the mobile out of the inspection slips,

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thereby adding a pragmatic, permanent improvement to Mike’s simple collection (15). Although she is chiefly available to us in a few snatches of dialogue, she does seem to have in common with Mike a talent for creative diction. We get hints of it in another “fluid achievement” (36) of hers: the cottage industry of inventing suggestive pet names for Mike, such as “Honeyhonker,” “Snakeboy,” and “Spank-victim,” not to mention her own capacity to achieve an “organasm,” a word that sends her husband spiraling into sexual and linguistic fantasy (85). (These endearments presage even more outrageous verbal inventiveness visited on sexual acts and apparatus in The Fermata.) One of her other coinages—having to go “big job,” which is her euphemism for a prolonged trip to the bathroom—thrills him with intimacy and supplies “another instance of why I needed her in my life” (79). Like Mike, Patty has the gift of closing the valves of her attention, so that Mike’s vigilant efforts to divine the emotional content of her writing in bed by the sounds of her pen across the page do not interrupt her. His referring to her insularity as a “bead curtain” (16) hints that it is a separation whose elegance he respects rather than resents. She is also as conspicuously attuned to colors as he is. The pleasure Mike takes in rubber door stoppers is made all the more acute by the assurance that Patty would have a name for that particular dark-red that they share with gas station air hoses, finger-thimbles, and toilet plungers (25). In addition, “celadon” provides them both with mystery and mutual nostalgia: She put [the new towels] on the towel rack and held the celadon washcloth to them, and asked me to come look.

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Didn’t the colors together against the white tiles remind me of the time we visited Anita in Los Angeles and stayed for two nights in that little motel with a balcony? The clean feeling of the colors together—the sense of sunlit balcony stucco and cloudless blue sky? I said it did. She came over and kissed me on the neck noisily, and I added: “Ah—you know, the pink of the hickey you are giving me plus the pale gray of my T-shirt remind me of that pleasant half hour with you in Bombay, when the junks drifted against the cool walls of the Jewish quarter and the Kaboulis limped in the lengthening shadows of the Hakalinki trees.” (29) Theirs is a marriage of true minds and parallel idiosyncracies. The competition proves to be a reinforcement, an exercise in novelty to refresh their love, which Patty’s gentle remonstrance (that “hickey” was not a word they used) only increases.15 Other subtle tests of their rightness for one another are likewise reassuring. They have made a practice of exchanging little toys as gifts, counting on congruent tastes in kitsch. At one juncture, while he conducts an exploration of one of her remarkable nostrils with the tip of his tongue, she is focused on the color swirls injected into a Superball. Throughout the novel we are let in on all manner of strange, and occasionally repellant, confidences, as Mike and Patty trade unsavory secrets regarding everything from nosepicking to masturbation. It is as though they were dedicating their marriage to putting together a concordance of one another’s every taste and habit, and the typically clinical nature of their exposures excites more magic than disgust (88–89).

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Basically, Mike is a fellow fortunate enough to have found a woman willing to hear him regale her about the connections between drinking coffee and worsening sinuses, if only he will listen to her confession regarding how inspecting interior decoration compilations or white-sale circulars brings on the need to move her bowels (80–81). Nor does the birth of Bug constrain them. Quite the contrary, with the baby comes a wealth of new products to savor, like a nose aspirator bulb. Better yet, his daughter’s just-hatched wonder about things—Mike especially treasures the joy she takes in the personal ventilation jets above their seats in an airplane, which tidily coincides with a current interest of his in respiration in general—validates his own quiet delights and promises that this value will be transferred from one generation to the next. Evidently, Mike came by this inheritance in much the same way: “It was obvious to me when I described them to Patty that these sandwiches were called graveyards because the strips of bacon suggested bodies buried in the Nilotic ooze of the peanut butter; but at the time I never speculated on the logic of their name, which, thanks to my father’s ability to convey his enthusiasm about everything he ate or did or thought about, I learned early enough for it to seem perfectly suited to its referent as broom or road or envelope” (96). And so an atmosphere of peace and contentment prevails over Room Temperature. While Mike is mildly troubled, like Howie before him, by the sense that he has settled for a life of limited dimensions, he can be consoled by Baker’s calculation that “The Size of Thoughts” is “about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden

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pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product.”16 Taken together, The Mezzanine and Room Temperature constitute a two-volume guide to the spiky marvels of Lilliput, which in Baker’s America are shown to await the tuned-in reader everywhere.

CHAPTER FOUR

U and I: A True Story

Although the Random House dust jacket lists U and I: A True Story as nonfiction, Galen Strawson’s evaluation is categorized with the fiction reviews in the Times Literary Supplement.1 The confusion is deliberate, and it is crystallized in the subtitle of the book. The common phrase “A True Story,” which is typically asserted innocently enough as a means of urging the audience that the narrative to come is authentic and, thus, to be taken all the more seriously, is really an oxymoron charged with philosophical perplexity exceeding the shelving difficulty Baker imagines U and I will occasion when it arrives in bookstores.2 For it must be admitted that storification, while it may intersect with verifiable, extratextual experience, abides by different mandates than truth does—if, indeed, there is such a thing as truth apart from the narrative conditioning that organizes and conveys it. Although the novels that preceded it are dominated by characters whose quirks and biographies have a good deal in common with Baker’s own, U and I officially provides him with a first-person forum. Within the book itself Baker introduces himself coyly, referring to his narrative alter ego as being “really and truly me this time, though only a tiny transverse slice of me” (86). Paradoxically, whereas the two self-avowed fictions leading up to U and I consistently tempered novelistic abundance with fanatical precision, this “true account” of the author’s intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic affinity with John Updike rigorously avoids precise reference to Updike’s fiction as a means

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of verifying Baker’s memory (or, in deference to the disclaimer that dogs this “true story” from the start, that of Baker’s proxy) of outstanding quotations. Therefore, both of the principals mentioned in Baker’s title are filtered through overt contrivance, neurotic misgiving, and strategic self-awareness. Like the stylistic “cloggers” that are alluded to in the Introduction and that Baker champions rather than excuses—they do not pollute passages so much as justify them—these filters “purify” the writing as “unlooked-for seepage points” are revealed. After all, when Baker declares the value of “blowing up” narrative cloggers, the phrase could refer to enlarging them (as in blowing up photographs) as easily as it could to obliterating them.3 In response to the pipe-rooter’s suggestion to Baker that the most efficient way to flush out “the roil of roots and black tampon-fruits and pinkly prosperous earthworms” from his mother-in-law’s sewer system is to first cut the strings off (73–74), Ross Chambers contends that Baker is loath to do so precisely because his writing “aims rather to be all strings,” or self-justified digressions.4 As Baker himself puts it, “To the worms it was not obstructive, it wasn’t revolting, it was life itself” (74). And given Baker’s insistence on the rewards of dedicated contemplation, his earthworms and his bookworms concur: complication is not an obstruction but a luxury. Meanwhile, by sacrificing accurate substantiation of his references to Updike’s prose, Baker means to treat memory as a creative strategy, not just as a retrieval system. “After a certain point, the management of one’s own past vocabulary, the avoidance of repetition, becomes a major burden,” Baker writes, with an eye to the established technique of The Mezzanine and Room

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Temperature. “Your earlier formulations become contingent influences—and they hunt you down” (74–75). For any writer, “getting the hang of it” (U and I 3) could also lead to getting hung up in one’s established manner; disrupting method may help to ensure novelty. As Baker admits, when one consults a muse, he invites twin perils: the sacrifice of originality (“He has gone dry”) and the discovery of his imitative debt (“He has taken to larceny”). Baker compromises here by grappling with an angel who, although attributed, is left unverified by proper, systematic investigation. This odd practice affords him space; or, as an anonymous reviewer for the New Yorker stated the basic premise of U and I, “Out of the books of others we sift a book of our own, wherein we read the lessons we need to hear.”5 Baker woos an Updike whom he has tailored to his intentions and imagined as reassuring to his career. Regarding the creative process, it is not only inevitable but essential that one’s beginnings not know one’s ends. The first chapter of the nine-chapter gestation that constitutes U and I traces the somewhat accidental stages of its conception: out of post–Room Temperature anxiety sprouted Baker’s decision to write an obituary for Donald Barthelme, which shifted course towards Updike and metamorphosed over many weeks into the presiding impulse of this book. Among the jettisoned stages in the planning was a traditional critical study of Updike, with its thesis-mapped itinerary and library odor. Instead, U and I evokes the ripple effects of Updike, that source of “constant subauditional speculations” (10), on and in Baker himself. Baker sheepishly suggests “memory criticism,” “phrase filtration,” and “closed book examination” as categories for slotting this quirky, flirta-

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tious volume, but repudiates each coinage before the reader becomes too enamored of it (87). How closely allied are Baker’s self-satisfied and sour moods regarding the efficacy of his method in U and I! For example, riffling through his few dozen index cards holding recollected phrases from Updike, he first congratulates himself on one’s particular fertility, which inspires him “to feel that I have dots left to connect, and that I am crisply advancing the cause of self-knowledge”; then he immediately inserts a deflating correction of the quotation that had so stimulated him until its inaccuracy was exposed (92). Faith in “remindability,” the continual pricking of the imagination witnessed in The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, remains in evidence, but it is now regularly opposed by the author’s anxiety over “totaled recall” (33). Baker’s goal is not to coerce or subpoena his man but to trust him to visit as he will: “As with nearby friends we seldom see because their very proximity removes the pressing need to drop by, so the living writer’s continuing productivity dulls any urgent feelings we might have about our filling in our unread gaps in his oeurvre. . . . No, I couldn’t possibly read Updike chronologically through right now: it would irreparably harm the topography of my understanding of him” (32). In a way reminiscent of the idolatrous “assault” of Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman upon the shadowy E. I. Lonoff, Baker, too, may be petitioning a Great Writer for “moral sponsorship” and, ultimately, for “the magical protection of his advocacy and his love.”6 So it is Baker’s inner weather more than Updike’s books (many of which Baker confesses to having only glanced at or not having read at all) that serves as the sustaining context for the “Updike” of U and I— that quotation-braced proper noun standing for one road among “the trembly idiosyncratic paths

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each of us may trace in the wake of the route that the idea of Updike takes through our consciousness” (46). Obeying this logic, one of the phrases Baker especially cherishes out of Updike—“vast, dying sea,” which Updike used in the story “Incest” to refer to the evaporation of poetic experience over time —applies equally well to the erosion of Baker’s experience of Updike himself, until what remains of the Master are some signature lines (often as not misremembered or misplaced), rhythmic echoes, and the hard, ineradicable fact of his venerable, obstructive stature. Indeed, Baker returns to repair the wording or origin of several of his attributions after checking them out, including the beloved “vast, dying sea.” Each bracketed alteration further exposes the imperfections in Baker’s memory even as it polishes the manner of his deference. Staunchly committed to the subjective and the roundabout, U and I is part tradesman’s notebook, part worshiper’s hymnal, part stalker’s manual. A disciple on the make, its composer alternately plays Boswell to Updike’s Johnson and Sancho to his Quixote. As these equivalents suggest, and as Baker regularly concedes throughout the book, Updike is too rapid, naturally graceful, and commodious a talent for Baker to emulate, much less overtake in terms of the “terrifying mastery” of the word (25). Taking Updike’s prints over the course of the book threatens Baker with a sense of his irremediable secondariness at least as often as it testifies to his belief that he should be Updike’s next golfing partner (a distinction received instead by Tim O’Brien, whose National Book Award, the slighted Baker rationalizes, accorded him that priority). Ironically, while Baker accuses the Rochester audience at an Updike guest reading of exhibiting “the cheapest, lowest lust for proximity” (147), his

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own angling for acknowledgment from the writer he worships is hardly exempt from that charge. The daydream turns even more bizarre as Baker’s wondering whether he might find a way of infiltrating Updike’s writing devolves into the fear that Updike might somehow abscond with a casual comment of Baker’s and employ it in a way superior to any Baker could have developed (54–58). Paradoxically, pursuing Updike makes the younger author feel meaner yet more possessive of his hoard than the expansive Updike. This feeling is confirmed when Baker chides Updike (in chapter 7, for example, regarding what he feels to be Updike’s unfair scolding of Nabokov and his rather insensitive fictionalization of his wife in “Wife-Wooing”), which has the quality of the child tugging petulantly at his father’s pants leg. Meanwhile, although he renounces hagiography—“people would probably rather hear me be smartass, thereby digging my own grave and taking old Updike down a peg or two at the same time,” he reasons, “than hear me be grateful and woozily admiring” (110)—he anoints Updike a genius and grants him the privileges pertaining to it. In particular, he admits that a major writer like Updike “exists above the threshold of assent” (123), which renders Baker’s occasional cavils points of interest only. From that vantage, presumably, Updike is out of range of homilies, stealth, quibbles, or spitballs. Upon inspection, Baker’s anti-research approach also strikes its originator as questionable. He concedes that it has an “atomistically image-hoarding” quality, and he admits that the editor at the Atlantic to whom he initially pitched the idea called it “creepy.” Still, there is a certain satisfaction to be gained from that first phrase, for “atomistically image-hoarding” neatly sizes

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up Baker’s own technique in his first two books. Other parallels between Baker and his unwitting host also fortify his belief that the legitimacy of his writing U and I is founded on more than simple obsession, and backward rewiring of “high-voltage parallelisms” to link faith to necessity is a relatively easy bit of engineering (105). For example, he quickly recruits Updike into his belief that building suspense in fiction is less critical than keeping alive the reader’s desire to keep reading, a belief for which the books of both authors supply good evidence (121). There is more to buttress Baker’s claim to affiliation here: both men acknowledge strong maternal influences on their careers; both suffer from psoriasis and insomnia; both employ surprising diction, elaborate conceits, and “flea-grooming acuity” (51). Therefore, although Baker at the outset claims only an understudy’s role in the relationship, there is enough intersection between them to warrant his hope that influence may be precedent to confluence, and his arrogance and craving for “danger” finally quell whatever interference shame or modesty threatens to bring to the project (23). The rationale is almost gratuitous anyway, in that once he is seized by the necessity of writing on Updike, old standbys seem measly: “On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn’t enough” (22). Surely the breezy prewriting techniques he recounts at the beginning of U and I swiftly plunge Baker into self-consciousness. Insertions, parentheses, brackets, asides, glosses, and other assorted mental tributaries worm through the text, simultaneously effacing Baker and keeping him prominent. In fact, Self-Consciousness, which is the title of Updike’s memoirs, could easily serve as the title of this book, or any of Baker’s novels, for that matter, all of them so fastidious in their

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excavations. Baker fastens upon Updike’s knack for finding “those incidental forms that induce his verbal tact to close around some uncomfortable chip of reality even as it reaches to reawaken our dulled sense of why certain conventions . . . or stock phrases . . . exist and what limber life can be found in them” (25–26). It is a reasonable assessment of Baker’s ability as well. What is more, Updike’s memoirs definitely encompass some of the ingredients of Baker’s own imagination. “Alphabetical symbols stamped on blocks marked the dawn of my consciousness,” Updike remembers, “along with the smell of oilcloth, the extrafuzzy texture of the rug underneath the dining-room table, the eerie flexibility of my own hands, and the shine on other people’s shoes.”7 Comparable small particulars are fondled in The Mezzanine and Room Temperature; to be sure, the hypnotic shine off the escalator railing as The Mezzanine opens does coincide very closely to the effect of polished shoes Updike so fondly recollects. And there is an even more extraordinary coincidence yet to come: “Our waking thoughts tend to be absurd. I think about whether or not my fingernails need cutting and why my shoelaces keep coming untied.”8 In The Mezzanine, Howie regards his obsession with these “absurdities” as damning evidence against his amounting to much; but here, in the memoirs of the living writer to whom Baker grants chief magnitude, and published, moreover, in the same year as The Mezzanine, is the same preoccupation. No wonder Baker is stung by Updike’s suggestion in one of his book reviews that some writers “resort to magnification in an effort to find events and objects that haven’t already been described to death” (170). On the one hand, the dismissal seems to implicate Baker; on the other hand, as the

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injured younger author implies, Updike himself might have trouble escaping that indictment. The reader can confidently assume that these connections would be inspiring to Baker, who, in spite of acknowledging moments of derivation trauma, claims exemption from Harold Bloom’s diagnosis of “anxiety of influence.” To exemplify one “treacherously alluring . . . Updikeanism,” Baker notes “the characteristic early uncoupled-copula rhythm of ‘her blank seemed, in its blinkety blankness and blanketed blinkness, almost blonky in the late afternoon blonk’” (131). Fully aware of his addiction to Updike’s sonorities, Baker has to search not only through his own writings but through Updike’s as well in order to purge repetitions from current projects. If anything, Baker suffers from what could be termed “anxiety of affluence,” or the fear that Updike is too accomplished for him to undertake. For a writer best known, if he is known at all (celebrity has not nagged his “writhings” as they have Updike’s), for contemplating navels and the attending lint, this is ambitious stuff, and it has much to do with the circuitous approach Baker relies upon. The problem Updike presents, apart from the sheer number and excellence of his works, is his preemptive capacity. Where can Baker go with his prose that Updike has not already been to and departed from in style? What creative maneuvers of his have not been bettered or foreknown by that “totemic” figure? Significantly, Baker uses that term to describe Updike in one interview, yet he also says that it is “excitingly provocative to write a book about commonplace, familiar John Updike [italics added].”9 In U and I, he is evidently either paying a formal visit to a good friend or acting chummy with an eminent stranger.

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Whereas Updike’s obituary for Nabokov had been distinctly “unrivalrous” (6), Baker is chastened by the sense that rivalry flavors his whole enterprise; whereas Updike is “fluent without affectation” (5), Baker judges himself to be blatantly opportunistic, energized as he is by competition instead of condolence. He wonders if he can accommodate Updike or if he will vanish in the luster of the subject he has invited into his writing. He realizes that he cannot match Updike for the cleverness of his answers during interviews or for the size of his royalty checks, nor in what he views as Updike’s blasphemous capacity for making the world’s sexual foibles “light.”10 Compounding the intimidation Baker feels is the fact that Updike is still around to wince at his perceptions, contradict him publicly, bring suit against him, or, possibly worst of all, ignore him altogether. Writing on any well-established literary figure could relegate the critic to the role of caddy, whose chatter, however relevant or useful, might not be welcome anyway. Devotedness threatens self-eradication, and the critic who is eager to prove himself worthy of admission to that ambiguous club of prominent authors may evaporate from his own “awestruck, fanatical receptivity to his [subject’s] proprietary strengths” (8). An obituary for Donald Barthelme, with his fixed, accommodating corpus, would be challenge enough; at any rate, there is the consolation that Baker could not injure the dead with his commentary. There is little danger of penetrating his posthumous aura and little hope of doing more than add to it. It is a moot point: Updike, who requires “a novelistically inclusive response,” tasks him and scatters other hypothetical topics. As Baker lets his Updike notes simmer, his compulsion evolves into

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a reactive duty: “I would study my feelings for Updike while he was still in that phase of intellectual neglect that omnipresence and best-selling popularity inspire” (8). How much simpler it would have been to apostrophize, to address the safely distant and decorously deceased, Baker begins to regret, than to risk having one’s love not only unrequited but openly rebuked! But once he is bitten by the Updike “assignment,” he realizes that he hungers for the sort of judgment that, so he asserts, only a living writer could impose upon him. There must exist the potential for learning what the host-author thinks of him to sustain Baker for the length of a book. He needs to be pushed by the prospect of response, whether respectful or hostile, friendly or disdainful, to make a book like this more of a contest or a collaboration. In his review of U and I, Galen Strawson seems to miss, or to discount, the humor that consistently accompanies this logic, rejecting as well the “oddly smartass tone” of the book as unattractive and unredemptive. Yet the reader must note that “oddly smartass tone” is Baker’s own disparagement, which the reviewer borrows from the author’s attempt within his book to “come clean” even as he composes U and I (12). Strawson goes on to argue that “the I engulfs the U. In the end, U and I is almost all about Baker.”11 Again, that is part of the joke: Baker solicits Updike to feast upon him as best he can, as though consuming a venerable ancestor to absorb his wisdom. This is why his prospective wife’s remark that Baker is the smarter person but Updike is the superior writer is so consequential (132); certainly his mulling over her equivocation (her betrayal of adoration for a prospective husband, as he sees it) for many pages is meant to be at least as

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funny as it is poignant, as is the tortuous route Baker takes to confirm that he and Updike have an essential relationship instead of merely a notional one. Strawson’s calling the whole procedure “implausible” simply targets a point that Baker himself playfully and continually harries. Baker keeps on playing this kind of trump throughout U and I. He anticipates criticism by indicting his own motives, laying bare his own questions of inadequacy, dismantling his own stature, and calling attention to the cracks in the book’s governing procedure. Baker glorifies the poetics of clogged passages that the critic calls “lumpish.” When he parades his exploitation of Updike to indulge his own lyricism and, he candidly hopes, to further his own career, Baker bulls his way past charges of self-indulgence. If, as Strawson contends, Baker displaces Updike, it may be because either he is carried away by the force of his tangents (directions in the case of “seepage” being harder to predict than in rigorously horizontal narratives), or the raising of the “I” was the underlying motive all along, whereby the “U” functions as elegant scaffolding. How substantial, much less essential, the relationship with Updike is remains open to debate. Once one gets past the fantasies about golf and shoptalk, what does the reader have to go on? It should not be forgotten that Baker’s “thought frequency list” regarding Updike’s books shows him to have been less than assiduous in his reading, and Baker notes that Updike has not been mentioned by reviewers as an obvious influence upon his fiction. (Not surprisingly, the appearance of U and I has made reference to Updike in subsequent reviews of Baker’s later writings nearly unavoidable.) Baker traces his earliest written refer-

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ence to Updike to a journal excerpt composed when he was twenty-five, which notably concludes with the realization that Baker (“Harold” in the journal) is “defining himself on the losing side of the comparison.” Whereas Baker/Harold is committed to “a steeper, rockier slope,” Updike at the same age had already given ample evidence of his “special destiny” (106).12 Regardless, the full excerpt strikes Baker as undeniably derivative of Updike in any event. Then as now, the “smarter” writer chases the “better” one. Baker actually meets Updike only twice. The first time is at a book-signing, where he gingerly presses a copy of Rabbit Is Rich and tenuous fellowship (they have both written for the New Yorker) upon him. The second time is when Baker decides to “spring out in front of him” at a party following a Harvard-Yale game, and Baker, the Haverford graduate, lies by saying that he is, like Updike, a graduate of Harvard. The thinness of this second overture is especially galling in retrospect for several reasons. In addition to the clumsy lie—a cheap reflex or solicitous ploy—there is the fact that Updike graciously remembers an early piece of Baker’s as “a lovely thing” and encourages the younger writer to keep at it because he has “a gift” (164).13 Typically, Baker is buoyed only momentarily by his own ghost’s regard because he himself now feels the piece to be flawed, thereby dividing the two writers in the crucial matter of critical taste. And when Baker praises Updike in return, it feels something like belatedly throwing confetti after a departing ocean liner. “I am friends with Updike—that’s what I really feel,” Baker maintains, but with significant qualification that may be sufficient to undermine him: “I have, as I never had when I was a child, this

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imaginary friend I have constructed out of sodden crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness over an armature of remembered misquotation” (58–59). If the closed book examination that is U and I is effectively designed as a prank, the last two pages of the book deliver a punch line. Up to now, comparisons to Updike have proved shaky or have relegated Baker to second-ratedness. Even when Baker fantasizes about winning the National Book Award, he finds himself chewing over how to elude Updike’s examples in his published acceptance speeches. However, at the end of the book Baker reverses roles with Updike when he detects a possible instance of Updike’s translating a sliver from that 1981 story of Baker’s that he had admired into his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick (178–79). The passages, both having to do with a cellist’s callus, are very close, sufficient perhaps for Baker to take offense, if not legal action. Happily, Baker treats the coincidence as a mark of their complicity. Updike’s sentence-by-sentence brilliance and Baker’s tenacious sensitivity to it originate from the same set of aesthetic capacities and, by extension, certify a kind of ethical contract. At least, this is Baker’s magnanimous reaction to his discovery, and it provides him with a chance to display some stature of his own. Such logic serves as a final claim to the allegiance between these two writers, for friends, as Baker takes pains to point out, would consider echoes of one another’s works to be homages, not trespasses.

CHAPTER FIVE

Vox

There is no mistaking the fact that the aspect of John Updike’s impact upon Nicholson Baker that has earned the most publicity has had to do with trailblazing in the sensual realm. According to Baker’s commendation in U and I, “Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose. Once the sensation of the interior of a vagina has been compared to a ballet slipper . . . the sexual revolution is complete: just as Emerson made the Oversoul, the luminous timeless sphere of pure thought, available to the earnest lecture-going farm worker, so Updike made the reader’s solitary paperback-inspired convulsion an untrashy, cultivated attainment” (19). Baker goes on to imagine posthumous grievings by Updike’s loyal readers for “the man who, by bringing a serious, Prousto-Nabokovian, morally sensitive, National-Book-Awardwinning prose style to bear on the micromechanics of physical lovemaking, first licensed their own moans” (U and I, 19). By this logic, erudition is the gap separating art from pornography. Left to fend in the seamier precincts of fiction, style vanquishes scandal. Few contemporary authors are as micromechanically minded and meticulously endowed as the Nicholson Baker of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. The question is whether or not his subsequent two novels, Vox and The Fermata, civilize smut for the literati or represent something gone luridly awry with

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one of America’s brightest new authors.1 In other words, can Baker do for carnal practices what he did for office procedures and washroom etiquette, which is to depict the private and the perverse so ingeniously, to bring out the universal fascination within unheralded or even vulgar habits so convincingly, as to purge them of indecency, or at the very least render complaints of indecency beside the point? Baker implies this goal at the close of the telephone conversation between Jim and Abby in Vox: “All right,” she said. “Let me think about things. Let me absorb the strangeness.” “What’s strange?” “Nothing,” she said. “I guess nothing.”2 Beginning with the appearance of Vox, the controversy has been prominently played out in the reviews, and it tends to focus on the issues of the self-validating morality and the metamorphic potential of aesthetically compelling writing. Certainly the responses to this novel were far more numerous and widely divided than those that greeted Baker’s previous efforts. Among those speaking against Vox was Pico Iyer in the Partisan Review, who concluded that its book-long dialogue, instead of lifting sexual concerns into some transcendent consideration, “simply ushers us into the back pages of a glossy magazine.”3 In the Village Voice, James Marcus preferred the “sublime embarrassments” of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. He dismissed Vox as “a forgettable washout,” and he bemoaned the absence of “the mandarin brilliance of his earlier prose,” replaced

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here by pornography, and rather steam-free pornography at that.4 Meanwhile, James Buchan informed the Spectator that he mourned the fact that so “maddeningly talented” a writer had chosen to sacrifice the beauty of his previous “triumph[s] of affectation” to concentrate on people who “plump themselves down, pale and atwitch from long study and self-abuse” for essentially pornographic purposes.5 Speaking for the defense, Craig Raine told readers of the Times Literary Supplement that Vox was one of the Outstanding Books of 1992, and he applauded it for being “true to the volatile sexual imagination—its baroque inventiveness, rapt banality, iron whims and imperious excitements.”6 Writing in the New York Review of Books, Robert Towers found in Vox “elaborations as fancifully and amusingly detailed as any of the digressions in Baker’s earlier work.”7 Randall Short was similarly enthusiastic in the New York Times Book Review, where he congratulated Baker on “a compelling and irresistible tale, a tour de force illustration of the fantasy inherent in eroticism.”8 Richard Stengel summed up the pro-Vox forces in Time as he celebrated “the myriad ah-yes analogies, the deadeye humor, the fervent carnal lyricism of what is not pornography (as some will call it) but an anatomically correct, technology-assisted love story.”9 Regardless of where one chooses to camp in reaction to Vox, it is worth noting at the outset that the departure it represents is almost entirely restricted to subject. Qualms about the author’s degenerate subject selection or upbringing aside, the established Baker tone (call it scholarly glee) and observational zeal— obsessively thorough, wide-eyed, and with its focus adjusted to the angels-on-a-pin setting—is still in evidence. Given the right

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slant, any well-delineated exposure can be sexy, including (among sources capitalized upon in Vox) the play of light across mottled surfaces, the effort to repair a twisted fork, or the breaking of a string of beads. It is more or less a matter of where one trains his zoom lens. For some, this reasoning may translate all of the minutiae of the first two novels into fetishes and Baker’s winsome insights into voyeurism. For others, sex becomes just another seduction, one more enticement for Baker’s passionately clinical stand-ins; conversely, whatever seduces someone into a luxurious, lingering attention—whatever promotes the exercise of imaginative stamina—is sexy. Propriety in fiction comes down to creative verve. When it comes to provocative scenes, wrote Nora Garrison in the New Yorker, “I feel enthralled only when the writing is as good as the sex, and all through [Vox] it is.”10 In a sense, and despite all of the contention surrounding the novel, Vox confines itself to safe sex and prophylactic substitutes for physical contact. Jim and Abby have accidentally chosen the same moment to call the same phone sex operation, and their seductions, like twisted, clandestine annunciations, enter solely through the ear. The hermetic tendencies of Baker’s characters are evidently readily adjustable to the era of sexually transmitted diseases. All of the rustlings under the covers are confined to bookish murmurings, indiscretions talked over instead of enacted. It is important to note that when some rustling takes place beneath a fringed blanket during a viewing of an X-rated video, it is in the service of parallel yet distant arousal only; the momentum being stoked is virtual. For all of its humidity, sex in Vox is a solitary, closed circuit. Jim and Abby exchange fantasies and phone numbers but never bodily fluids.

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Again, reliance upon language and agile fictionalization are phone sex’s center and circumference. The delicate trance of desire is sustained like and by means of narrative suspense; like traditional plot itself, passion peaks atop Freitag’s Pyramid. We may think of talk as prelude to, or compensation for, sexual satisfaction, whereas in Vox rapture is made up of words traded over thousands of miles. All there is to keep them there is the dialogue. In a purely dialogic fiction, love-talk can be therapy, confession, legislation, complaint, arousal, or plea, but whatever its intentions or effects, the surrogacy of just talking about lovemaking is inevitably emphasized. The writer’s compliment to his paramour in Philip Roth’s Deception—“I’m very fond of your head,” he confides across the secret white margin of their bed and our page11—affirms Vox’s categorization of the brain as the truly compelling sex organ, not to mention Scheherezade’s lesson about how it is up to narrative to keep interest percolating in the bedroom. Baker’s novel unites authenticity with verbal conviction: an affair is real insofar as its rendition holds sway over the imagination of its audience. For a true “audiophiliac,” or “talk fetishist,” an utterly concocted episode cannot be discredited for having been made up, only for having failed to stimulate interest and response. An adept, considerate love, in other words, gives “good phone.” The root of “talk dirty to me,” after all, is “talk to me.” Thus, the conventional opening foray of “What are you wearing?” is an occasion for dilations that exceed a linear drive toward orgasm, and relating what one does in the shower weaves sexual activity into the broader tapestry of sometimes practical, sometimes quirky, sometimes digressive rumination, as though

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thoughts were hands allowed to roam about the body of the beloved. “What are you doing?” will sometimes lead to revelations of self-arousal and sometimes encourage revelations about household plants or entertainment centers. The point is that titillation may be due to specificity for its own sake and may not necessarily be sexual in nature. What is more, the wild, the weird, and the commonplace can be equally tantalizing if they are equally particularized—or poeticized. “See, to me the word ‘tights’ is much more exciting than just ‘stockings,’” Jim explains, cueing Abby to treat words not as proxies for what one yearns for but as objects of that yearning (9). Ordering lingerie is an anticipated turn-on; but discussing characters from Peter Pan, how streetlights slowly emerge into full glow, the lubricious roil of noodles stirred in a bowl, the girth of elephants, and the possibility of vaporizing and recondensing, which probably are not part of ribaldry’s usual store, still contributes to the provocative atmosphere when those topics are handled inventively. In this way, the reader is likewise conditioned to keep in mind that, as in Baker’s previous books, eloquence does not merely convey delight but constitutes it. While composing a novel entirely out of dialogue challenges the author to engage the reader in a drama that he limits to recollection, phone sex does provide its participants with definite advantages. Nora Garrison recognizes how well-suited this technique is to Nicholson Baker, in that it allows him to dispense with “the need for a kibitzing presence” or for developing other narrative components in favor of concentrating on magnifying minor properties, which has always been his strong suit.12 The telephone, Vox’s chambered naughtiness, helps to preserve the

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fevered dream of an infinitely willing, yet somehow unobtrusive, partner. The simulation of intimacy encourages boldness and invention by loosening the strictures of conventional face-to-face contact. Accordingly, not only does Jim prefer watching a sexy video to pursuing a woman in the flesh, he admits to Abby that he prefers telling her about the video to watching it— a double remove from the physical. As Jim further explains, even pedestrian employments of the telephone, such as ordering by credit card or lying to the receptionist at the office, can provide a pleasurable jolt of power. By affording contact and privacy simultaneously, the telephone releases inhibition and enlarges prowess: Jim and Abby can “make out” for hours, or at least for as long as they can hold out at ninety-five cents per half-minute. Phone lines leach the loneliness out of people without infringing on their security. The telephone offers that critical “distancing step” through which, still safe and civilized in their trespasses, they can take the world’s measure (89). It is an opportunity whose attractions Baker will redeclare in The Fermata: “Neither of us wanted the other, but we did want to get close to what we really wanted by talking about it.”13 The telephone also expands the possibilities of belief. Obviously, one can imagine whomever one wishes on the other end of the line and function freely as an unseen seer. Penetration is, under these circumstances, an intellectual foray instead of a venereal one, and advantageous for that reason. As Jim says, this kind of merging is purer yet still swaddled in indirect diction: his description of the employment of a “technical interior conduit structure” reciprocates Abby’s own desire to avoid risk by thinking about intimate acts instead of performing them (122).

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Once again, voice is a formidable, fundamental sexual device. For polished explorers of confidential regions like Jim and Abby, it is the vehicle of choice. The reader of Vox should prepare for outrageous expressions and radical coinages befitting the “come as you are” freedom afforded by the telephone. Trawling for novelty and sophisticated play, Baker’s speakers invent a glossary of puns, aliases, and sexual slang, all in the effort not to censor indecencies but to renew their authority. Stoking sexual vernacular intensifies sexual enjoyment; the fact that both consenting adults participate in this activity is an argument for the progressiveness of the sexual politics involved in Vox. These linguistic instruments are the phonophile’s apparatus for maintaining commitment, constancy, and adequacy.14 Luckily for them, Jim and Abby turn out to be ideally suited to one another, at least in the context of oral-aural sex. She is clearly his fantasy girl: alert to homely phenomena and odd gadgets, richly bemused, eager to be expansive and to explore the intellectual rapport at the heart of any viable “conception of thrilling wrongness” (11). Grant her a new mythos worthy of the electronic age: she is la belle dame sans call-waiting. Together, Jim and Abby are at once finicky and charming, paradoxically inquisitive and reclusive, and, in ways that Emerson could hardly have predicted, symbiotically pitched and torqued in terms of how they manifest the “infinitude of the private mind.” Salient among their shared interests, in addition to research and development regarding alternative terms for certain private parts and practices, are the metaphors inherent in stereo system lights— while she sees them as ocean buoys, he envisions an ethnically

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diverse cityscape (24–27); the wish to detach their respective sex organs (57); and the belief that there are “strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies” (72), which motivates both of them to persist in efforts, first in solitude and now in concert, to upgrade them. On her recommendation, he decides to rent Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; on his, she promises to watch for a subtle glitch on her television screen the next time she turns it on. They are also both intrigued by personal adaptations of Alice’s slow fall down the rabbit hole, which are congruent with the clinical indulgences of Baker’s other protagonists: courting a “fixed image” he can dwell upon, Jim flips back and forth over the Playboy Channel to strobe an inchoate picture out of the “houndstooth and herringbone cycles of the scrambling circuit” (30–31); Abby imagines a nude, frictionless descent down a luminous tube (37–38). Appropriately, “clicking” soon loses the threatening connotation of hanging up in favor of the unifying connotation of getting along, of coinciding. When do they differ? Jim is typically stirred by the visible, halted image, while Abby more often turns to flowing narratives.15 She is also somewhat more inspired by public self-arousal than Jim is. Nevertheless, the differences only increase their rapport. Jim cannot resist going on about how Fortune has smiled (albeit leeringly) upon them this night: But that’s why talking to you seems like such a miraculous once-in-a-lifetime thing, because you are smart and funny and aroused and delightful—you are not representative. We’re actually talking! If you come on this phone with me, it will be, as far as I’m concerned, it will be the

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top item on Washington Week in Review, it will be bigger than anything your bearded friend who eats the meatball subs has ever experienced, it will be really something, because you get it, you understand, you have a complicated response to things, and I mean, an orgasm in a complicated mind is always more interesting than one in a simple mind . . . I mean an orgasm in an intelligent woman is like a volcano in a mountain with a city built on a slope—you feel the alternative opportunity cost of her orgasm, you feel the force of all the other perceptive things she could be thinking at that moment and is not thinking because she is coming, and they enrich it. You still there? (126–27) Given the typical fidelity of the Baker imagination to advances in perforation and the ancestry of the stapler, one is tempted to say that captivating Abby with sexual insistences should be no great task; however, the examples of Baker’s previous novels also indicate that if Jim is to induce any response in Abby at all, he will have to muster metaphors just as ingenious to earn favor. Allies in the fight to place intellect at arousal’s core, fastidious and welcome editors of one another’s fancies, Jim and Abby coauthor explicit, mutually gratifying scenarios. When Jim concludes an erotic tale, Abby seizes upon the weakness of one of the strands, for she is still serious about the amenities of the means even after the orgasmic end has been achieved. They likewise bring craft to fantasy when they collaborate on a prospective ad for the personals column (99–102). In every instance, the drive is twofold: to treat intimacy as complicity, and, whatever

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the delectation of the expensive hour may be, to be as precise as possible. For example, Jim’s story of his get-together with a woman at the office to watch a pornographic video is no less exacting in its consideration of surrounding details than it is in its depiction of the “good parts.” The prelude to the movie is a movie in itself: I put the tape in, and the VCR made its little swallowing sound, and I turned the sound up, and then there was, without even an FBI warning or anything, there was the logo, this blue word ATOM, with this wow-wow-wow-wow sine-wave kind of music that focused in on a note while the word ATOM focused too. There was a little stylized spirograph atom even—it was kind of moving to see this symbol which once meant progress and science fiction and chemistry and then the evils of radiation, and now it just means “Hey, you’re going to have to take this sex film very seriously, as seriously as anything that requires a linear accelerator to discover, I mean you can pretend to laugh and think how funny and ridiculous, but you aren’t really going to laugh, because no matter how many times you see X-rated filmed sex in your apartment, just by renting a tape, it still will have the power to shock you a little bit, it’s still always miraculous, always a blessing.” (109–10) Vagueness is anathema to all process analyses: recipes, prescriptions, architectural constructions, sexual encounters, and literary ventures alike.

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But a unique responsibility goes along with the liberation afforded by the telephone. Since words are essences here, and not just poor consolations, verbal affinity must substitute for sexual compatibility as a gauge of the quality of the relationship. The qualities of good sex parallel the qualities of good reading. In that both are forms of intercourse, they are rhythmic developments that ask us to soak, not just skim, to guarantee the fullest pleasure. Sex and reading are imaginative elaborations that rely upon careful interplay between formula and innovation; exquisite stresses and cajolings—the artful preliminaries of well-made love—enable social, textual, and sexual intercourse to transcend the level of diligent thrashing. Rising and falling action are as important as the content of the experience—Abby offers this insight in regard to effective lead-ins and fade-outs of the songs she likes on the radio, but it is clearly designed to caution Jim to manipulate his stories with similar calculation (23–24). The writer’s and the lover’s arts alike demand patience, thoroughness, attentiveness, enthusiasm, and endurance. Both are marked by a voracity for detail and “the need to commit . . . to a situation” (Vox, 105). Like erogenous zones, the pages of an erotic novel are to be lingeringly fingered and savored in every particular. In this sense, perhaps, any novel, correctly handled, is an erotic novel, and one can think of Vox as The Mezzanine wrapped in brown paper. The autoerotic emphasis in Vox may complicate the correspondences between reading and sex by rendering them suspicious, even morally indefensible. Nevertheless, Vox provides grounds for the redemption of this centripetal movement by suggesting the replacement of old metaphorical orthodoxies whereby,

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for example, literary experience is secondary and vicarious, or whereby the male actively inscribes while the female is passively inscribed upon. Vox campaigns for an alternative set of metaphors based upon mutuality of exploration and play—the “pan-sexuality” of shared creation, shared delight.16 In this way, charges of waywardness or irresponsibility may be deflected even if affronted reviewers are not entirely consoled. At any rate, Baker’s analogy between literary and sexual encounters reinforces connections between his novel and the writings of several esteemed contemporaries, a point that serves as further evidence that Baker’s work should not be dismissed as a pornographic joke. In addition to William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, which is presented in the introduction as one formidable ally of Baker’s in bringing the lavish scrupulosity of sexual intercourse to one’s reading, there is Sven Birkerts, whose vision of the reading encounter as being bordered by “a kindled up sort of high” and the “affective slackening” of “the return to the more dispersed conditions of dailiness” is another vindication in an age when the printed word is under siege.17 (Nor, evidently, does any of these authors neglect that the fall out of art into the quotidian risks something comparable to postcoital depression.) Then there is Roland Barthes’s book-length praising of “the pleasure of the text” as it “searches for . . . the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony.”18 As a materialization of language, voice articulates the body and delivers it to the ear, where “it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.”19 From

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this perspective, phone sex could be seen as a ceremonial practice of language’s intrinsic, unconstrained phonetic joys. Baker teases out the sexual components of reading still further by having Jim relate the bondage-and- discipline potential of a device that frees the reader’s hands for other business: “What this Book Mate is is this rigid-backed thing to which you strap the book using this quote ‘see-through strap.’ There’s nothing the book can do, it’s powerless—it’s strapped wide open—open for all the hungry eyes of the world to admire” (68). In keeping with the novel’s emphasis upon linguistic parallels to sexual practices, a play on the phrase “richly bound edition” is all that is needed to complement the physical maneuvering of text with an equally agile rhetorical figure. A book like Vox faces a dilemma from the outset. On the one hand, proponents of explicit literature are used to routing their transports in routine ways. As with ancient Greek tragedies, so with contemporary pornography: the catharsis we hope for is the reward of the art whose outcome is never in doubt. On the other hand, when transfiguring ecstasies are ground to the usual figures, and when raciness rounds the same rutted tracks, it becomes all the more difficult to inspire the novelty of the novel, however outrageous its subject. As the marketplace more and more quickly accommodates his daring, how does today’s writer escalate erotic tales past the predictable? Baker says that he was exceedingly self-conscious about the predicament when he conceived of the novel: I’ve never really liked sex scenes in books. You’re reading along, you’re interested by the social nuances, there’s all

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kinds of threads in play. And all of a sudden you’re in a sex scene. And these time-tested words are in play. And your reptile brain takes over. It’s almost as if the writer’s cheating. It’s like an awkward shifting of gears. And then you get through with the sex scene, and you’re supposed to take up again with the social nuance and stuff. So I didn’t ever write sex scenes, for that reason. It just didn’t feel right. Instead of writing books that had no sex in them, I decided to just sort of turn the thing around completely—to write a book that was entirely about sex.20 If Vox is designed to be a witty comment upon erotic literature in equal measure to its being just one more torrid contribution to the genre, it is hardly surprising to find critics who believe that Baker has compromised one or the other intention. Jim abjures “the grimness that films get into when they try to make art out of porn” (110). While Vox is too blatantly cheerful an enterprise to fit this description, Baker may still have to contend with related accusations about the line between smut and “meta-smut.” The second question has to do with the legitimacy of the correspondence that Vox suggests between explicitness and intimacy. Jim and Abby vamp assiduously, seemingly dedicated to depriving the reader and one another of no fantasy; however, they are always conscious of controlling and pacing their transgressions, of keeping temptation at an expertly monitored boil. “I will feast on that revelation for weeks to come,” Jim gushes in response to one of Abby’s displays of candor (61), for to him a flash of mind is as exhilarating as a flash of thigh. Paradoxically, although one tends to think of the telephone as enabling

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people to be less than honest in describing what they look like, what they are doing, and so on, Jim and Abby agree that the telephone is one place where they can and should be rigorously, and at times startlingly, honest. Nevertheless, as has been discussed, phone sex is a distinctly mediated encounter, one that requires the distance and physical absence of the person conversed with as much as it does the intimation of his or her presence. Jim is especially fond of rhapsodizing about postponed, indirect pleasures. He asserts the beauty of women who operate beyond the intrusion of visual witness (125), finding, as usual, the concept of women more exciting than a more direct experience. He loves to touch pages, towels, or any items that a woman may have touched in order anonymously to absorb some magical, suggestive pulses than still adhere to them; he wonders if he could somehow be all spirit, not to exempt himself from sensual needs but to pursue them as an inviolable, unviolating watcher— a selfless donation to the perfect sphere of a woman’s privacy (62). Jim’s narratives feature many concentric levels of removal from actual contact: over the phone he tells one unknown woman about his lust for another woman, who is unaware of it, so that the two conversationalists can contrive a fictive web to hold him and the other woman . . . Still, although the delineative genius of Baker’s other books does appear in Vox, it may be hard for readers to find much warmth in all the heat it ignites. After all, Jim and Abby do not just settle for virtual or second-order contacts, they positively prefer them. For this is “the story of an imagination in love,”21 which may explain why the novel’s principals appear to be im-

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pervious to shame or discretion. The supremely conditioned existence of the beloved guarantees his or her appeal—the attraction of the fantasy life is not that it is lived but that it is fantasized. Vox describes a blissful claustrophobia and a passion as regulated as it is clinical. Intimacy has always been a problem for Baker’s characters anyway. One recalls Howie in The Mezzanine as a man exclusively, contentedly absorbed with stocking his ark of the commonplace, so that other people, if they do intrude at all, occupy roughly the same shelf in his consciousness as the replacement staples; or the reader may refer to the cerebral hide-and-seek solicitude of U and I, which, after the comparatively promising (if modest by other standards) marital and familial scope of Room Temperature, seems like a relapse into an elite, if sumptuous and engaging, privacy. Regular and availing human contact is either an ambition that most of Baker’s population cannot achieve or one they do not even aspire to. The extreme sexual humidity of Vox by no mean exempts it from this accusation. Baker himself has admitted that the situation in Vox is “so fragile” because the characters must solely rely upon words “just to keep the thing from seeming, you know, tragically alienated.”22 Perhaps it is easier to defend the novel’s sensational “givens” than the humane depths of Baker’s characters. In Vox, Jim and Abby are undeniably clever connoisseurs with chic, experienced tongues, but it often seems in this novel of simulated intercourse that all that glitters is ice. Or maybe what glitters is the same gaudy reflection from all the licensed venues of capitalist getting and spending. As one critic argues, Vox works at least as well as a satire of the culture

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of consumption as an inquiry into the borderlands of romance: “The novel’s two disembodied protagonists are microwave gourmets of sex, foraging with apparent intelligence in the supermarket of readily available soft-core porn, ‘erotica,’ and quasi-pleasure.” Yet in spite of the sensationalism of their efforts, their demimonde of virtual sex “isn’t the underbelly of anything. . . . Virtual sex is, if not innocent, certainly wholesome. Its effects, if not hygienic, are at least expected to be indistinguishable from any other form of purchasable pleasure-seeking consumption.”23 Squalor may be pricey, but entrepreneurial forces ensure that it is not all that hard to come by. One of the prolonged fantasies that Jim narrates highlights a necklace that, in the plot he constructs, is a product of Abby’s handiwork at the jewelry store where Jim has her working. The climactic scene has her adorning herself with this masterpiece and nothing else to encourage a prospective customer. The scene closes as we expect it must: the performance climaxes as a “hot mess” (53). From one perspective, art has the ability to redeem the “mess”; from another, art is spoiled or squandered in the attempt to do so. The question becomes whether Baker interrogates or cheapens vast, complicated nouns—Identity, Alienation, Independence, Anxiety, Estrangement—in the controversial arena of Vox. Whichever perspective one opts for, it is instructive to appreciate how Vox connects to Baker’s earlier books. Speaking of The Mezzanine, Baker confided what tremendous satisfaction he got from writing a novel on which nothing was lost: “I remember bursting out of the study, saying, ‘I’m gonna put everything in this!’ Just this triumphant feeling of, you know, it didn’t

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matter whether it was gonna be formally imperfect or something. Just throw it all in.”24 In his recent apology for continuing to write novels in an era in which they seem not very competitive with other entertainments and may be on the brink of obsolescence, Jonathan Franzen lists several qualities that novelists uniquely offer: among them are an aura of oppositionality, a capacity for understanding the interpenetration of mystery and manners, a tradition of precision of thought and language, and a saving habit of pushing beyond surfaces into interiors. “Above all, they are preserving a community of readers and writers, and the way in which members of this community recognize each other is that nothing in the world seems simple to them.”25 Especially according to Franzen’s last criterion, Baker’s preceding novels are undoubtedly eligible for praise, and it may well be that the controversy over this “sex book” should not disqualify it either. Vox may be animated by different energies than are The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, and these energies are kept to an obviously “closeted” range; but as far as the drama of accumulated detail is concerned, it is just as unsparing.

CHAPTER SIX

The Fermata

Baker once again skews the approach to sexual desire in The Fermata, but the remove from which its first-person narrator undertakes his pleasures makes the telephonic channeling of Vox seem positively conventional by comparison. “I just felt, having written Vox, that there were other, more uncomfortable things that were also true about the way that men thought about sex that Vox hadn’t captured. I just felt that I’d left things out that were maybe more objectionable,” Baker told Esquire’s Lynn Darling.1 He was apparently being only half-facetious. Arno Strine is not only about as dedicated a libertine as one might hope to find in contemporary literature, he also has supernatural powers to facilitate his compulsions. The novel’s title, which in music refers to a protracted holding of a rest or note, is one of several names given by Strine to his ability to freeze time and motion all around him while retaining the capacity to move about himself. He “enters the Fold,” as Strine calls this suspended state, and takes advantage of the hiatus to strip women, diligently excite himself, then restore order before resuming the surrounding physics, all blissfully undetected. No mere onanist, then, Strine is a “chronanist,” who manipulates the laws of science in addition to his own urgent privates. The Fermata serves as his confession, testament, diary, and instruction manual. “In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which

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savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation,” says the magician or the storyteller, as he begins to weave his spell.2 But this presumption seems mere vanity if its ostensible goal is to make the world safe for peeping and fondling. Suddenly, as if answering a parlor game’s casual “what if,” Baker grants his protagonist that wish; and Arno Strine reconstitutes the scene not to save lives or correct tragedies but, first, foremost, and pretty much exclusively, to engage in one indulgence. His idling the planet to prevent injuries, to engage in philanthropy, to make regret obsolete, or, at the very least, to get a jump on his office work might render Strine more agreeable than his reputation among many reviewers has come to be. On the contrary, he revels in being “serenely unproductive.”3 He is very quick to disqualify vengeance, altruism, or other more philosophically strenuous uses for the Fold. Sensationalism is his sole incentive, he announces (280). He tells people he is a writer to deflect attention from his having settled for temp work, as well as to account for his penchant for peripheral details; however, whereas a writer would likely take advantage of the ability to halt time to free up the opportunity to finish projected manuscripts before mortality sets in, Strine chiefly concerns himself with fleshly encounters. So Baker has given a devilish twist to this latest “angel of detail.”4 It is fitting that Strine is another office temp (the quintessential Baker’s man, it seems) because temporariness is integral to the hit-and-run relationships he commits himself to. On the job, he is immersed in fleeting names, faces, interests, and peccadilloes that overwhelm his mental filing system and make him forget their consequences as he moves from company to

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company; he occasionally resorts to the fermata as a reconnaissance mission to permit him to filch information from wallets and purses, design responses, and otherwise get his bearings. In the Fold’s momentary stay against confusion, the temp is quite literally a temporal custodian—he has “time on his hands,” as it were—who indulges his every temptation. The template for Strine’s fixation may be traced to Jim’s fascination in Vox with the possibility of fluttering television channels to create the illusion of a fixed image to tarry lasciviously upon, or to Jim’s dream of becoming an invisible witness to women going about their personal business. Strine’s interest in centrifuges mingles these desires into an eccentric composite that, by virtue of his secret talent, he can actually experiment upon: I want all of the semi-remembered images of half-dressed women, all these fragments of my voyeuristic history, that still remain in messy colloidal suspension to fly around at the speed of insight until they are compelled to file themselves away once and for all into neat radial gradients of macromolecular uniformity, like layered cocktails or fancy multi-colored creations in Jell-O. I happen to know, from a three-week assignment in the research department of Kilmer Pharmaceuticals (for better or worse, an alert temp can pick up lots of stray knowledge), that biochemists routinely use the centrifuge . . . to spin down, or “pellet,” lengths of DNA in order to purify or clean them. And everything in the mind—that final triumph of protein chemistry—is likewise in helpless motion, afloat, diffuse,

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impure, unwilling to commit to precipitation: only an artificially induced pensive force of hundreds of thousands of gravities can spin down some intelligible fraction of one’s true past self, one’s frustratingly poly-disperse personality, into a pellet of print. (113–14) Strine would whirl the dervish to reify erotic memory and lose not one intriguing atom.5 In that latter function especially, the Fold may hearken all the way back to Howie’s scholarly loitering and depth charting in The Mezzanine. He wants a satori of totalized sensation, polymorphously versed. Such connections do not redeem this novel for every reader. Many will not be distracted from finding The Fermata to be a singularly repellent entry and the most difficult “sell” in the Baker canon. Strine’s handling of his gift, depending on which reviewer’s censure one reads, is disappointing, sophomoric, unforgivably sexist, or just plain vile. “Reading The Fermata is like having a man you hardly know slip his hand under your skirt while whispering that he’s really a nice guy,” Rhoda Koenig scolded in New York, where she also complained that the novel’s sporadic observations did little to advance plot, character, or identification with Strine, in particular when positioned against the dominant sexual scenes.6 Cathleen Schine wrote in the New York Review of Books that she missed the gracefulness of the earlier novels, and she deemed The Fermata tedious for all of its winking insinuation: “Passion does not exist in this book about sex. Baker has taken the wonder of the human body and revealed it as a grinding collection of gadgets.”7 For Trev Broughton, too, The Fermata fell short of its predecessors: “But where The Mez-

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zanine and Vox were bristling with originality, this is a novel of one idea and a thousand jokes,” he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. “Even the clever-diction becomes wearing” until the book’s featured spectacles have “the same disheartening effect as watching a bright child hunched over a Nintendo.”8 Francine Prose was even harsher in her condemnation in the Yale Review. “There’s an ickiness about the whole proceedings,” and the indecencies of the book are not mitigated by its dissertative elaborations nor by its playful humor. It even fails as pornography, Prose complained. “The cutesy-poo sex talk is more than just anti-erotic—it’s a chilly, joyless void for the erotic to tumble into” (123).9 While it may not lead to a withdrawal of these indictments, it may usefully complicate evaluations of The Fermata to treat the novel as a predictable, albeit lurid, culmination of Baker’s baroque method. The fermata symbol, a crescent suspended over a period, could be taken as an emblem of voyeurism (the eye forever prowling) or, in keeping with the reviews just mentioned, as an eyebrow raised in response to the novel’s shocking displays. Baker told Alexander Laurence and David Strauss that as a musician he was drawn to the fermata’s sustaining promise and the evocative quality of the symbol itself: “It sits on top of a chord and just looks at you.”10 Exhilarated by what his glasses can accomplish—namely, bring clarity and depth of focus and, when pushed up the nose, actuate the Fold—Strine confides, “My happiness was optical” (120); a vivid exposure during a rather extensive Estoppel leaves him “dying with visual happiness” (150). These specifically optical allusions suggest that Strine’s visionary leer is meant to be cousin to the meditative gazes of Howie and Mike. (It bears noting that Strine dispenses

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with contact lenses precisely because a by- product of the clarity they afford is a sensation of obstruction, and he finally decides that it is not “worth losing the beauty of the world in order to look better to the world” [7].) Further evidence of this connection is provided when Strine reveals that in his comparatively normal, yet temporary, relationship with Rhody her appeal for him was not limited to sensual prospects but extended to process-oriented seductions reminiscent of those in The Mezzanine or Room Temperature: “She lifted the teabag out of her cup with a spoon and bound its string tightly around the bag-and-spoon duo, squeezing most of the water that was left in the leaves out into the cup. I had never been exposed to this method of managing a teabag before, and I was thrilled by it; and I don’t need much more than this to fall in love, after my fashion” (177). In every case in Baker’s canon, one stops time in order to see better. Indeed, Baker offers as much when he maintains: “The Mezzanine was an attempt to stop time by expanding the length of the paragraph by using the footnote as a kind of fermata. So that you would feel a stop in the middle of a sentence, and then have a whole secondary thought that balloons down the side of a page. The Fermata is taking that idea and giving it a supernatural twist. It really isn’t enough to write a footnote about a pair of shoelaces. What you want to do is stop the world and allow your own prose to catch up with whatever it is you want to describe.”11 Taking Baker’s cue, it is not sufficient to define The Fermata as solely the most vulgar interpretation of “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off” (the title of Cathleen Schine’s discussion of the novel in the New York Review of Books); it is, more comprehensively speaking, like the rest of Baker’s self-conscious works,

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a demonstration of “Stop the World, I Want to Write about It.” Among those reviewers attuned to this was David Gates, who in Newsweek congratulated Baker as someone who continues in The Fermata to write “like no one else in America, elevating self-indulgence into an esthetic principle” as he resumes his central absorption: giving the freest possible rein to a bustling inner life.12 The New Yorker, too, found Arno Strine to be “a classic Bakerian narrator” and emphasized that “despite all the sexual hoopla, Baker’s deeper subject is consciousness,” whereby the fermata’s time-retardance is but a logical extension of Baker’s usual “slow-motion camera panning across every nano-nuance of perception.”13 Significantly, the phenomenon of the Fold is usually either optically induced (Strine fidgets with his glasses or feeds the middle distance with his glare) or triggered by ordinary paraphernalia taken right out of The Mezzanine or the essays in The Size of Thoughts, including “rocker switches, rubber bands, sewing needles, fingernail clippers, and other hardware” (3). “It wasn’t until the summer after fifth grade that I was once again able to Drop in, with the help of our basement washing machine and some thread,” Strine enigmatically notes at the close of second chapter (34).14 Also in keeping with criteria proposed in Baker’s other novels, it is important to recognize that the legitimacy of the Fold passes the litmus test of poetic resonance. For example, whereas that privileged state occasions several heralding phrases—Strine highlights “achieving pausation,” “hitting the clutch,” “taking a personal day,” and “instigating an Estoppel” (11)—it is difficult for Strine to come up with synonyms for prosaic timeas-normally-experienced. Lastly, we should not be surprised,

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given the enchantment of common objects as heroized in Baker’s other texts, that Strine need not turn to exotic catalysts to perform his brand of magic. As in the previous fictions, the fact of invasion appears to be more crucial to arousal than a hormonal focus per se. Strine’s passions are as democratic as they are unforestalled; promiscuity is the novel’s subject and technique. Maybe the gathering of any knowledge mandates some degree of violation, in that we must strip the world to know it: “My Fold-energies seem to be a direct by-product of my appetite for nakedness,” as Strine confides (46). Vigilance eroticizes the atmosphere whether it targets a woman’s legs or her driver’s license. Exercising the fermata voluptualizes whatever gets trapped in its amber, and as always, Baker treats us to fermentation on several fronts. Not only women, but colors, meat thermometers, hibernating toads, toggle switches, and tape guns receive his characteristically high-intensity assessment. A spread of needles against their thin cardboard backing is a microscopic calliope. Even the consummate prospects of being en-Folded soon spring Keats to Arno’s busy mind in a memory precipitated during his detailing of a fourth-grade classroom episode during which Strine first employed his power: the “woolly” quality of the air molecules remind him of a line from “The Eve of St. Agnes” (“And silent was the flock in woolly fold”).15 Audio cassettes stimulate Arno Strine the way telephones do Jim in Vox, extending a distinctly technical fundamentalism imported from The Mezzanine. The cassettes are stocky, solid, paragraph-shaped material objects, held together with minuscule Phillips-head screws at each cor-

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ner (the screws are smaller, incidentally, then the screws in the hinges of my glasses, so small that only SCARA robots could have twirled them in place in such quantity), with their pair of unfixed center sprockets left deliberately loose so that they can comply with slight variations in the spindle distances of different brands of machine—these chunky pieces of geometric business within which, nonetheless, an elfin wisp of Mylar frisks around any tiny struts or blocks of felt placed in its path, minnowing the ferromagnetic after-sparkle of a voiced personality through whatever Baroque diagonals and Bezier curves it can contort from the givens of its prison. (39) As for towels spinning in a washing machine, they are also compelling for their own sake, not simply because they may have caressed a woman’s body. They coalesce with a metaphorical rush: At its peak speed, the basket of a clothes-washer turns at something like six hundred revolutions per minute. Towels, which are ordinarily the very soul of magnanimous absorbency, are at six hundred r.p.m. compressed into loutish, wedge-shaped chunks of raw textility, apotheoses of waddedness, their folds so conclusively superimposed, and their thousands of gently torqued turf-tassels so expunged, or exsponged, of reserve capacity, that I feel, after the last steady pints of blue-gray water have pulsed from the exit hose and the loud tick from within the machine signals some final disengagement of its transmission, and the spin-

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ning slows and stops, as if I am tossing boneless hams or (in the case of washcloths) little steaks into the dryer, rather than potential exhibits in a fabric-softener testimonial. (104–5) Glamor is ubiquitous, and women’s erogenous clefts are only the most conspicuous places in which to find it. Arno Strine seems as likely to “strum” (as he euphemistically puts it) to Popular Mechanics as to Penthouse. And one of the things that he busies himself with beneath his trench coat is a thesaurus. The Fermata also regularly elaborates on the attachments Baker previously introduced in Vox among sex, language, and reading. When Strine goes into the Fold, he proceeds to bear down verbally, to manipulate words along with buttons and glands. Fittingly, Strine’s current turn-on, Joyce Collier, is sexy linguistically as well as anatomically: I’ve typed some of her tapes. The language of her dictations is looser than some of the other loan officers’—she will occasionally use a phrase like “spruce up” or “polish off” or “kick in” that you very seldom come across in the credit updates of large regional banks. One of her more recent dictations ended with something like “Kyle Roller indicated that he had been dealing with the subject since 1989. Volume since that time has been $80,000. He emphatically stated that their service was substandard. He indicated that he has put further business with them on hold because they had ‘lied like hell’ to him. He indicated he did not want his name mentioned back to the Pauley

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brothers. This information was returned to Joyce Collier on—” and then she said the date. As prose it is not Penelope Fitzgerald, perhaps, but you crave any tremor of life in these reports, and I will admit that I felt an arrow go through me when I heard her say “lied like hell.” (5) The unexpected touch of novelty entices whether the defamiliarization comes from lingerie or language. Meanwhile, novelty depends upon standard practice for contrast, just as leisure is defined against the rituals of the work day and highly figurative language requires the alternative of more “transparent” usage to accomplish its effects. The lesson for the appeal of the Fold, therefore, may be that “real” moments are necessary for Fold departures to maintain their allure. In other words, art is portrayed in The Fermata as the realization of a contrapuntal process (239). The pedigree of Joyce Collier’s appeal can be traced back to Strine’s first deliberate Drop in response to the charms of a grade-school teacher, Miss Dobzhansky—strange that he retains that formal distance even after having taken such liberties with her in the Fold!—whose prepossession of young Strine is due not only to her physical beauty but also to her spelling of Esquimaux on the blackboard and her outlining of Asian migrations across the Bering Strait (29). Even on those rare occasions when couples do actually couple in The Fermata, performances are rated for the rhetorical flourishes they cause in addition to their sexual ingenuity, as we see when Strine tries to grade his “real-time sex” with Rhody over a sixteen-month period: “We were able to marvel at how many incremental variations a couple could come up with—variations so minor that they couldn’t re-

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ally be codified. It wasn’t a question of distinct “positions” but of—I don’t know—crystals grown in slightly different concentrations of a reagent, or grown in the presence of one or more trace impurities, or grown while subjected to faintly stronger or weaker gravitational fields” (75). So normal, regular sex is no “cure” for Strine’s commitment to developing more abstruse, ingenious manners of speaking. Contorting sentences and contorting bodies remain inseparable components of satisfying intercourse; Strine the poet works as hard to liberate words from predictable employment as Strine the libertine does to liberate an electric toothbrush and an avocado from theirs. Strine sums up the experience of having his erotic manuscript read by a recently de-Folded woman on the beach while spying on her through binoculars as deriving from complicit provocations. The climax comes from his having “created an expression of puzzled curiosity in the universe,” which he deems simultaneously a sexual and a literary triumph (143). On the other hand, when a woman later throws his taped version of a pornographic story out of her car window, he is critically injured as well as sexually deflated, and his Fold-powers are scuttled for months (255). But what is arguably the epitome of the word-flesh wedding is given to the reader in the form of a sexual aid, the Monasticon, which Strine cannot resist ordering through the mail: it is a device featuring a twistable Capuchin monk which arouses its user with the open manuscript it holds (60). Thus Strine views the Fold’s elongated “quality time,” versus the disappointment of “time’s cattle-drive” apart from its influence (47), as a miracle of lyricism that he bestows upon the environment. As he sees it, it is more to the point to describe the

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opposing poles as “statuesque” and “ordinary” instead of “inert” and “vital” (13). In terms of a literary equivalent, it follows that the effect of the Fold is comparable to the spatialization of time in the novel by virtue of techniques of self-apparency, such as splintering events, multiplying perspective, altering the physical form of the book, indulging in meta-commentaries, or otherwise exposing and exploring the elements of the narrative.16 As a boy, Strine wondered what it would be like to be the little agitator ball in a can of paint. During his mature “Foldouts,” as time’s solitary pilot, he learns the answer: “I am in fact held in the vacuum chamber of a single exceedingly patient millisecond, potentially doing a thousand things, reading whole books, wandering through buildings filled with scientific instrumentation” (116). He can “agitate” to his heart’s delight from within the paradox of liberation and acuity in torpor. The sensation of being that agitator-ball in a can of paint is akin to what Strine does experience when he tries swimming through the motionless surf during one of his “Drops”: “The water’s viscosity varied, areas of turbulence in a crashing wave dissolving like lumps in batter as I swam through them. Shells and pebbles were suspended in the undertow like forest underbrush. I ran my finger along the quiet sharp crest of wave and flicked a hanging drop of seawater into vapor with my fingernail. It was very tiring breast-stroking my way up and down the stiff-peaked pectinaceous swells” (122–23). The play-pause pedal of the transcription tape recorder activates a related pleasure for him. Contentedly isolated inside the alluring sonic interior of his superior’s voice, “I pause within her pause and float in the sensory-deprived lagoon of her suspended meaning” (38). In

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other words, Strine increases the capacities of the shell-like bower of the telephone in Vox by transporting its essence to the workplace. Moreover, to return to the language of U and I, a fermata makes available that edenic state of “all cloggers.” No wonder that Strine gets frustrated with adhering to linear movement in this memoir. As he declares in one of his parenthetical digressions, the pedestrian traffic of one-thing-then-the-next is as exasperating to the writer as dating rituals are to the debaucher: “It isn’t that I think my disorder so far is in any way swanky or artistic; it’s that when I try to be a responsible memoirist and arrange my experiences in their proper places on a timeline, my interest in them dies and they altogether refuse to allow themselves to be told. I find that I have to submit to every anecdotal temptation just as it arises, regardless of temporal priority, in order for it, for me, to flower into words” (104). When Strine comments in passing upon the “overriding sense of nowness” conveyed by a newsstand (230), this may suggest that the newsstand, as a perpetual testimony to the present tense, is a more fitting complement to the quality of the fermata than is the bookstore in which he dreams of seeing his bestseller mounted, what with its historical/archival implications. For other human beings, erotica is a plea; for Strine, it is an incantation. Whereas the greatest poets can merely petition the landscape, Strine can texture it to accommodate his peccancies. Still, Strine’s amicability, his self-approval as a writer and a lover, and the remarkable prospects his memoir recounts should not prevent the reader from underestimating moral objections to the fermata—rather, to the purposes to which Strine applies the fermata. No matter how urbanely Strine describes them, his di-

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vine violations undeniably cost their victims whether or not they are aware of them. Scrutinizing women with the intensity other Baker protagonists apply to objects threatens to turn women into objects. It is what pornographers and their patrons do to the women in the photographs. The effect of lust’s unremitting glare during stopped time may be likened to that of sunlight through a magnifying glass trained on a bug: it is sin as incineration. Strine may proclaim the dignity of their private parts, but partitioning women hardly suggests adoration or compassion, much less inspires emulation. To be sure, the fermata amputates Strine from the social world and relegates him to a malleable wet dream, in whose sweaty confines Strine admires women in pieces and as pieces. When he says that “typing is my livelihood” (8), he inadvertently implicates the detached, taxonomic approach to the women he professes to love so well. It is really a one-way, dead-end courtship he promotes; and while he falls all over himself explaining how he is no necrophiliac (157–59), the Fold definitely embalms women so that he can visually, descriptively, or physically embrace them. At the very least, Strine is a secret sharer who does not share his secrets except from the sanctuary of the other side of the memoir or the depths of the Fold—privileges his sundry beloveds cannot enjoy. Moreover, Strine himself admits that his secret “has swallowed up large chunks of [his own] personality” (20), and that admission rings truer than his subsequent determination that he is not alienated: “I don’t see that nasal, sociological-sounding word applying to me in any useful way. I get along well with people” (155). This from a man who

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has just described his ejaculation directly into the face of an entranced woman whom he has shadowed all the way to her bathtub! Saying that “alienated” does not apply to him “in any useful way” primarily shows that Strine’s introspection is compromised by his unwillingness to negotiate when it comes to the power of the fermata. That willful blindness also intrudes during Strine’s “hypothetical” debate about the fermata with a security guard whose coarseness about what he would do with that talent (essentially, go on an indiscriminate rape spree) causes Strine to try to define his more elegant impulses as differing in kind instead of degree. (It is sobering to think that people’s security is guarded by someone who harbors such marauding desires!) Even though he stated very early on that “I have no sympathy to spare for compulsions other than my own” (18), he is now forced to waffle about his supposed superiority: “Morally, I am different from that security guard—no, let’s not mess around: morally, I’m a little better than he is. I am. But I acknowledge that some of the things I have done are—let me just say it—rape-like acts that some observers would condemn more vehemently than they would condemn the security guard’s offhand remote-control fantasies, because I should know better, and because, in my own case, they really happened” (91). It takes a while for Strine to fight through the Prufrockian baffles to arrive at this awareness, but he does not loiter there. He fundamentally wants to think well of himself. Therefore, he eventually revises his self-evaluation on the grounds that he is really not a threat, for he never uses the fermata to steal, only to stroke; that he is really a decent guy;

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and that since his depravity is restricted to one thing, it does not interfere with the overall picture we should have of Arno Strine (144). A considerate lecher: Strine wages his self-esteem on the legitimacy of an oxymoron. Here he is working for ethical leverage in typical fashion: I’m arrogant enough to believe, at least to believe sometimes, that the reason that I have been chosen over any other contemporary human to receive and develop this chronanistic ability (if there is indeed some supernatural temp agency doing the choosing) is maybe that I can be trusted with it—trusted at least not to do any real harm. Morals depend in part on consequence; consequence on time; and since my amoralities flourish and expire entirely in momentary pico-states of timeless inconsequence, the usual rules just don’t have the same prohibitive force. Nobody else should be entitled to take off women’s clothes at will, at the snap of a finger or the flip of a switch, but I think I should be, because, for one thing, my curiosity has more love and tolerance in it than other men’s does. (155– 56) Although he will waver between selecting merit or luck as the cause of his Fold-powers (278), Strine feels pretty smug about his continuing to deserve them. “When I am in a Fold,” he announces, “I know for a fact that no woman anywhere is crying or being betrayed” (48), as though suspension of despair elimi-

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nated it . . . as though abusing women while they are unconscious were not itself a betrayal of them! The evolution of Strine’s attitude toward his addiction over the course of the book is quite remarkable. He begins by tabling issues of moral hierarchy because “when I try defending my actions verbally I find that they are indefensible, and I don’t want to know that” (24). The refusal of knowledge and the failure of articulation should be insurmountable proofs for a Baker narrator that his rationale is extremely shaky. Later, during his interaction with the security guard, a distressed Strine says that refraining from rape and simply molesting inanimate women is “not really right, either,” and weakly offers that there are probably “levels” of right and wrong in the matter of what one would choose to do to them (88). Nevertheless, from these iffy ethics Strine is able to salvage his compulsions after all. Because he is uniquely affectionate regarding women’s scars, cellulite, and other imperfections; because, like a poet, he endeavors to “insert some novelty into the lives of women” by leaving mysterious, connotative traces for them to discover upon reawakening; because his goodness “blossoms” rather than fades into irrelevance during his phantom incursions, Strine feels vindicated. If one revives the sexual-literary intercourse correlation once again, distinctions between what William Gass affirms in a text like Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife as the reader’s acquiescence to “kindly imprisonment” by authorial will and the imposed captivity endured by Strine’s victims do not deter Baker’s narrator from his practices or from spending an entire book on rationalizing them. He presses further: “I feel that what I’m doing isn’t

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wrong enough for me to override my irresistible desire to do it. In fact, maybe what I’m doing is straightforwardly right and good!” (157). So in the course of a few chapters Strine moves from defending his transgressions to lauding his enactments of sexual justice. What Strine evades, of course, is the issue of consent. In the introduction to the pornographic recording he places into a woman’s car tape player during a Fold-out, he tells her to “please feel free” to dispose of it should she be offended (194). Unfortunately, any feeling of freedom on her part would be an overestimation of the part she can play in the drama he has coordinated, not to mention the fact that the offense has already taken place in the form of the uninvited intrusion. The reader realizes that his “encounters” are always perpetrated through partitions, launched from undetected lairs; they are as detached as they are perverse and transitory. It does not take an inspired psychologist to realize that surreptitious contact hardly counts as evidence of a healthy relationship. Strine’s former girlfriend Rhody makes this point when she reacts to his “speculation” about how he would exploit the fermata. She calls it loveless, disrespectful, and borderline criminal, and Strine sacrifices his relationship with her principally because of this response. That is really too bad, for the discovery that Rhody finds men sexy who take off their watches in public hints that a man who can literally free himself from time’s constraints would be a gratifying match for her. Interestingly, when Rhody initially discusses the pros and cons of such a faculty, she and Strine disagree in a way that parallels a difference between Abby and Jim in Vox: like Jim, Strine strives for the static image—in Strine’s case, the stopped

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body; Rhody, on the other hand, repeats Abby’s need “to be in some sort of unfolding dramatic relationship” in order to be fully aroused (167–68). For his part, Strine retrospectively decides that the lasting benefit that he obtained from his relationship with Rhody was the generation of additional ideas about what he might try during future fermata Drops. “Nicholson Baker’s view of sexuality is curiously devoid of any notions of power or powerlessness. Not to mention, sadness, ambivalence, or emotion of any kind,” David Shields lamented in the American Book Review.17 Shields’s assessment of The Fermata is reluctantly negative. A fan of Baker’s “extraordinary eye for social detail, his uncanny access to the most oblique and buried aspects of consciousness,” and his lyrical ambushes, Shields believes that Baker’s style reads like evasiveness when the subject is something complex, like fatherhood or the psychology and politics of desire. On this basis, he contends that Room Temperature and the “sex books” fall short of the full-blown successes of The Mezzanine and U and I. Possibly one should amend this complaint slightly to say that in Arno Strine Baker devises a character whose matchlessly “uncanny access” seduces him with the advantages of dismissing those complexities in the service of feeding his obsession. Other Baker characters are as obsessive as Strine, but because they consign themselves to innocuous matters—broken shoelaces or comma splices, say—the reader is amused instead of outraged. Part of what makes Strine so stubborn (and, I would add, absurd) is that whenever he does try to divert his attentions to nobler pursuits, he “drops” into the same old subject anyway: “There were wonderful non-gonadotropic topics everywhere and I

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wanted very much to do them the courtesy of thinking about them—it was my duty as a conscious creature to think about them. The plastic arts, for instance. At random I thought of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, how skilled he was at depicting clear water and wet tulle. It would be good to be lying on a towel on a beach while the Hispanic phlebotomist held flat pages of a large-format edition of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings with her flatly coconut-oiled breasts, so that the Caribbean breeze wouldn’t make me lose my place” (118). The saying goes that the average male thinks about sex something like every fifteen seconds; Arno Strine would probably be amazed by the rumor that some are able to postpone it for so long. As the reader has seen, it is the philosophy more than the explicit sex that incenses many readers of The Fermata. One need not be a prude or a feminist to object to it, and Strine’s glib reassurances and obvious intelligence make his explanations all the more infuriating. It does seem, though, that even as Baker tends to share Strine’s fascination with women and to acknowledge the humor Strine finds in all things human, he also labors to undermine Strine’s belief system. It profits the reader in this case to remember how Strine operates as an anonymous influence peddler. If Strine enjoys making coy, calculated (and primarily obscene) alterations in the arrested landscape to suggest his infiltration, the novelist, by inserting elements of “simulated fortuity,” which the reader can either stop to interpret or “walk on by,” likewise provides those caught in the Fold of his narrative evidence that there is something disrupting the coherence of his character’s argument. As it happens, Baker made a definite point of reminding Lynn Darling in the Esquire piece that

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while it is commonplace to stress that a writer and his character are not equivalent and that an unreliable narrator should not be a revelation among sophisticated readers, The Fermata is a book that makes him want to underscore what separates him from Arno Strine rather than what unites them.18 In the matter of “thrilling wrongness,” to recycle a phrase from Vox, this memoir entails ethical burdens that Strine’s sexual relish alone is insufficient to carry. His alluding to “the almost horrified excitement of my wrongdoing,” which implies that the depravity of his actions does not smother their orgasmic potential but heightens it, at the same time betrays his understanding that, whatever logical gyrations he performs, the end of rapture does not excuse the means of achieving it. Many of the instances in the novel indicating Strine’s unreliability are not subtle at all. What logic could be more transparently ridiculous, for example, than Strine’s conclusion that it would be acceptable for Rhody to insert a blue eraser in his anus during a Fold just to satisfy curiosity, as long as it was not done out of a wish to “rob me of dignity”? (173). “So the moral is: Rhody was quite wrong in assuming that the Fermata was intrinsically antithetical to seduction. I used the Fermata to seduce her,” he concludes (184). Strine’s Fold powers may be intact, but his evaluation is clearly, conveniently whacked. When he admits that ordinary sexual innuendo is lost on him (24), Strine gives away more than he knows of his insufficiencies; when at the end of The Fermata he is astonished to experience the splendor of being hugged by a woman who is awake or stunned to discover that “there is no satisfactory autoerotic substitute for a kiss” (298), one senses that neither ecstasy nor embarrassment

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will disrupt his vision of himself. Only twinges in his wrist, not twinges of contrition, will stay his hand. At the core, The Fermata is a comedy (low or base as it may be) and Strine its straw-man advocate. The return of Vox’s punning invention of names for sex organs and apparatuses is highlighted throughout the novel, and it cleverly swells Baker’s bestiary of improper nouns (133). In fact, Strine’s maiden attempt at producing conventional erotica, resulting in what he calls his “rot” piece, is very funny indeed, what with its riotous employment of a riding lawnmower for ingeniously perverse purposes.19 As to Strine himself, here is a man who assaults countless women in countless ways, yet who says he is friendly and likable and sane because he does not have a flat affect (155). And when he rhapsodizes about the bodies he cherishes, the effect is nothing if not laughable, as the reader learns when Strine takes a somewhat Berkeleyan slant on a derriere: “Each time I Drop I get another chance to love a chosen body as it really is: to see a woman’s ass, for example, when its owner-operator is talking at a pay phone and thinking about other things than the fact that she has an ass, and her ass can therefore be completely itself” (158). The Fermata may not just be a joke, thus mitigating the insults it gives, but it is undoubtedly also a joke. Arno Strine may be a villain, but like Howie, like the Nicholson Baker of U and I, he is also a bookish, self-absorbed schlemiel. It is hard to say whether his hope that conferring an explicit story spawned from his “rotterly imagination” upon an unsuspecting woman will make her realize that he is “an unusual man, possibly worth knowing” is diseased, ludicrous, or just plain pathetic (227).

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Strine remains committed to the same kind of reasoning when it comes to his comparatively loving, lasting infatuation with Joyce Collier, who he dreams will come to “a conscious realization that she really liked [him]” in spite of the fact that he has shown interest in her more or less exclusively while she has been unconscious (281). The tonic effect of her voice in his head, the compatibility of her hobby of drawing still lifes with his own supernatural habits, and the belief that this is the woman to whom he can productively declare his gift steel him to deal with her in an extra-fermational setting. He decides to ask her out on a date— “not something I do lightly,” as opposed to what he does to them while they are frozen (289)—and he convinces her of his ability by making her a second animate agent during a Drop, which he instigates during their lovemaking. (Curiosity about the Fold evidently softens her umbrage at the liberties he had taken with her during previous solo Drops.) Either the “unnatural” intersection of time warp and Fold-Drop or the fact of his having trespassed against some unknown fermational orthodoxy by sharing the secret somehow transfers the Fold-powers to Joyce, leaving him utterly human and in customary, unadulterated love with her. A soul mate after all, Joyce employs her newfound talents more or less as Strine had done, with some added contrivances to keep their own intimacy lively. Meanwhile, Strine seems to have reconciled himself to the absence of fermational control, having perhaps matured through his participation in a relationship that does not require his veiled domination. The one exception he does note to his fermata-free contentment, however, is that he would like to regain it just to perpetrate a best-selling

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book out of his memoirs. Once again, Strine intimates that his memoirs have more in common with other novels than they do with other forms of corruption.20 He decides that a true haven of lapsed moral laws and tailored rewards would have to include shamelessly splashy sales. It is hard to imagine any writer who would not similarly upholster his Fold. By virtue of its bizarre modification of erotic possibility and its deftly stylized commoditization of erotic fiction, The Fermata is doubly subversive of expectations. With this novel, and in face of stormy reviews, Nicholson Baker got the Drop on more readers than with anything else he has written.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Uncollected Works

This chapter discusses Nicholson Baker’s uncollected writings, which reinforce an understanding of some of the most conspicuous themes to be found in the acclaimed novels and essays. More than just apprentice pieces, however, they merit consideration not only because they illuminate the “central” works but also because they are stimulating in their own right. Two of the short stories are directly indebted to Baker’s training in music. “K.590” (1982), which originally appeared in the Little Magazine, was chosen by John Gardner (in conjunction with series editor Shannon Ravenal) for Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Short Stories 1982. The title refers to the last of Mozart’s quartets, composed in 1790 and dedicated to King Frederick William II. In this story, it is being rehearsed in 1969 in a most inauspicious setting: the Refreshment Room of the Fountainblue Hotel and Apartments, a California court complex currently on the downslope of whatever questionable elegance it may once have pretended to. While the quartet practices, Mrs. Warner, the manager, armed with vacuum cleaner, rags, and chemical solvents, skirmishes against the stubborn forces of decay at the Fountainblue. In a sense, the “harmonic tension that must be resolved” by the musicians is paralleled by the tension between entropy and repair that daily engages Mrs. Warner.1 A related, comic tension also surfaces in “K.590” between Mrs. Warner’s stabs at upgrading the decor and the curious, kitschy results she gets. Her fashion statements expose a bizarre

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taste indeed. Her installing pink shag carpeting to set off purple Moorish-style trim, desk chairs padded in white vinyl and studded with artificial rubies, and wood-grained vending machines does not overcome but intensifies the heavily trafficked and randomly appointed feeling of the place. The walls are scarred and dented (Mrs. Warner suspects the San Francisco 49ers, who had practiced on the nearby field and stayed in the rooms, of this vandalism); the carpet is spattered with chunks of tar, which “had imbedded themselves among the shag fibers like ticks” (117); and save for regularly spaced greens where the recessed sprinklers leak, the grounds are brown all year. Paradise is embattled; the Refreshment Room appears to be beyond Mrs. Warner’s furtive attempts at rejuvenation. Even the blue fountain of the Fountainblue (a Pacific Pool Supplies blue, to be precise), adorned with spray-painted rocks and plastic seaweed, although it soothes Mrs. Warner with its mechanical chirping when it is turned on for special occasions (the cost of electricity being what it is), shows the Garden’s succumbing to the vulgar Machine. And yet, whatever the inadequacies of Mrs. Warner’s restorative campaign may be, domestic order has not surrendered to ruin altogether. To be sure, whether the shoddiness of this environment fatally contaminates the playing of K.590 or whether Mozart redeems the seamy features of the Fountainblue remains something of an open question. Baker exploits these stresses to humorous effect: “The quartet was, still is, in F major, whereas Mrs. Warner’s vacuum cleaner played a steady B-natural with occasional rises in frequency when she pressed the wand hard into the poolside carpeting” (117). Other discordances—the slangy contentiousness of the musicians, the distractions caused

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by a man walking by in flip-flops, and the naive commentaries by a couple of girls snacking on candy and soda after a game of Frisbee—initially militate against the prestige of a classical performance. “This is the kind of crap that ticks me off,” the second violinist rants. “I’m sitting here trying to play Kochel 590 staring at a row of vending machines. It’s pathetic” (121). No wonder that a difficult passage, designed to be played “joyously,” comes off as “agitated.” For all that, “K.590” does not overwhelm Mozartian enchantment with satire. Like the quartet itself, the story has the effect of “a witty work with spots of lyric beauty” (117), manifesting the “complex polyrhythms” emanating from the quartet and such unintended accompaniments as the “complex clicks and scraping sounds” of coins dropping through a vending machine, a girl chewing a Mars Bar, another girl tapping her Frisbee, and Mrs. Warner going about her stabilizing routines. “The quartet passed the double bar, and the first violin and cello had a witty interchange moving to tonic that was abruptly punctuated by two sharp hisses, followed by sounds of tearing metal” (119). Circumambient noises either antagonize or enrich the polyrhythms, depending on one’s sympathies. The successive uses of “complex” and “witty” in the excerpts quoted above intimate a kind of symphonic treatment of language in “K.590,” which further examination bears out. Just as the musicians are busy “weaving the sounds together” (120), so does Baker overlap images through verbal repetition. “Complex,” “beauty,” and “destruction” are salient instances of this technique, but the most critical repetition is probably “spots.” Not all of the spots are welcomed by Mrs. Warner, of course, who is regularly vexed by the ineradicable tar and oil spots on

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her carpets. But other appearances seem to recapitulate the “spots of lyric beauty” in the quartet, seconding its motion. There are “several lush spots of bright green” on the nearby field created by the aforementioned leaky recessed water sprinklers, like oases punctuating an otherwise arid landscape (116). There is also the first violinist’s entreaty to the second violinist to make K.590 “more joyful at that spot near G” (118). A salacious pun on a shifty erogenous zone—the joyful G-spot, for which the male musicians search in the company of girls dressed for a summer romp—is ripe for the taking; for the relentless reader of double entendres, it may be extended by Mrs. Warner’s “press[ing] the wand hard” as she vacuums nearby. Perhaps the introduction of one girl’s can of Sprite into the proceedings likewise informs the music, lending sprightliness to all of the “movements” in the vicinity. Admittedly, joyfulness may be inhibited by the command to be joyful. But the convention in Baker’s books is that every pleasure, from the intellectual to the sexual, is wrapped in consciousness. Put another way, the prospect of defining, contemplating, and talking about something—making it into a topic—is integral to its occasion. It may even be more pleasurable to Baker than the pleasure that mandated language in the first place. If “K.590” does not achieve dignified climes, it does vindicate somehow the variegated pleasures of a string quartet in the Refreshment Room, of emotions recollected in tranquillity “near a decorator trash can” (120).2 In a climactic moment, Mrs. Warner puts aside her chores to devote herself to the music: “She watched the players bob and sway. She noticed the cellist’s sharp endpin, putting a hole in her carpeting. This pained her, but then every-

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thing is a compromise and where are you going to find perfect beauty except in front of the blue Fountainblue fountain” (120– 21). Her epitome of perfect beauty is at least as compromised as her carpeting. But again, Baker’s “K.590” (if not Mozart’s K.590) suggests a mitigated definition of beauty, in which pure grace is infiltrated by the surrounding “bounciness” without being scuttled by it. Sadly for Mrs. Warner, she cannot abide the tempering of her desire for sonic and household tidiness. Hence her dilemma when she realizes that protecting one orderly resource jeopardizes the other: “Here was one of her tenants participating in the destruction of her carpeting right in front of her eyes, yet if she cried out, if she seized her by the shoulders and shook her, if she yelled at her about the callous forces of destruction in the world, the music would stop, and the four young men would think of Mrs. Warner as a callous force of destruction herself” (122). She escapes to the fountain for succor, that enduring symbol of pure beauty steadfast among the painted rocks and labeled in turquoise Dymo label tape. The entire audible spectrum, from Mozart to the crudities assailing the performance, are overwhelmed by a liquid quartet of “four trembling silver plumes of water that began interlacing in complex trajectories of great formal beauty,” as the pump motor “hummed a slightly sharp B-natural,” the key of her cleaning regimen. Under this spell, “All tar spots dissolved from the world” (122–23). Mrs. Warner’s vision does not take precedence in the end, however. Her fear of callousness and of being thought callous herself—“callous” echoes within the paragraph describing Mrs. Warner’s outrage over the fate of her carpet—chimes with the pink “callus” under the chin of the second violinist. For Mrs.

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Warner, the callus is an emblem of ugliness rather than an indication of years of dedicated practice (122); unconsciously, perhaps, it serves to mock the pink shag carpeting to which she religiously attends. On the other hand, the first violinist deems the callus on his left index finger manageable, if not actually a boon to his art. On the advice of one Professor Belanyi, he files off the hard part, and although it hurts at first when he plays, “then the skin warms up and it gets flexible” (119). And of course, Baker himself has a special reason for enjoying the callus and the passage extolling its virtues in “K.590,” which he shared at the conclusion of U and I: as an idea occurring in Updike’s writings after its appearance in Baker’s story, it is the best evidence Baker has, if only regarding a single “thoughtlet,” of the apprentice having for once preceded his master. Most important, the callus is not callous, or not only callous; it is also malleable and can be manipulated to contribute to the production of beauty. Accordingly, “K.590” champions the attractions that derive from heterogeneous yokings, such as the minglings of prescribed and peripheral sounds, as well as of the “elite” musicians and the “underclassed” California girls who gather for coffee after the rehearsal. Even the fountain cherished by Mrs. Warner is revealed by an outside perspective to be a testimony to this composite standard of excellence. The second violinist exclaims that it is “amazingly tacky,” and the first violinist responds, “It was hard to take at first. But actually now I kind of like it. It’s got its own integrity” (123). Integrity is not a product of exclusion, nor is tackiness poor soil for amazement to prosper in. Befitting a story by the author of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, in “K.590” beauty is not restricted to the transcendent engineering

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of a Mozart composition; it also lies just hidden in unanticipated connections and local ironies. Variations on these themes occur in “Playing Trombone,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (1982).3 “There once was a miner who lived in Bang County with his wife and son,” begins this allegorical tale4—a heroic cycle set to music. “Playing Trombone” tells the story of Zeno, a gifted trombonist. His humble, anonymous origins in Bang County microcosmically recall the Big Bang, whence all stories, fortunes, and sounds initiate. Legend has it that Zeno’s father, the miner, had an affinity for the trombone, which he played at weddings and funerals. On the fateful day that his son picks up the instrument, Zeno performs marvels with his first note—a “TU” like an Annunciation. Strange tunes poured steadily out of him, mastering animals, reforming matter. “Someone was playing my trombone,” his father intoned, echoing Father Bear from another well-known fable, for Zeno’s father can hear the boy’s unprecedented blasts even from within the mine. His consternation quickly gives way to the awareness that what in his hands was an “old slushpump” is in his son’s a magical attachment: he can not only “make the instrument speak,” he can make it lecture, rage, and cry. Furthermore, he is able to refine his pitch to pulverize rock, making him, like some metallurgical Orpheus, indispensable in the strip mine. His talents soon require a finer tool, so Zeno goes to see the owner of a music store, a Mr. Shelf, who outfits him with a special trombone in a scene comparable to the ritual arming of Achilles. Baker also plays with the motif of encoding magic numbers in “Playing Trombone”: the instrument Zeno acquires from Mr.

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Shelf costs $99.99; his audition for the Mammoth Symphony Orchestra is held in Room 9999, where his conclusive rating from the conductor is 9.999; and the ideal trombone that will ultimately be fashioned for him will emerge as the Conn Model 99Z. For the puzzle-hungry reader, matches can be coerced from among telephone numbers, bus lines, and seminal dates in the history of the trombone as provided throughout the story. Shelf’s daughter, Thama, who teaches Zeno to read music (a trial Zeno must overcome to certify his worth and earn the custom-made trombone), serves as the hero’s postponed intended. In an amusing forecast of a novel over a decade away, Baker explains that “by the time Zeno had mastered the fermata he was in love” (40). Tragically, their secret desire is discovered by her irate father, and with requisite archaic rhetoric, he banishes Zeno and curses him with a Paradox: “May it paralyze you at an Inopportune Moment” (40). In keeping with the conventional course of monomythic development, which features a three-part sequence of isolation, initiation, and return of the transformed hero, Baker transfers his fabulous musician to the metropolitan Oz of Mammoth, New York, where the grail of winning the place of principal trombone in the symphony orchestra beckons. With the passage of time, Zeno’s rate of improvement diminishes and his confidence flags. Set adrift in a post-Freudian century, this legendary hero seeks counseling at the Institute for Performance Anxiety, which specializes in artistic rather than sexual impasses. Group therapy exposes him to a panoply of music-related fears, phantasmal projections, and addictions; their carriers range from Twelve-Step Confessors (“I’m Lou and I do violin”) to the Consultant himself, martyred to his piano, who

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offers the tale of his self-maiming as an object lesson in the pursuit of perfection. When Zeno unburdens himself, the shadow of his namesake, the ancient philosopher Zeno of Elea, looms largest, for the curse he endures is a trombonist’s version of the paradox of the infinite series: “I have discovered to my dismay that my slide has an infinite number of points between each of its seven positions, making it quite difficult to hit precisely the pitch required in fast passages. Or in slow passages. Also, all music is based on the harmonic series—the fundamental, then the octave, fifth, fourth, major third, minor third, etc., which I believe follows the progression a, a/2, a/3, a/4, a/5, etc., always approaching a certain high pitch, but never attaining it” (41). Ultimate technique as an ever receding goal, incrementally tantalizing and defying his approach: with the prospect of heroic resolution—and thus, of narrative closure—frustrated, Zeno’s very identity risks disintegration. The Institute’s slogan “Breathe Easy” would make a relevant mantra for serenity within and beyond the orchestra, but with a mythic framework riding on his achievements, Zeno needs more than pat phrases to sustain him. Unfortunately, that is pretty much what the IFPA has to offer—a one-sizing-up-fits-all diagnosis. The Consultant, Klipsch, brings forth a battery of abstractions, which are as contradictory as they are adamantly prescribed. His first rule, “RELAX AND CONCENTRATE” (44), counsels a reconciliation of moods which he himself has never been able to contrive. Rule two, “MUSIC DOESN’T MATTER” (44), refutes Zeno’s utterly practical application of his horn in the mine, and it is designed to quell anxiety by emphasizing the glorious inutility of art; if poetry survives in the valley of its saying, music survives in the valley

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of its playing. However, liberation takes musical aptitude to the brink of irrelevance, so Klipsch amends rule two, then recants altogether: “MUSIC DOES MATTER” (44). Ultimately, the consultant reconstitutes the profession by reckoning the instrument as Alpha and Omega: “Our instrument is our universe. Everything must lead to it and emanate from it” (44). It is a clumsy trump, but it allows him to justify his having sacrificed his wife, his health, and possibly his sanity to music, as well as to validate the obsession he shares with the rest of the stricken company. As to rule three, “ACTIVELY DISLIKE YOUR LISTENERS” (44), this antidote to performance anxiety is especially dangerous in that, once summoned, contempt may not be containable. One may remember Stanley Elkin’s God in The Living End, who, disgusted because he could not find an audience who could understand or appreciate him, ended up destroying his creation.4 Zeno practices, but his disenchantment provokes an anti– Big Bang of sorts: he announces that he is quitting, and he “banged his fist down” (45). Desperate, he spends a dark night of the soul in the wilderness (at the city’s edge), where he is invigorated by a mystical figure who tutors him in the voodoo of jazz and, like a rhythm-blessed Yoda or a Gollum with sonic guile, restores to him his purpose. These new teachings dismiss the consultant’s contempt theory in favor of human sentiment and moral involvement. (Zeno accomplishes the latter by disrupting an impending assault with a trombone burst that expertly mimics a police siren.) Zeno’s saving ancient also frees up his musical style: “Even with unassuming hops from one melody phoneme to another, he tossed in lots of little ancillary blips and ornaments, rice at a wedding, celebrating the central interval.

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He was loosening up” (46). By circumventing the search for pure perfection through an embrace of complication, textured excursion, and sheer verve, “Playing Trombone” reapplies the findings of “K.590.” Zeno extends the lesson when another “bang”—he knocks his trombone against the refrigerator, denting the bell—causes him to embark upon the possibilities of imperfection (51). Digesting the various consequences of the revelation that “the best is the enemy of the good” takes him the rest of the story (55). The Mammoth Symphony audition is his first labor and trial. The portents are bad: it takes place in a sterile office complex, all high-tech consoles, Day-Glo pipes, and gleaming linoleum, where Art seems very much the vagrant. Zeno spies a maintenance man grappling with a laser-guided floor buffer whose wild caroms and unpredictable ricochets, reminiscent of the jazzy tangents Zeno recently learned to enjoy, only enrages its operator. Worse, the waiting room for the audition is populated by what appear to be rejects from the Institute for Performance Anxiety. Here, too, Zeno has been closeted with trombone paralytics and maniacs, trombonists with grudges declaiming with instruments aflail, and trombonists suffering from embouchure envy. He tries to calm himself with synaesthetic finesses, then with earplugs. The audition tribunal comprises four silver-robed “Beings,” replete with myth-scented names and vast, quaking pronouncements. They are Plumbat, who scorns vibrato; Plumbob, who appreciates “a sincere low register and a wry smile after a mistake”; Umplumbon, who prefers that performers remain still when they play; and conductor Bliss, who worships the beautiful. On the basis of an ontologically dense improvisation, “a

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playful defense of the essentially nondiscursive character of aesthetic judgments,” Zeno transcends the jargon-ridden preliminary round of reactions of these Elders of the Horn to emerge as principal trombone (50). For a while, Bliss does indeed conduct him, and Zeno revels in his growing reputation. It is as if the rumored music of the spheres were deferring to his talents. Practice becomes solely a matter of verification, and “he felt he could happily sustain the tone for hours, his bell eclipsing planets and distant suns, if only the downstairs neighbor would not begin javelining her ceiling with golf clubs to get him to quiet down” (51). But with his rise to prominence come the old forebodings. Blowing like some literalized inspiration, as principal trombone he has never made a mistake in seven months with the Mammoth Symphony Orchestra, and Zeno realizes that he has been seduced once again by perfection as a measure of selfhood. Omens darken over Eden as he awaits the Fall. The most insidious of those omens is the slumberous Mort, the second trombonist, who tends to doze off during slow movements. Part Caliban, part Satan, he triggers Zeno’s investigation of the treachery that may reside in his instrument, a concern that a reference librarian intensifies for Zeno by relating the seven primary positions of the trombone to the Seven Deadly Sins. God may be in the details of her research, but research suggests that the Devil skulks in the slide of Zeno’s trombone. “And who can really say,” she continues, “whether the Snake in the slide will overpower the Angels in the bell in the fateful nanosecond prior to articulation?” (54). Thus the trombone becomes the site of a struggle between divine and devilish influences.

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Ironically, “evil” gains the upper hand at the moment that Zeno finishes a solo whose last note “lit the hall for an instant of blue perfection,” for that note drifts away as though it were a valediction. Self-consciousness, the nemesis of easy breathing, causes Zeno to atomize his play into discrete notes and to anatomize his passion beyond the recuperation of Bliss’s increasingly feverish cues. “It will never be played better than we just played it,” judges Klipsch, who has resurfaced as pianist with the Mammoth Symphony (53). Perfection achieved cannot be surpassed. Zeno encounters a revised paradox comparable to that of Albert Camus’ Sisyphus, absurdly abandoned at his peak. Although the next performance begins promisingly—“Zeno was knee-deep in his solo before he knew it”—awareness crashes him to earth: “Let me think. Hit the beaches! Note flipping salmonlike up to the higher harmonic. Yodeling for a millennium of agony. Faltering. Disfigurements. Sneers, ignominy, trash” (54). Zeno retreats to the mine, but he cannot even play his home venue anymore, his trombone evidently having lost its blast along with its balm. In a flourish of repudiation, he denies the “engine of my misfortune . . . thwarting my purest intention” and drowns the false thing in the sea (55–56). The love of true Thama Shelf rouses him from despondency over lost stature and a dead lip. She escorts him to Pompeii, where a volcano-powered trombone factory (of epic proportions, unsurprisingly) awaits. Computers guide the construction of an Ideal Form, a trombone designed to Zeno’s capacities, physical attributes, calculable spirit, and revived primal love for music. Out comes the Conn Model 99Z, his Excalibur, the “distinguished thing,” as Zeno calls the cooling prototype.

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The hero’s rewards are marriage and a chastened restoration to the Mammoth Symphony as second trombonist. Meanwhile, Zeno shows himself able to bend the elements once again. In India, his playing charms a snake into positive mandalas and “have-a-nice-day smiles” that mark his triumph over symbolic affliction. But the full measure of his happy ending depends upon his having vanquished another demon: “I date my life from my first big public error. It made me realize that absolute control is not possible,” reports Zeno, the newly ordained Consultant for Slide Trombone, to a brass convention at Indiana University (57). “Playing Trombone” weds classical compositions to the theme from the television series Kojak, musical to marital bliss, academic delineations to shouts in the street. Zeno leaves the reader with an adaptive metaphysics: Mort, you know what? It occurs to me that life is quite similar to what you might imagine to be the experience of a single note in a trombone: you emerge as a sound of a certain frequency, this is your heredity, and then you wander through a tube of variable length and bore which both alters and amplifies the original vibration—this is nurture, life experience, reading, country, all that—and then you are sneezed out the bell, music, spirit, no less, and invisible sound jostling the air molecules; that’s death, you see, and the whole series of small occurrences you have set in motion by living, that play themselves out even though you’re not around to hear them. What do you think? (58) Mort has his own solo to worry about, so the response is to play

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on. For his part during the annual Bang County Fourth of July outdoor concert, Zeno reprises the range of the relationships between art and life: he plays “the sound of a bee cleaning its antennae, a sponge drying on a countertop,” and, setting off a closing pyrotechnic boom with the right note, shapes a “large blue human ear” in the sky, which spreads his intention for a receptive universe. The reader might view that constellated ear as Zeno’s editing the zodiac, inscribing the night with the artist’s personal cadence. More accurately, this approach to the cosmos now represents an evolving alliance instead of domineering mastery. Along with “K.590,” “Playing Trombone” negotiates a truce between the sounds one confronts and the sounds one makes. While it gently satirizes intellectualization, “Playing Trombone” also steadily invokes the spirit of The Mezzanine. The new orange floor buffer with its prize-winning aerodynamic design and sensory apparatus may aggravate the custodian who tries to steer it, but it inspires Baker toward lingering description. What is more, both the reference librarian Zeno contacts and his beloved Thama prove they are attuned to his scrupulous genius by expanding upon the historical, mythological, and etymological richness of the trombone. “Thus does God through scholarship reveal his intentions to us” (54). “Subsoil” (1994) fantastically insinuates that in scholarly realms darker forces lie alongside divine. Whereas the artist of the beautiful in “Playing Trombone” leaves off by addressing the heavens, the agricultural historian in “Subsoil,” one Nyle T. Milner, commits his studies to cultivating the earth below. He has come once more to Harvey, New York, to inspect the Mu-

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seum of the Tractor in the course of what has grown into a three-year study of the harrow. It is a studious obsession very much in tune with Howie’s or Mike’s avocations in Baker’s novels, further credited in this case by virtue of the professional legitimacy that underwrites Nyle’s efforts. But as “Subsoil” proceeds, sinister forces are at work, as though The Mezzanine had been rewritten by Roald Dahl or the meditations of Room Temperature had dovetailed into The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Hidden just beneath the innocuous surface layer in “Subsoil” is Nyle’s erratic and culpable inner life, as well as the secret machinations awaiting the itinerant professor at the Taits’ bed-and-breakfast. A comic exercise in poetic justice, “Subsoil” could just as easily have been entitled “The Harrowing of the Harrow Historian.” At first glance, Nyle seems hardly worth the bother of supernatural assault. He is a man of simple pleasures and private, even claustrophobic, enterprise, whose sole indulgence appears to be a tendency toward gently elevated diction: “Where tractors are I must go!” he declares to the oddly prepossessing Mrs. Tait, following with “I have heard high tidings of soup.”5 His trespasses, if they can be said to deserve that categorization, are two. First, he avoids his usual lodgings at the Harvey Motel in favor of the Taits’ bed-and-breakfast because the manager at the Harvey would routinely drench the place with scented air freshener; he could not abide it, but he did not have the heart to mention it, and now it was impossible to do anything other than steal off to other accommodations. Second, his monograph on the early history of the harrow is growing out of control. Nyle deliberates

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over the tragic fates of people like Raymond Purty, a world expert on silos, and Shelby Hemper Fairchild, inventor of a “groundbreaking” turf flail and trencher, who had died with their respective careers cut short and their vast learning unpublished. Purty and Fairchild are cautionary legends in the field of fields, and Nyle senses that he is moving in the same counterproductive direction. Nyle’s are venial sins, surely, but venial sins can have devastating consequences. His imminent doom is made all the more piercing by Nyle’s recent decision to change his life: he has determined to clamp off his research and doggedly commit himself to the business of “synthesis, exclusion, and sequential paragraphs” (68). Mrs. Tait embodies the antithesis of that resolve. The signs extend from the tentacular tattoo peeking out of her shirt, to the “risky” slapdash and eccentric elaboration of her decor, to her notorious soup, a strangely savory chaos with indefinable vegetable shrapnel bobbing throughout its “grainy pallor” (70). Yet these intimidations all seem to derive from the core horror of Nyle’s discovery of an old Mr. Potato Head game in his room at the Taits, whose box contains not the sterile plastic impersonation of a potato familiar to the current generation of children but a ghastly real potato, now “dead,” whose “flesh had shrunk to a wizened leer of agonized supplication or self-mockery while it had grown seven long unhealthy sprouts that had curved and wandered around their paper chamber, feeling softly for the earth hold they never found” (69–70). Mr. Potato Head’s appeal centers upon the comedy of human-vegetable interplay, “the encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic,” as Nyle re-

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constitutes philosopher Henri Bergson’s interpretation of laughter (69). The adult would also count upon a nostalgic twinge or two from the endorsement of one of his own childhood pastimes—a gratification Baker addresses, for example, in his essay on “Model Airplanes.” But happening upon this memento mori causes a complicated sensation of revulsion and insistent identification, as if to cut a raw potato open were “like breaching a strangely refreshing tomb.”6 For Nyle, this fermenting Picasso works as an alter ego and indictment of the impacted researcher. Its mummified look of supplication is prelude to his abduction. Nyle’s predecessor in his room at the Taits, whom Nyle presumes to have been the progenitor of that rotten hybrid in the game box, had been another agricultural scholar. “Well, his potato head has not aged well,” is Nyle’s reaction, but whether it is to the man’s creation upstairs or to his research legacy is not clear (72). Arguably, “potato head” is superior to “egghead” when it comes to defining those stored in ivory towers. Regardless, when Nyle sketches for the Taits “the story of Purty and the terrible soy suffocation, from which the history of ‘sprouted beds’ and other fermentational mechanisms might never fully recover,” the moral seems to be that one must seize the fruits of his labor while they are still ripe (72). Had Nyle not drunk the soup, in which potatoes lurked in disguise, while his hosts suspiciously stuck to dried apricots, he might have met a better fate. As ever, in his verbal laboratory, Baker is a Doctor Frankenstein concocting puns to usher the reader along. But Nyle fails to grasp the clues connecting him to

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the other “aging gentlemen” in the Tait pantry. They peered out of his description of his need to “branch out,” the surprising “taste” of the Taits/Taters, the feeling that the sight of the Mr. Potato Head “scared the starch out” of him, and the kitchen cabinet chock-full of potatoes. Was there no inkling in the appetite for fresh air that led him to his catastrophic rejection of the Harvey Motel? But such are the grim givens of horror fiction, even when humorously reconceived by Nicholson Baker. Whether because of present accident or long-standing error, Nyle T. Milner is about to be sup-planted. “Subsoil” moves inexorably toward an outrageous metamorphosis as Nyle falls prey to a malefic carbohydrate spawn, an army of viciously lissome tendrils and vile ganglia. Temporarily, Nyle staves one of the culprits off by stuffing its blind finger back through the keyhole. “We have scotched the snake, not killed it, he thought to himself, drawing comfort from the scrap of pentameter” (74), but it is too late for dreams of order to save him from the overgrowth. (Earlier on, Nyle had thought of Keats, pitting the potential of sonnets against his “feeling unusually mortal at the moment” [72], but there, too, the relief was frail.) In the end, the potatoes shackle his limbs, slip into his ear canals, surround and burst the lumpy tuber of his heart, until he is consumed by the vampire brood. To drive the joke deeper into the ground, the sprouts are “attenuated and colorless and slow and soft,” making their “blind, tentative way” toward their goal like pale scholars loitering in library stacks forever (76). The vegetable remains of Nyle “know only what potatoes know. He sensed the changes of geothermic pressure; he heard the earth’s

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slow resentments” (78). A dim, misanthropic chamber, he turns away from human memory toward what one might be forgiven for calling vegetable matter. A similarly playful ghoulishness is on display in another New Yorker tale, the brief piece entitled “China Pattern” (1997).7 Again, the devolution of the protagonist parallels the single-mindedness of her professional activities. The artist-hero in this case moves from combining watercolors with her own saliva, to mixing in ox bones to upgrade the quality of her ceramics, to grinding down the remains of her dead Great-Aunt Parch for incorporation into a punch bowl. The reader is rather used to the way Baker relishes a brand of art that can recycle everything from product trivia to sexual effluvia. And as in “Subsoil” and The Fermata, Baker implies in “China Pattern” that mental and moral balances are equally threatened when one fails to heed the social repercussions of exercising one’s talents without restraint. Also published in the New Yorker (26 December 1995–2 January 1996), the poem “From the Index of First Lines” encapsulates and epitomizes Baker’s fundamental aesthetic strategy.8 Like a child delighted by his first microscope, Baker has always hovered, fermata-like, over things the previously engaged or plot-minded usually miss. “From the Index” is another reconnaissance mission launched at the commonplace. Masquerading as a “found poem,” which seems to arrive unsummoned and complete before a grateful observer (“masquerading” because the lines are inventions, albeit plausible as any one might really wrest from an anthology), “From the Index” demonstrates not only that an index for poetry can be a repository for poetry, but

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also that a keen eye for principled organization and fortuitous juxtaposition may extract resonance from any random harvest of language. The poem appears to be a twenty-five-line graft taken from the “H” section of a college poetry anthology. Taken in isolation, the openings extend from the pejorative Hack on, hack on, you specimen of waste, 80 (line 3) to the axiomatic, Harm’s bordello is the op-ed page, 132 (line 7) to the suspenseful, Held close, or clutched in knuckled sweat all term, 38 (line 12) to the suggestive, Her hips knew what they were about, 144 (line 14) to the lofty, Hundreds of dew-sprent wordlings sprawl, 65 (line 23) Disparate dictions create a drama in themselves, as stately metronomic iambs (lines 8 and 11, for example: “Has this been tried before? He asked the glass, 213” and “He lost the rest on Thursday

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afternoon, 36”) crowd up against brusque free verse, and portentous and crass tones collide. In his admiring analysis of “From the Index,” Bert O. States claims that Baker’s coup comes from his having captured the optimistic energies of “firstlineness.” It is “a world of constant beginningness,” he continues, “where self-engrossed half-thoughts, each facing its own direction, wait like passengers in an air terminal for the flight home.”9 But of course, Baker’s lines are already “home,” in the sense that they have been rigged expressly for their appearance here. This index requires no ulterior, authenticating elsewhere; despite the pretense implied by the addition of a page number after each line, “From the Index” always points only to itself. The reader can sympathize with the compulsion to check out the rest of a poem lying beneath “Handel bites the bag, and Bach, 193” (line 4), except that one must remember that individual lines do not serve in this context as means to an end currently “subdued to incipience” (States, 155) but as their own lyrical destination. Possible meanings are epidemic nonetheless. Beyond the basic prank of “From the Index,” one discovers all manner of intellectual capital that can be “post hoc’d” from the poem. The educated reader could treat the collection of lines as a sequence of comments about his or her analytical progress through it. The first line, “Ha! Small wonder joists are suspect here, 73,” preys upon the critic’s appetite for significant conjunction—for sturdy, hidden “joists” operating in spite of the fragmentary quality of the reading. Alliterative hasps and fasteners, alphabetical order, and other allegiances of sound and sense encourage us in such endeavors. The second line, “Habit, trial and error, jurisprudence, 161,” offers conditions of diligence. Once coaxed into the pro-

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cedure, however, the reader is stung by the third line, “Hack on, hack on, you specimen of waste, 80.” Pressing on, “hang[ing] on every syllable,” advancing through the “drilled array” to where “wordlings sprawl” (lines 10, 22–23), the reader beaches upon the closing lines of the poem: “Husbanding his paltry store, 203 / Huts will rot in better weather, 157” (lines 24–25). The reader has been had: what he or she has gleaned does not amount to much, as paltriness surrenders to rot. Critical impositions should be treated like puppet governments: as tentative constructions, they should not be given wholesale support. The fact is that Baker’s interplay between clear and concealed meanings is more or less the premise upon which all poems are founded—in Emily Dickinson’s phrase, if they tell the truth, they do so at a slant. Reading “From the Index,” the reader may want to puzzle out Baker’s method of selection, sculpture, and positioning or to try it out on his or her own by dusting other indexes, appendices, catalogs, or dutiful groupings for latent poetry. Dragging any poetry anthology discovers several secret collaborations in the back pages. Thanks to Baker’s example, one can look forward to a slew of creative writing classroom exercises founded upon the faith that random sections of real indexes of first lines will not only derive alliteration from their alphabetical order but also provide intriguing metaphorical resonances. “From the Index of First Lines” pokes gentle fun at the poetry reader’s penchant for deeper meanings that must lurk inside any and all juxtapositions. Finally, like the exacting meditations in The Mezzanine or the essays in The Size of Thoughts, this poem glorifies another humble miracle of human devising. The indexer joins the maker

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of concordances, the designer of the paper clip, the inventor of the stapler, and the rest of Baker’s high priests of artful, ordinary necessities who, poets all, teach the reader how much is amenable to attentiveness, and how entertaining and rewarding optical and verbal exertions alike can be.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Size of Thoughts

Some reviewers believe that Nicholson Baker is essentially an essayist masquerading as a novelist, or that he is a writer who uses the novel as a podium from which to lecture on the luster and necessity that live in ordinary things or to rail against the casualties one allows them to become. Thus David Shields explains in the American Book Review that he finds Baker funniest and most effective when he eschews narrative scaffolding in favor of letting “his style [feed] upon farcical and foppish topics” directly;1 and Thomas Mallon opens his Gentleman’s Quarterly profile of the author by suggesting that Baker “has never really been a novelist at all. He has been writing essays the whole time— has been, in fact, a small master, the genre’s American Faberge.”2 For them, the appearance of The Size of Thoughts must be at once welcome and inevitable. Its contents bring to mind those glass-topped display cases used by museums and pawnshops to display their wares, with each essay representing a case of curiosities. Baker is the ideal spectator. Fans of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature especially will discover in The Size of Thoughts the same fixations upon trivia and gadgetry, the same joy in proximity to the intricate and the overlooked, and the same refined sentence-making on which his reputation as a literary artist firmly rests. In U and I, Baker dismissed the dispute over whether Updike is a better novelist than he is an essayist or vice versa: “It doesn’t work that way: the novels and essays lend reciprocal authority

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to one another” (111). The uniformly appreciative responses to The Size of Thoughts indicate that the same position holds for Baker’s own writings. The reader gathers from the reviews that what at present stands as a summative statement of Baker’s aims and concerns will eventually serve, as his output continues to grow, as the foundation for future assessments of this writer. For example, David Shields, who found fault with Vox and The Fermata, clearly believes that Baker returns in The Size of Thoughts to his natural strong suit after having tested the effects of being “the thinking man’s pornographer.” Shields insisted in The Village Voice that The Size of Thoughts reestablishes Baker as “an utterly idiosyncratic, artistically adventurous, passionately intellectual writer” and that its overarching subject is nothing less than “the glory of human consciousness.” “He is a kind of literary Statue of Liberty: give him our wretched refuse and he’ll turn it into poetry.” Shields went on to situate Baker within the venerable “line of 19th- and 18th-century male meditators whom he reads extensively and with whom he clearly aligns himself: Gibbon, Mill, Newman, Pater, Burke, DeQuincey, Carlyle, Ruskin, Johnson, inter alia,” and he closed his review with admiration: “[Baker] notices things no one else notices, and he articulates what he notices extraordinarily well. He writes heart-stopping sentences and he’s hilarious—what more are we supposed to ask for?”3 From the plush, lubricious sensuality of The Fermata, in other words, Baker moves with epicurean ease to what Francis Spufford, writing for the New Statesman and Society, praised as “the intangible sensuality of a train of thought.”4

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Eric Korn was similarly dazzled in the Times Literary Supplement, where he described Baker as “hugely literate and with a promiscuous, if not actually incontinent, love of words, and a fine Dumptyish ability to make them perform tricks for him.”5 In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Irving Malin united Baker with Henry James in terms of the absorbing “tentativeness” of their writing, which charms the reader by making a quick observation slow and suitably complex;6 while in the New York Review of Books, Michael Wood identified the elements of Baker’s “heroism” as an essayist as subtlety, intensity of attention, pun-drunk wit, and passionate investment in small things.7 Finally, writing in the New York Times Book Review, Sven Birkerts congratulated Baker for establishing himself as “one of those writers who almost cannot not give pleasure”: “Like no one I can think of, this writer puts the language through its paces—showing how nomenclature and syntax not only serve heightened perception but also create it in the reader.”8 Birkerts resolved that whatever quarrels he may have with individual observations in The Size of Thoughts pale before the breadth of the achievement: “It is grand not because of its subjects but because of its incessantly effervescing prose, which not only sharpens the reading reflexes and tunes the mind but has the power to rout platitudinarians of every stripe.”9 Generally speaking, reviewers judged the essay to be wonderfully compatible to Baker’s penchant for self-conscious elaboration, acrobatic allusiveness, and rangy contemplation; in Baker’s hands, it shows itself to be a form that indulges both screwed-down detailed analysis and lyrical, anecdotal, or joking departures.

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In discussing this collection, it is appropriate to follow Baker’s lead by adhering to the sectional logic of the book. The first three essays in The Size of Thoughts are grouped under “Thought,” and they do indeed lay proper groundwork for an author so contentedly predisposed to addressing, qualifying, weighing, and measuring his ideas as they emerge. He minds his own eccentric mind as if it were a hothouse filled with exotic blooms. “Changes of Mind” (1982) in particular operates as a sort of preamble to Baker’s sublimely restless writings, which often seem constitutionally incapable of prioritizing one point before they go skidding off into other equally appealing directions. Irving Malin’s allusion to the religiously self-modifying Henry James is fitting here. However, “Changes of Mind” as readily conjures the spirit of Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy is one of fiction’s most self-approving circuses of digression. Baker defines his teeming thoughts as “nomadic suborbital junk” with occasional pretensions to the level of an integrated organism. However, that characterization overestimates the illusion of the mind’s having achieved “a polished and freestanding coherence” like an elegant set-piece within a blooming, buzzing confusion of prose.10 On the contrary, Baker admits that digressions, tangents, and asides are not permanently reformed by the invitation to any broad coalition of fascination. In fact, even the center of belief cannot hold: “The community of conviction flies apart, you sense unguessed contradictions, there are disavowals, frictions, second thoughts, pleas for further study; you stare in renewed perplexity out the laundromat’s plate-glass window, while your pulped library card dries in a tumbling shirt pocket behind you” (4).

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Baker discovers that the “radical inadequacy” that besets this and every such community inevitably results from his honest inspection of them. His convictions are exposed as habits, his decisions as “barnaclings” only. Unitarian belief is a false claim: “a mad flux is splashing around the pilings of our personalities” (5–6). Thus Baker unmasks coherent paradigms as tricks of long distance and usage or as imitations of the deceptions of nineteenth-century novelists “who sit their heroines down and have them deduce the intolerability of their situation in one unhappy night, as the fire burns itself into embers in the grate” (7). To combat anxiety over the “bright-speared opinions” that restlessly prepare to lay siege to the current mental regime, Baker figures that it is better to treat a change of mind as an exercise of mind. By this reasoning, the motility of thought is a sign of its dynamism and health, whereby one’s opinions are not so much destinations as they are checkpoints for an endlessly peregrinating thinker. Certainly this is the kind of logic that presides over Baker’s fiction and over The Size of Thoughts: a limber mind is open and active, while truths held still from birth are stillborn truths. A great deal of forgotten water rushes through the oyster before a pearl of wisdom develops, and even that will be exchanged one day. Picking through the brain’s remnants, Baker is loath to edit or regulate his findings, a tendency that accounts for his love of lists and skeins of examples. Among them, the reader notices “the richer underthrumming” of the evidence he brings to the question of whether things are generally getting better or worse: There is more static in long-distance calls than there was a while ago. The Wonder Bread concrete they now use for

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sidewalks is a real step down from the darker, pebblier substance they used to use, and that in turn was a decline from the undulant slabs of weathered blue slate, thrust into gradients and peaks by the roots of a nearby tree, that were on my street as a child. Progresso artichoke hearts frequently have sharp, thistly pieces left on them now, as they never used to. When I tip the paper boy these days, he doesn’t say thank you. Cemetery statues suffer increasing vandalism. On the other hand, there is Teflon II. Reflective street signs. The wah-wah pedal. Free libraries for everyone. Central heating. Fire codes. Federal Express. Stevie Wonder. Vladimir Nabokov. Lake Ontario is cleaner. My friends like my new blue coat. (7–8) Thoughts are moody organisms, and they do not react well to coercion. Instead, from the public to the personal, from the serious to the whimsical, they fall in a rich, communal, glittery spill. The sacrifice of any one of these enlisted bits would be mourned, and who knows which would not turn out to be the keystone of a future point of view? This is why Baker wants to keep every thought on the payroll. It is why, rather than “the story of the feared-but-loved teacher, the book that hit like a thunderclap, the years of severe study followed by a visionary breakdown, the clench of repentance,” Baker prefers “each sequential change of mind in its true, knotted, clotted, viny multifariousness” (9)— the integrity and messiness of its ongoing evolution. And let the reader not forget that such a liberal mental climate makes room for rogue metaphors, stylistic teasing and preening, and all the good-natured affectation that Baker trades in.

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In The Mezzanine, Howie inventoried the frequency of thoughts; now Baker addresses their size. The volume’s title essay also guards against intellectual arrogance: whereas in “Changes of Mind” Baker accuses his thoughts of lacking endurance, in “The Size of Thoughts” (1983) he accuses them of lacking stature. At least this is true of most of his thoughts, which measure “about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product” (10). Initially, Baker sounds a little despondent about the modesty of his mental life; he would be master of worthier thoughts, titanic ones capable of shaking Truth “by its indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent” (10). Of course, Baker’s first two novels imply that the value of smaller thoughts, and smaller things thought about, is not negligible. Perhaps those thoughts are the foothills of massive intellectual ranges. This hypothesis, as well as an unfailing sense of humor, steadies him as he confronts his limitations. Baker proposes three theorems about large thoughts that redeem—moreover, that necessitate—their inferiors. First, “All thoughts are reluctant,” an observation that should not astonish readers of Nicholson Baker, whose thoughts persistently drag all manner of burrs and baggage with them as they go and occupy snaking sentences “drawn out with numerous interstitial timidities” (12). The growth of thought is a patient, capillary action; there is no use trying to hurry the complex architecture of epiphany along. Second, “Large thoughts are creatures of the shade.” They dwell among untrodden ways, and they prosper

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among latticed shadows like the checkered “light Mosaick” lining the forest floor in Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax (line 582), to which Baker seemingly alludes here.11 Nor do they stride confidently through the surrounding discussion. Tentativeness and humility, Baker maintains, are likelier indications that we are nearing Truth’s genuine altitude. The last theorem, “Large thoughts depend more heavily on small thoughts than you might think,” causes Baker to renew his affection for “lovely, brief insights”—lovely for being brief— and to state the principal accomplishment of the essay: “Major thoughts, like benevolent madonnas, are sustained aloft by dozens of busy, cheerful angels of detail” (16). These “angels” are also, in keeping with the lessons of “Changes of Mind,” circumspect, on the move, and vulnerable to “a bookish delegation of counterexamples” (15). Ironically, as though he had blurted out too loudly from his library carrel, Baker pulls back and reckons this thought small after all. Still, his dream of coming up with thoughts provocative enough to empower his solitude, “evening after evening, walking in little circles on the carpet with my arms outspread” (11), is surely closer to realization for Baker than for many less nimble-minded thinkers. “Rarity” (1984) opens by extolling the lusciousness of writing on a rubber surface with a ballpoint pen, a sensory satisfaction comparable to Mike’s fixation upon the sound his wife’s felt-tipped pen made as she wrote in bed in Room Temperature. Baker confronts a fundamental paradox in “Rarity”: on the one hand, he feels that he is performing a valuable service by pointing out subtle pleasures for others to recall or adopt for themselves; on the other hand, he worries that his articulating a

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“rareme” rubs away its strangeness and risks dissolving its ration of awe. As a result, honoring or salvaging a rareme exposes it to the twin corrosions of frequency and commonality. Just as large thoughts thrive in shade, rare phenomena may better prosper in relative secrecy. Still, Baker is compelled to yield to the skepticism that habitual activities and ideas should be regularly cleared away to admit new ones—a philosophical position he finds supported by grant committees, “New and Noteworthy” columns, and venture capitalism as a whole—and to defer to the pressures exerted by “a society so intent on institutionalizing its response to novelty” (20–21). But before one plunges wholesale into a radical turnover, whereby raremes are hurriedly ushered through an assembly-line life span of enchantment, convention, and disposal, Baker suggests a compromise proposal to guarantee quality control: the observation of a set gestation period for every new product or epiphany before it is snatched by the trend-fanatics. As Baker puts it, “Civilization ought to be superficially pigheaded, suspicious of all subversion, so that rarity can leap in with her accordion and startle the anatomy lesson” (22). Yet he also provides a disclaimer: raremes may not germinate even under fertile conditions and watchful eyes. Whether they arrive as “oddball aurora borealises hanging their ballgowns over unpopulated areas” or as “priceless misstamped nickels” (19), raremes come unbidden, gifts granted the attentive. The best way to ensure a fruitful equilibrium between longstanding and upstart pleasures, then, is to pursue truth, rather than rarity for its own sake: “And very often, when we are looking over several common truths, holding them next to one another in an

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effort to feel again what makes them true, rarities will mysteriously germinate in the charged spaces between them, like those lovely, ghostly zings that a guitarist’s fingers make, as they clutch from chord to chord” (24). No reader should be surprised that the author of The Mezzanine grants equal time to familiar, if typically unacknowledged, “Machinery” as he does to presumably loftier subjects like the nuances of mental activity. In “Model Airplanes” (1989), Baker revels in kit names and delicious scale-model technicalities, all contributing to a honed “idea of speed,” his self-appointed mission being to protect his nostalgia while diagnosing its sources and legitimacy. He is moved immediately and regularly to poetic worship, as the reader sees during his explanation of how glue is the key to appreciating these childhood assemblies: When you tweaked off the dried wastrel from an earlier session and applied a gentle pressure to the Testor’s tube, a brand-new Steuben-grade art-blob of cooling poison would silently ensphere itself at the machined metal tip, looking, with its sharp gnomonic surface highlights and distilled vodkal interior purity, like a self-contained world of incorruptible mental concentration, the voluptuously pantographed miniaturization of the surrounding room, and the artist’s rendering on the Monogram box top, and the half-built fighter itself, along with the hands that now reached to complete it; and as the smell of this pellucid solvent, suggestive of impossible Mach numbers and upper atmospheres and limitless congressional funding, drove away any incompatible carbon-based signals of hunger or

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human frailty, you felt as if your head had somehow gained admission to and submerged itself within that glowing globule of formalism and fine-motor skills. (27–28) From the proliferating clauses to the winning neologisms (“vodkal” is especially brave) and winking witticisms (“finemotor skills” skillfully applied to fine motors), this is vintage Baker—and all for the sake of a child’s enterprise. In retrospect, even Baker is slightly abashed for a change about the nerdiness of this pursuit. Although a model airplane kit provides a sumptuous architecture to dwell upon, not only is the kit “informationally richer” than the completed model, but also “the activity of model construction goes to its final rest in one’s memory as a long, gradual disappointment” (29). Building the plane, Baker confesses, is an exercise in disenchantment as a boy’s dream devolves into just another toy. (Truth to tell, he would rather have a model of the infinitely more promising model-making press itself.) Better to keep the things safe in their boxes, where their “interior purity” cannot be tampered with. “Model Airplanes” may make reference to issues like the Cold War, on which these kits comment, and to the vast, vague industrial complex in which they are tiny but instructive cogs; nevertheless, its real focus is the paradoxical durability and frailty of their appeal. The essay also provides a valuable analogy for one of the chief features of Baker’s writing: the quality of “drag.” Aerodynamically undesirable though it may be, drag is positively the life’s blood of the plastic-model enthusiast, “because drag means rivets, knobs, holes, wires, hinges, visible missiles, sensors, gun

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blisters—all those encrustations that inspire study, and make imitation . . . difficult enough to be worthwhile” (33). This logic accounts for what Baker calls the failure of the Stealth B-2 Bomber. The very reason for its success as a warplane—the “maddeningly smooth,” detection-resistant features—explains why it disappoints kit-builders, who are ravenous for as many details as possible to fiddle with. Of greater significance to Baker’s writing, however, is that drag is what causes attention to take root; it is synonymous with “clog,” another seemingly derogatory term that Baker rehabilitates in U and I. Passionate observation requires aggressive elaboration. “The Projector” (1994) opens by detailing a meta-cinematic scene from the film The Blob, in which a projectionist gets absorbed by the insatiable monster of the title. Even though it comes off as more goofy than gruesome, the scene is prologue to Baker’s divulging a “terrifying reality” that no horror film dares disclose: film reels have been replaced by tiered platters. The balance of the essay, which is as doggedly informational as anything Baker has published (as well as fortified by diagrams), is devoted to a pro-and-con examination of the two projection systems. As one would anticipate, Baker does not easily surrender his doubts about the platter upgrade, notwithstanding its “visual interest”—it is “quite beautiful in its indolent, wedding-cake-on-display sort of way” (40)—for many reasons. He is troubled by the way the new system is “less intuitively comprehensible” than the old; furthermore, the jury is still out about whether or not platter projection is harder on the film itself than reels had been. But the main problem he perceives is the threat of evanescence. Will the old “reel/real” puns persist in a meaningful way once the secret

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is out? “Will there always be intermittent sprockets, and the projectors they serve, at work in the world? Will later generations of movie watchers know how similar a projector sounds to an idling VW Beetle? Will they, when viewing that superb early scene in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, realize that, though Chaplin is ostensibly dragged down into the bowels of a huge ‘Electro Steel Corp.’ machine, he is really miming a piece of flexible film and threading himself through the sprockets of a movie projector?” (48–49). VW Beetles and Chaplin himself are vulnerable to the same erosion of secure reference. Even as one takes pride in manufacturing advances, the depletion of memory and culture continues, as piece by innovative piece they abandon one another. In short, Baker’s usual fears surface in this essay, and they inspire the usual writerly commitment to make the book a habitat for endangered species of knowledge. While it is true that Baker does defer to some of the advantages of technological progress in “The Projector”—most notably, to how a VCR caters to his predilection for infinitely replaying a chosen scene for Fermata-like scrutiny (50)—it is the plight of obsolescence that provokes this and many other essays in The Size of Thoughts. Baker trails behind the changing times, raking the fossil remains, picking up the sloughs. Here Baker finds an ally in Albert Goldbarth, who urges that “to the last, diehard practitioners of a craft, a heroism accrues. The woman who remembers the oral lexicon of quilters. The man who travels the country, renting queen bees. The smithy: a row of shoes—of upsilons—over his doorway.”12 To them Baker adds old-style projectionists, typesetters, lexicographers, toymakers, and kitsch-collectors; and

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from the footnotes of The Mezzanine onward, he pays them homage. “Clip Art” (1994), a tribute to nail clippers, handles a subject evidently so engrossing to Baker that he simultaneously treats it here and in The Fermata: “Now that I think of it,” Arno Strine parenthetically recalled, “the sound of my ex-girlfriend Rhody using a fingernail trimmer in the morning in the bathroom, the extremely brief and high-pitched chirping sound of the smiling snipper blades meeting after they had snapped through her nail, which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong, is one of the most satisfying memories that I possess of that relationship” (34). So meticulously customized a love cannot be repressed. That nail-clipping is an art as well as an evolutionary history, a literary amenity, and even a mythological footnote is the burden of this brief essay. (The most astounding of the mythological uses Baker uncovers is the tale of an apocalyptic Norse ship, Naglfar, constructed out of the nails of the dead.) Men’s accessories are an exceptionally challenging issue for Baker because our culture so severely limits those options; if jewelry, watches, key chains, and the like constitute the “burrs” men wear and on which interest may catch, the nail clipper boldly stands out by continuing “to glitter legitimately in an otherwise unpolished age” (51). Certainly it is a cunning piece of personal equipment, a well-groomed grooming device. Aerodynamically and aesthetically satisfying, it economically combines the pleasures of transformer toys and origami, so that “a big clear drum of ninety-nine-cent Trim-brand clippers sitting near the drugstore’s cash register like a bucket of freshly netted minnows is an al-

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most irresistible sight” (52). Best of all, Baker assures his reader, the development phase continues unabated. As brilliantly accomplished a feat of engineering as a pair of clippers may be, its researchers relentlessly push on toward perfectability. As usual, Baker is not completely fooled by the extravagance of his appreciation. He enjoys the heights to which he has taken the nail clipper, but he also has fun with the bathetic fall, as the reader sees when he traces the path of an errant clipped nail to its final resting place in a box of his tax records, or when he happily notes that “this Christmas, Bassett will be selling the Holiday Family Manicure Kit, with a fingernail clipper and a toenail clipper, two wooden cuticle pokers, some emery boards, and a pair of tweezers, displayed against a background of falling snow and rising reindeer. (What better way to spend Christmas morning with one’s loved ones?)” (54). But the gratification that comes from the fact that an author will sometimes dent a page of a book with the edge of a fingernail to hold his place, just as Baker now marks The Size of Thoughts with this topic, is quite sincere. A “nail impression,” then, may be made upon on a page or upon the person who bothers to meditate upon that minuscule evidence of human presence. The next section of The Size of Thoughts comprises four essays having to do with Reading. “Reading Aloud” (1992) tells the story of Baker’s first public reading (at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland). While the fact of the invitation itself is proof of his election, the reading turns out to be a trial for his ego, as the intoxicating sense that “formerly silent words unfolded themselves like lawn chairs in my mouth and emerged one by one wearing large Siberian hats of consonants and long erminous

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vowels” to descend effortlessly upon a rapt audience begins to deteriorate into a fit of weeping (63–64). As it turns out, Baker chokes back the feeling and salvages his appearance. Moreover, in a leisurely evaluation of his desire (maintained since childhood) to affect a sonorous, muscular voice, he rallies his self-esteem, concluding with a declaration appropriate to the author of Vox: “It’s not called an Adam’s apple for nothing,” he writes after inspecting the site of struggle. “That relic of temptation, that articulated chunk of upward mobility, that ever-ready dial tone in the throat, whether or not it successfully leads others astray, ends by thoroughly seducing oneself” (69). Questions about the adequacy, propriety, and relevance of public performances may well be distracting to “grappling with the syntactical rigors of stationary prose.” Audio prose threatens to reduce the intricacy and the self-determination of the reading experience to “a companionable blur, a string of easy cadences in the ear.”13 Baker’s concern is that the public reading always risks corroding the work of art in the open air. But what may be significant about “Reading Aloud” in terms of understanding Nicholson Baker is that it is so unremarkable a sentence from The Mezzanine (about a woman bagging a breakfast muffin, coffee stirrers, and sugar packets) that strikes him with such emotional force. Classifying the several components of his near-tearful response, Baker realizes that “a big part of it” is “pity for its very unmemorableness” (66). His concern during the reading was that the audience might think him a charlatan or a mental deficient; in retrospect, his concern is for the small acts and objects that his writings have always sponsored. Away from the solitude of the word processor, perhaps, Baker has a chance

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to disseminate his sympathies directly and see them actually attended to. Howie and Mike would have been moved, too. The three remaining essays compiled under “Reading” are book reviews. “The History of Punctuation” (1993), which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, was reprinted in Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Essays 1994, edited by Tracy Kidder. In good Bakeresque fashion, it devotes some five thousand words to “narrow-gauge works of erudition” (73)— Baker clearly applies the phrase with appreciation and no small amount of envy—about punctuation, most extensively addressing Dr. Malcolm Parkes’s Pause and Effect. Baker gives the reader an idea of just how massive an undertaking it is to cover the centuries-long establishment of “our familiar and highly serviceable repertoire of punctles” as “it emerged from competing and overlapping systems of theories, many of them misapplied or half-forgotten” (71–72). From such riotous origins came the current streamlined choices—the starting nine, like an All-Star team. Or, to borrow from another letter of recommendation for all that these standard symbols accomplish, punctuation is “a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.)”14 As it metes out thought and breath, punctuation artfully regulates interactions between person and person, reader and page. Yet even as he surrenders to the Darwinian inevitability of the contemporary system, Baker waxes nostalgic for lost embellishments and outmoded filigrees. We may readily imagine the speculative narratives a Nicholson Baker could concoct from, say, the politics of the that-comma, the crisis of diminishing hyphenation, or the legend of the lost

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dash-hybrids. The reader will remember that the pretext for Room Temperature is that Mike is imaginatively disembarking from his reading of a review by Grevel Lindop in Times Literary Supplement of a book on Coleridge’s second career in marginalia; as Peter Evans points out, the review begins with a passage from DeQuincey, whom Mike also honors for his fanatical, “fusing” intellect and the talent for punctuation that secures it.15 In any event, Baker asks that the reader join him in giving thanks to Parkes “for offering us some sense of the flourishing coralline tidepools of punctuational pluralism that preceded our own purer, more consistent, more teachably codified, and perhaps more arid century” (88). But it is an appreciation doused with longing for times when punctuation, “like marginal and interlinear commentary, seems . . . to have been a ritual of reciprocation, a way of returning something to the text in grateful tribute after it had released its meaning in the reader’s mind” (77). If the saying is true that one writes the books he wishes to read, maybe it is just as true that one critiques the books he wishes he had written. “A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst” (1994) is a reprint of Baker’s review of The Folding Star. The aspects of Hollinghurst that most attract Baker highlight affinities between them. The first criterion for approval by Baker is linguistic precision set off by lively punning; Hollinghurst’s protagonist, Edward Manners, who “describes whatever suits him with an intelligence that cheers itself up as it goes,” sounds like someone who would be welcome in any of Baker’s fictions (90). Second, Hollinghurst’s novel investigates gay sex and sensibility with a cleverness and alertness that mirror Baker’s renowned

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treatments of their heterosexual counterparts. In this regard, what is sauciness for the goose is sauciness for the gander. Therefore, while “there is a deep chasm, no doubt essentially vulval, of reciprocal incomprehensibility that normally separates the gay cosmology from the prevailing straightgeist,” Baker judges that “we might as well recognize the obvious cleavage and wrest some entertainment out of (for example) our mutually baffling pornography” (92).16 As for his response to the appearance of the first volume of J. E. Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Baker is left blissfully amazed. “Leading with the Grumper” (1994) is a rave review for this exhaustive promotion of “the west wing of verbal consciousness” to reference-room and coffee-table respectability (98). Particularly delightful to Baker is the idea of Lighter’s study as clash of realms: it is a comprehensive gallery (from A to G, anyway) in whose academically respectable confines one gets to swear loudly, frequently, and ingeniously. “How delightfully chronological and typographically tasteful it all is!” Baker gleefully confides. “How firmly principled, how unchaotic, how waltzable in!” (97). How gratifying, he might have added, to happen upon a controlled excitement so in tune with Baker’s own fastidious addictions. Vox and The Fermata bow to what must be anointed the Ur-text of obscenity, from whose abundance Baker greedily samples. Best of all, Baker offers a concluding matrix, created “under Lighter’s fluid spell,” to enable readers to contrive unprecedented compounds of their own with which to impress and denigrate their friends (107).17 The “Mixed” portion of The Size of Thoughts is a grab bag composed of what was left in the desk. To borrow Ross Cham-

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bers’ phrase, as coined by that critic in his reading of The Mezzanine, the Et Cetera Principle spares us nothing; to be sure, an objective evaluation would have to call “Mixed” an uneven gleaning in that these pieces are so exclusively tied to their occasions. Nevertheless, there is some kind of prize in every one of these little packages. “The Northern Pedestal” (1982, 1993) alternates the babble that percolates under the influence of marijuana with posthallucination commentaries, the latter of which clinically assess the meaning and value of the “Subject’s” transcription. If one trusts that an altered state may liberate poetic intuitions and pans for crystals among the drivel, there are some intriguing tidbits here. The effect is like plucking “tender buttons” out of Gertrude Stein: A logic of the ears, certainty of outer crust. Changing pleasures in misstatements. (111) Power lessons in discontinuity, retinue of the unfamiliar. . . . (111–12) Chasten the memory switching houses. Decorum focuses the hiss momentarily, but the roar prevails. . . . Cluster globe tendencies; meld proliferation. Debug the profanities! (112) Drunken soliloquies of spree. Melded enticements. (113) Toast dread insufficiency or cramp its claws! (114) There is not enough in “Northern Pedestal” out of which to construct anything so ambitious as an artistic statement, but it is worth picking through Baker’s sluices for the loose change. One would be hard pressed to claim even this much for “Mlack”

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(1989), a two-page hodgepodge of the entrails of type that settled at the bottom of the last computer-screen page of Room Temperature at the completion of a given day’s composition. A variation on the needles-in-a-haystack premise of “Northern Pedestal,” “Mlack” is probably best viewed as a parody of the desire of critics to scour an author’s life, notes, casual statements, and debris for molecules of intention or clues to the artistic process. Readers of Room Temperature may enjoy seeing a word or phrase from the novel in its embryonic or deviant condition; they may also be inspired to treat their own subsequent writings to this method of creating “concentrated, enantiomorphic residue” (117). Baker notes that “Mlack” was his contribution to a request for previously unpublished work for an anthology called Outtakes; the fact that he had this to offer and that he preserved it for The Size of Thoughts shows once again how he must wince at the prospect of eliminating anything—a reaction that tightfisted surrogates like Howie and Mike obviously share. The Mixed section also contains “Wedding” (1987), an edited version of a toast Baker made to his sister and her new husband, which fastens on the etymological niceties of “husband” and “wife.” Of special interest in the wish he offers them is this approximation of the relationship between Mike and Patty in Room Temperature, in which marriage is also seen in part as a linguistic commitment: “The two of them now have the freedom, as they didn’t quite have before, to go wild with their own private language, and invent many strange, embarrassing names for each other, with the knowledge that these, too, though kept secret from us, will last—they will last their whole lives, and evolve just as public speech does” (116). Then there is “Recipe”

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(1991), whose steps for making a gloppy confection include mention of a chance for woolgathering during the stirring stage. More appetizing than the edible product itself, perhaps, is the repeated reference to “Baker’s chocolate,” a personal resonance he could hardly let pass. The section closes with “Ice Storm” (1991), a description that takes advantage of the metamorphic potential of a natural phenomenon. Baker’s slant on this commonly depicted spectacle concentrates on how the gleaming devastation holds portents of tragedy and redemption alike; they are balanced as delicately as the “worry-bead crackling of [the ice’s] fretwork” (121). “Library Science” consists of two essays, both of which show Baker pitted against cavalier forces that urge people to disrespect or blithely dispose of certain aspects of their verbal legacy. “Discards” (1994) discharges over fifteen thousand words on behalf of the outmoded, losing side in the library cataloguing wars. Society has entered the reign of the on-line database, and with very few eccentric or sentimental exceptions, Baker laments, he feels that he is alone in knowing that we are supposed to grieve. Most dismaying, perhaps, is that Baker cannot recruit many librarians to his cause. Even those who could have been candidates for inclusion in the sub-basement of footnoted heroes in The Mezzanine for their anonymous card-catalogue contributions are for the most part prepared to sacrifice their achievements for the bright promise of computerization (144). Baker figures that librarians are eager to “distance themselves from the quasi-clerical associations” that diminish them— overdue fines, “Read to Your Child” posters, date-stampers, and the “soiled cardboard” or card catalogues (157–58). How much

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more glamorous is a title like “information technician”! As libraries recycle their ancient cards, the cabinets themselves, and the histories they represent, the vast majority of patrons and librarians whom Baker questions seem positively exultant over the displacement of catalogues formed by human minds in favor of occupation by “iterative software routines” (174). Baker assures the reader that the “villains” in this story are well-meaning, but they have been swept up in a “national paroxysm of shortsightedness and anti-intellectualism” whose bottom-line ethics brook neither hand-wringing nor delay (128). Baker himself is no Luddite—he recognizes the many economic and research appeals afforded by computerization, not to mention the invulnerability of data to mold, ink, and other common desecrations—but he is alarmed by the haste with which the “artifacts” themselves are consigned to the warehouse or the fire. In a spectacular revision of the idea of information dispersion, thousands of cards from one doomed catalogue were tied to balloons and released to random fates. Baker sarcastically relates how someone went to the trouble of returning a jettisoned card to the library, “foolishly” thinking that it was valuable (126). Indeed, the redefinition of card catalogues as artifacts or souvenirs renders them charming in an old-fashioned way and, absent the obvious rare value of museum pieces, dispensable. Baker’s refutation of the wholesale celebration of library technology comes from two principal directions. The first of these is utterly practical, having to do with the dubious sufficiency of on-line databases. While Baker is impressed by the anagrammatic names of these databases, which are coined to relieve our “subcortical fear of technology”—names like ALLECAT, LUMINA,

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MELVYL, VIRGO, and SHERLOCK sparking Baker’s reliable delight in naming—he warns the reader to suspect their pose of approachability and user-friendliness (136–37). His investigation into the bugs in library databases surely makes Baker one of the foremost entomologists of these brave new systems, and it is the reason that “Discards” has become a frequent reference among library journals. For example, the conversion from cards to computers has already caused errors and omissions, many of which will not be discovered for years, if ever; on-line systems are budget sinkholes and storage nightmares in the making (154). A rather redoubtable “browser” in his own right, Baker offers numerous instances in “Discards” of systemic contamination. On-line hybrids are subject to corruption, confusion, redundancy, undependable retrieval, and almost comical inconsistency. The fallout mutates some records, orphans others. The terminals themselves may cause screen fatigue and intellectual lethargy, and they are infested with dreaded “grime pixels” (168), which are but one of several elfin species mischievously emboweled in the software. The “paper environment” is at the very least an estimable backup to all of this progress, whose extinction involves risks that may not become apparent until we arrive at “some later ecosystem of knowledge” (160). The second concern is more broadly conservationist. Automation comes at the expense of handiwork; it erases not only handmade products but also the memory of those products. (Baker informs on a few intrepid fellows who have salvaged cards, some to paper their walls, others to fashion mobiles, still others just to stock their drawers and attics.) In the spirit of the

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“nail impressionists” in “Clip Art,” Baker wonders about the staffers and readers who softened the edges of cards or scribbled once-consequential notes on their backs; he remembers that many cards were entirely handwritten in a special “library hand” designed for that monastic task. Are these casualties negligible? Baker contends that card catalogues constitute a “social trust and communal achievement” (136). Their contents are the brain cells of the library, and who is to say that any one of them can be safely lost? In sum, card catalogues retain “the irreplaceable intelligence of the librarians who worked on them” (178). They need not undergo any transformation at all to be understood as conceptual art. A store of treasures, card catalogs are treasures themselves. Besieged, they are nonetheless a library’s most amazing holding. “Discards” is Baker’s thoroughgoing plea for a stay of execution.18 Who better than Nicholson Baker to home in on the books used as props in mail-order catalogues? In “Books as Furniture” (1995), which was chosen by editor Geoffrey C. Ward for Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Essays 1996, Baker begins with the assumption that, when brought into close, lingering focus like cards in a library catalogue, books used as visual fillers in scenes contrived to promote an atmosphere of chic learning and well-appointed domesticity may “betray reserves of emotion” (186). He reports on the results of his deductive backtracking through the “thematic mission” of the Company Store or the Pottery Barn (189) as that mission is evidenced by the books chosen to stock the backgrounds of their respective advertisements.

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As the reader would anticipate, Baker invests the advertisers with greater ingenuity than their intentions warrant. This is not to ignore how surprisingly agreeable his discoveries of Tongues of Flame and The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus turn out to be. “We could do worse than accept the reading suggestions that fall unsolicited through our mail slots,” Baker reflects (197), and this essay does much to convince the reader that there really are no shallows in the ocean of recorded incident. His search-and-rescue procedure naturally leads Baker to reflect on books that could not be salvaged, famous absences like those incurred during the 1731 British Museum fire. From this perspective, even books of dubious literary worth, which are now chiefly employed to fill out the scenery, take on a sobering significance. Similarly, Baker’s summary of the development of furniture used to encase or enclose one’s hoard of books confers upon any of the books so mounted or protected an air of righteousness and sociohistorical weight. The title of the essay comes most prominently into play, however, when Baker fixes upon the corporate strategy behind treating books as furniture. Basically, the effect is to flatter consumers with the prospect of transferable sophistication and erudition implied by books in the background that will accompany the purchase of the bedding in the foreground. One is seduced by the illusion that when we buy the armoire—traditionally a book container but now customarily and unapologetically a television housing—“the spirit of those beautiful shadowy books in the picture will persist after delivery, raising the moral tone of the TV—in other words, that the armoire’s bookish past will give the TV a liberal education” (193). From here, Baker ad-

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vances to the idea of books as ornaments themselves. Complementing the decor, books also compliment the decorator, for “they represent a different order of plenitude”: not accumulated capital but “the ampler stretches, the camel caravans of thought-bearing time required to read them through” (195). The philistine who purchases books for the spiritual imprimatur of having them on display can impart the same message as the authentic reader. Actually, thanks to inventions like book coasters, book tables, the Faux Book Cassette Holder, and other bookish substitutes, it is possible to exploit the attractive connotations of reading without having to put up with all of the bothersome paperwork. Indeed, there are shopping services that will obtain distinctively bound books by the yard rather than by the subject or author for the successful man or woman who is too short of time to supply his or her own home. Baker marvels at how books are used to bind, balance, disguise, and otherwise distract visitors from our guilty (specifically, audiovisual) preferences. He imagines some utopian future when it becomes fashionable to have these unique pieces of furniture furnish us instead of our living rooms, but the strong implication of “Books as Furniture” is that this is not a premonition but a dream of the past, quaint as the era of card catalogues. The most sizable contribution to The Size of Thoughts shows Baker at his most playful and presumptuous. The volume’s last essay is truly gargantuan: a one hundred and fifty-page genealogy of “Lumber” (1995). It is a research project set sprawling by one entry, a keyword search to beggar all other keyword searches. It is also a seven-chapter Bildungsroman for a single

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word, tracing its picaresque journey from its seventeenth-century infancy as a term for imaginary products (the mind as a “lumber-room”), through its adolescent stage as junk or commercial items (hence, the lumber-room as a pawnshop), and including its prodigal appearances as building materials. As Baker indefatigably details his findings, he honors and matches for industry past “masters of the search”—concordancers, catalogers, archaeologists of usage—“who were in the dark” and who, he maintains, deserve “a little moment” at least as much as did the visionary inventors of office supplies (and the comely supplies themselves) in The Mezzanine.19 John Donne’s contention that “the world is a great Volume, and man the Index of that Booke” properly acknowledges via metaphor the profundity of such explorations (quoted in “Lumber,” 208). In fact, several of the quotations that Baker discovers in the course of compiling “Lumber” strikingly justify Baker and bid him continue. For instance, there is this sustaining echo from Samuel Johnson: “The most important events, when they become familiar, are no longer considered with wonder or solicitude, and that which at first filled up our whole attention, and left no place for any other thought, is soon thrust aside into some remote repository of the mind, and lies among other lumber of the memory, over-looked and neglected” (quoted in “Lumber,” 286). Not only is the use of Baker’s pet term in evidence—“my word” is how he will refer to it, for ownership is due to the one who best adores (311)—but the context itself motivates him to persist in his act of recovery. Lurking alongside in the database is Leigh Hunt’s plot to shatter “the surfaces of habit and indifference, of objects that are supposed to contain nothing but so

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much brute matter, or common-place utility, and show what treasures they conceal” (quoted in “Lumber,” 301). There is also A. R. Ammons’s revivifying desire to “get / every word in” in his book-length poem Garbage, which reaches down into the dead pit and cool oil of stale recognition and words and brings up hauls of stringy gook which it arrays with light and strings with shiny syllables . . . (quoted in “Lumber,” 316) “Imagine being the first to say: surveillance” (line 1), begins Michael Blumenthal’s “Inventors,” another text that quivers with the verbal rummager’s relish in discovery, the nominalist’s thrill.20 When Baker deems Alexander Pope “one of the most skilled word-pickers and word-packers in literary history” (218), he identifies not only another rationale for continuing to glorify the poet but also the mantle he himself hopes to earn. The choice of the word “lumber” for this experiment in intellectual retrieval was a deliberate response to several criteria familiar to readers of Baker’s fiction. “It’s always been a word that I’ve loved. I’ve had my eye on this word for ten years,” Baker told one interviewer. “It’s one of those unprepossessing words that turns out to have hidden reservoirs of meaning.”21 It also meets additional conditions of offering “some fairly deep and marimbal timbres when knowledgeably struck,” of contributing to the “accumulated drift” of “elementary misconstruals” about its original meaning, of provoking excavations that lead

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away from and back to itself, and of satisfying the desire for beauty (207). Like The Mezzanine, “Lumber” fills footnotes like scrap boxes for tangents and asides too intriguing to throw away; or, in view of the attention they claim in both of these works, perhaps the “main” text is the attic and the footnotes the living spaces. In any event, as he indulges himself in “snuffing for sources” (218), Baker creates a lumber-room out of this burgeoning essay, loading up on academic, poetic, and homely corollaries. As he patrols the centuries for sympathetic employments of “lumber”—rooting out a concordant network, as it were— Baker plucks relevant strings (out of Ammons’s “stringy gook”) and braids them into a supportive web. Chapter 4, for example, is a tapestry of excerpts from Nabokov, Flaubert, the New Testament, George Sand, Proust, Ruskin, Whitman, Dickens, George Eliot, Goethe, DeQuincey, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, and a brace of judicious translators. “No decomposing quotation is so vile that it can’t be taken in hand and turned to good account,” Baker proclaims, orienting his analysis among resonant scores (322). “I am not alone: it is worth remembering that each lonely plodding footnoter is also an honorary citizen of the intergenerational federation of commentators” (264). As far as that is concerned, it is surprising just how democratic a conference they constitute. Rather than positing absolute and incontrovertible beliefs, their evidence inspires quibbles, additions, and contests. “As soon as you footnote a history,” Anthony Grafton said during a National Public Radio panel discussion on “The Possible Demise of the Footnote,” “you give the reader leverage to argue against you. . . . With the footnoted book, you have a book you

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can immediately argue with.”22 Scholarly gossip, mutual allusiveness, integrative intrigue—out of these flow Baker’s invitations to his lumber party, until a lettered multitude is in attendance. In a sense, “Lumber” is a ploy to demonstrate just how woven and interdependent writers have been down through the ages. So too does the reader discover that Baker’s mind, cultivating DeQuincey’s “massy erudition” (quoted in “Lumber,” 252), wedged to its rafters with information, speculation, and consciousness, is a lumber-room, too. “Lumber” is capacious enough to allow Baker to reactivate in passing some of his previous interests. John Updike makes a cameo appearance during a consideration of Hawthorne’s “heap of Customhouse lumber” (243), as does the word florilegia, introduced earlier with some embarrassment in U and I (80) but fortified here by its ancestry in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (216). The reader is treated to Baker the gizmologist’s merrily deviating from his appointed task when he tests the effects of playing various CD-ROM software disks on his audio CD-player; his description of “the usual vagrant digital buzzing and swooshing,” as well as the multitrack lyrical juxtapositions resulting from the “auditory misprision” of performing this experiment upon the Compton’s Encyclopedia CD-ROM, recalls effects and pleasures in Vox and The Fermata (231–33). Also, there is the enduring, and endearing, contrast in Baker’s attitude between venturesomeness and humility, as the reader witnesses, for example, in this interpretation of the absence of lumber in the writings of Jonathan Swift: “To Swift the word would have felt like a piece of Dryden’s proprietary vocabulary, and, wounded by Dryden’s brutal assessment of his literary future, he purged it

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from his speech for over twenty years. Or maybe not” (217). (This interest in proprietorship includes Baker’s contempt toward surreptitious borrowers and other plagiarists, whose cleverness or postmodern sensibilities do not exempt them from the indictment for cheating their providers and conning their readers [292], an evasion Baker obviously denies himself throughout U and I.23) Similarly, he winds up an ornate and accusatory tale of Pope’s usage of “Learned Lumber” in the Essay on Criticism with characteristic guardedness: “What we can earnestly strive to believe, then (although it may well not be true) . . . ” (352). Finally, Baker’s predisposition to digression is on display as well, particularly when he veers from praising “lumber” into giving an etymological recipe for “pie” in chapter 5. How hard it is for him to leave anything “by the way”! (“Mice are in their element in poetry’s l.-room, by the way,” Baker offers, picking up on a simile of Nabokov’s [267]. He then runs with that aside for a couple of pages before collaring himself.) For a few pages at least, “pie” puts forward its own resume and demands top billing. With some effort, Baker restores his monogamous commitment, and while he is aware of other linguistic come-ons, he manages to keep them more or less at bay. His inventory leads Baker to the prodigious multidisk Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Full-Text Database, “the greatest lumber-room, or lumber-ROM, ever constructed,” which, as predicted in “Discards,” turns out to be simultaneously time-saving, vital, exasperating, and unfinished (220–27). Baker does chafe somewhat at Sven Birkerts’s funereal argument that increased lateral access militates against depth of attention—

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that the expense of the horizontal is the vertical—because he largely owes his accomplishments in “Lumber” to the topographical aid of “the ostensibly heartless, plastic English Poetry Database, whose thousand sideways shocks air-hockey us into an unusually vivid realization of the number of poems there are out there, waiting for us” (313). Yet his ambivalence about databases surfaces when he evaluates the Library of the Future’s Third Series CD-ROM holdings of Montaigne: This CD-ROM includes, for example, only two of the first twenty-five essays, leaving out “Of Pedantry,” “Of Liars,” and “Of Fear,” nowhere warning us, onscreen or off, that any material is cut. If this Library of the Future really is a foretaste of the Library of the Future, I hope we won’t, overawed by its exquisite searchability (and I am deeply indebted to it at present myself—although I would like to go on record as saying that I had already found the use of lumber in Boswell’s Life of Johnson by reading an old Everyman Library edition on the T in Boston in 1987), compromise the university Library of the Present, which typically holds Hazlitt’s full annotated nineteenth-century edition of Cotton’s translation, as well as a convenient one-volume 1952 Great Books edition that prints every word. (293–94) Certainly the exclusion of Montaigne’s “Of Pedantry” in the Library of the Future is especially painful to Baker, for in “Lumber,” flushed with competition, he pedantically cites com-

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mentators of the past pedantically disparaging pedants (251– 52). What is true of the CD-ROM is true of the critical essay itself: expansiveness intimates an unavoidable incompleteness. No lumber-room can provide comprehensive storage, after all. It would require a lumber-room “coextensive with the world itself” to fully satisfy the scholar (322). To be honest, however, Baker vacillates between consternation and relief when his computer searches fail to locate exact “hits” for his obsession (321). As any effective dissertationist will verify, the key is to formulate a thesis somewhere between unexplored territory and firm footing. (The conventional wisdom is that dissertation committees encourage ideas that stand apart without actually becoming marooned—a rareme of an expectation, to be sure.) Putting computerized concordances through their paces, then, Baker simultaneously marvels at their advantages, coyly (or hubristically) offers to supplement them, and puts the lie to the “notion of containment” that databases inspire and inevitably disappoint (354). “Lumber,” too, steers its awesome erudition into the dead end of endlessness: “One book after another I have sliced in half and jammed down on the juicing hub—at times my roistered brain-shaft has groaned like a tiny electric god in pain with the effort of noshing and filtering all this verbal pulp” (354). Baker concludes the study not because he has reached his goal or satisfied the writing proposal—like U and I, which bulged far beyond the word-length agreed to by the Atlantic, “Lumber” has grown unaccommodatable by any outlet— but because the expensive computer disks are long overdue.

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Among the qualities Baker shares with those he quotes from is “the fear that too much learning will eventually turn even an original mind into a large, putty-colored regional storage facility of mislabeled and leaking chemical drums” (291). The “massy erudition” one lugs about could harden into impenetrability or seep poisonously through other, and more wholesome and utilitarian, occupations. Fortunately, Baker once again risks and wins by betting heavily on an utterly unexpected obsession. What is true of the overwhelming closing essay of The Size of Thoughts holds for the collection as a whole: it is a wondrous, inviting lumber-room that may be entered profitably from many directions. Once inside, one is compelled to admire the way Baker stacks his lumber, as he ranges among large thoughts and nimbly handles the small.

CHAPTER NINE

The Everlasting Story of Nory

Nicholson Baker’s books provide a series of detailed lessons in how not to be bored. The key ingredient to sustaining interest, it seems, is to remain conscientious about the capacity for fascination one takes for granted in a child and enjoys unself-consciously during childhood. In The Everlasting Story of Nory, Baker returns to the origin of that capacity by featuring his youngest protagonist to date. Nory is Eleanor Winslow, age nine. Born in Boston and then moved to Palo Alto, California, she now lives with her parents and little brother, affectionately known as “Littleguy,” in England, where she attends Threll Junior School. Vital, precocious, and often breathlessly engaged, Nory is unremittingly absorbed. The world is her reliquary and a persistent challenge to her empathic powers. The Everlasting Story of Nory evolves as a fable about how the human mind brooks no restriction. Furthermore, as our heroine flirts with local and imaginary wonders, she reveals the wholesomeness, the naturalness, and the necessity of compulsive behaviors that in Baker’s earlier novels tend to turn problematical or just plain bizarre. The achievement of this novel makes special claims upon the reader because of the transparency of Baker’s impersonation. In order to avoid mere cuteness in his portrayal of a young schoolgirl, in order to keep from smothering her in conventional pastels, Baker trusts in two strategies throughout The Everlasting

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Story of Nory. The first is on display in all of his fictions: the faithful, exhaustive rendering of strictly itemized details. Insights proceed naturally from the acuteness of vision, whether it belong to a writer of technical manuals, of explicit sexual fantasies, or, in this case, of a child’s diary. If in novels like Vox and The Fermata eccentric sensibilities are redeemed by particularization, in The Everlasting Story of Nory they are authenticated by them. The second strategy is to realize that the voracity and the veracity of a child’s imagination are by no means inferior to an adult’s simply because of the social or physical stature of its source. Anyway, grown-ups have schedules to attend to, appointments to keep; a child is likelier to have the time to compile the precious minutiae lying at ground level. Whatever the specific targets of their respective attentions, each of Baker’s main characters is childlike in the sense of being able to see things— relationships, mechanisms, cultural artifacts, words—with fresh eyes. It is only logical that little Nory Winslow serve as a literal counterpart to her childlike predecessors. Perhaps the greatest pleasure to be taken from this novel is Nory’s voice. Baker channels it beautifully. She is hyperprecise, mannerly, and alert to inconsistency in a way that must occasionally madden her parents even as it enchants them. Most important, Nory Winslow has the high-voltage awareness readers of Nicholson Baker have grown to expect: Another time Daniella Harding wanted to scratch “D H” on the back of her watch, to stand for Daniella Harding— she was a pillish girl in some ways, no question about that, although not always—and she borrowed Nory’s compass

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to use the point for scratching. Nory let her take it because it was flattering to be asked for something and to have it there in your pencil case, and of course, an hour later, the pencil in the compass was totally lost, gone, bye-bye. (Really the compass is called a “set of compasses” and the things that stick out are called the “arms of the compass.”)1 Erudition may be unpopular at school and impertinent on occasion, but Nory is irrepressible: “Nory’s father sometimes hummed to the sound of the microwave, because the microwave was extraordinarily loud, much louder than the one they had in America, which is named after Amerigo Raspucci, who made a map of America that was not terribly accurate because the technology that they had available in those times was not good, and the microwave sounded like the humming note of a bagpipe” (138). And one would never think of accusing a Baker character, for whom every iota—every “scrabjib,” Nory would say—matters, of leaving out essentials: “The two main chitter-chatterers for most of the time were Paul and Ovaltine, who was called that because his first name was Oliver, and he liked Ovaltine, since basically everyone likes Ovaltine and you wouldn’t normally make a big thing out of liking it and, for instance, stand up on a chair and say, ‘Hi, everybody, I like Ovaltine!’—and his last name was Dean, and his face was oval, and maybe another reason that Nory couldn’t remember, but that covered most of it” (149). Any parent who in response to “How was school today?”ever received from his or her child a run of “ands” lasting the whole car ride will attest to the accuracy of Baker’s impersonation of Nory in the feverish midst of an everlasting story.

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Definitely, Nory, who variously considers art, dentistry, and paper engineering as future careers, owns the sort of industrious eye promoted throughout Baker’s canon. As a result, this novel proves to be yet another compendium (admittedly rudimentary when compared to The Mezzanine) of minimalist engineering and hidden potencies on the order of the previous fictions. Highlights among Nory’s inventory include her ink eradicator, the way ancient Greeks made imprints on wax, commonsense application of toothpaste, the mystical properties of non sequiturs uttered by her sleepy father, her National Trust eraser, squid ink, crooked bricks, screensavers, grass seeding, hues of blood, tailless cats, the history of salt, claymation, and double-jointedness. Early in the novel, Nory determines that Littleguy’s head is “still basically a construction site” (14), but this has less to do with the strength of avidity of her little brother, whose interests are largely confined to trucks and heavy machinery, than with its breadth. Even at its most primitive, the imagination strives constantly for nourishment. It also strives for individuation. Like the stained-glass mosaic at Threll Cathedral, which in Nory’s mind affiliates Godliness with meticulous assessment, The Everlasting Story of Nory consecrates the discreteness of its components. Nory decides that “you have to spend your whole life learning more and more about how to draw a difference between one idea and another idea and how to keep them separated out rather than totally dredged together in a sludgy mass” (14). According to this logic, books and cathedrals both should be designed to honor uniqueness. A good narrative should be spiky, “clogged,” respectful of differentiation, just as a good cathedral should not cultivate a

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heap of souls or unconjugated congregation in a “sludgy Mass.” There is a mosaic quality to the structure of The Everlasting Story of Nory as well, whose fifty-four short chapters are reminiscent of the island-hopping progress of Robert Coover’s incremental fictions in Pricksongs & Descants or the ice-floe stations of William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” whereby we see the main character’s consciousness developing through its steady accretion of curious detail.2 It is no accident that Nory’s preferred spot in the Cathedral is where the entering sunlight sends down “a soft green stalk onto the floor”: patient and sensitive under that Marvellian green light, “supposedly at that moment you could almost think God’s thoughts” (6). Central to the comparison between religious and narrative forms is the fact that both are shelters or preserves—frank commitments to everlastingness. From grace at meals to cathedral gardens to monks’ graves, true worship represents to Nory an elaborate means of staving off forgetting. She is especially fond of leaving off her stories with TO BE CONTINUED; she positively revels in the prospect of AND THEN. “‘Neverending’ and ‘everlasting’ were good words for the job because they last and last when you say them, like ‘forevermore,’” she thinks, uniting positive traits of stories and religious service (70). Indeed, Nory already knows what her predecessors, Baker’s adult heroes, have demonstrated: memory is not a lucky happenstance but the perpetual work of perpetuation. Lessons of death are pervasive, ranging from the slow-turning remains of buried monks to the destructive infestation of the Jasperium by Death Watch Beetles,

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“so you have to keep convincing people from scratch—‘Remember this person, remember this person, remember this person.’ It isn’t easy, but it may be satisfying work” (15). In short, it is the principal business of afterlife. When she writes longingly to her friend Debbie back in the States, Nory draws a picture of a girl with a fan behind her head, which, as she learned in a visit to a museum fan room, means “Don’t forget me!” (32).3 When she buries her dead hermit crab, Nory takes pains with the marker, for she never wants to end up lost underground (like monks unable to pierce the cover of Astroturf in one of her nightmares). The task is to combat oblivion always—to rescue not only the Jasperium but the molesting beetles within. Actually, it could be argued that Nory’s desire to be a dentist naturally derives from this same incentive, in that stories serve as “retainers,” too, by taming irregularities of nature. Furthermore, piercing the enamel, like the surface of the earth, the bark of a tree, or, for that matter, any of the subtle excavation sites the reader is guided to in The Mezzanine or Room Temperature, uncovers layered phenomena—the secret treasures of a good story worth remembering and telling again (84). Thus Nory thinks that were she to become a stained-glass maker instead of a dentist or popup-book maker, that her window designs in the Mary Chapel would “tell the story not just of Mary’s life but of the digging of the stone for the Mary Chapel and the whole construction of it and the story of the people who came around one Thursday afternoon for no reason smashing the stained glass and the statues,” rendering every cause and repercussion in good Mezzanine fashion, even to the point of includ-

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ing Nory’s own story of the woman who retrieved and repaired the broken head of stone dolls on the chapel grounds, not to mention the specifics of the glue she used (192). Let nothing be lost. The dutiful dollworker, the nuns whose very carriage and gestures are devotionals, and Nory herself are among Baker’s praiseworthy “angels of detail.” From Nory’s own perspective, “Each person contributes something in this world. Some people make bricks, for example, and some make chocolate cakes. Some invent a new kind of powerful glue or maybe a marionette that works by magnets. Or they put the little ball bearings inside whistles that twirl around” (117–18). Who would presume to disqualify anything? There is the “sort of the way an eraser will jump in a rubbery way in little tiny bounces if you pull it lightly over the paper, and the eraser [leaves] twisted shapes like something an insect would leave behind” (170). To let that pass unannounced is to risk missing a universe, as every Baker book shows. At the heart of the penchant for experiment, terminology, and “strange facts” is Nory’s motto, “Things That You Take for Granted others May Treasure” (157). To turn the motto around, treasure things so that they cannot be taken for granted again. Even more durable than Nory’s notion of a museum for fake food from different lands, an everlasting story—one that persists, one that protects—can be a holy enterprise: “You live your life always in the present, this day, dozens and hundreds of tiny little things happen, so many that by the end of the day you can’t make a list of them. You lose track of them unless something reminds you. Say someone says, ‘Remember when you dropped your ruler this morning?’ And you do remember. But then that is

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lost in the triangle” (107). Recording is a way of saying “remember,” an effort emphasized by Nory’s list entitled “Things to Rem” (156). That “Rem” suggests the rapid eye movement of the assiduous curator, and it implies the requirement to restore the fading “ember” of “remember,” to send one’s breath over it lovingly and keep it lit. As Emily Dickinson put it, some keep the Sabbath going to church, but she and Nory keep it through infinite concern for all of “Nature’s people,” from unchurched ladybugs to disgusting spiders on the toilet seat to accidentally damaged worms—all the countless, precious Littleguys in the vicinity. Stories also enable Nory to redream herself. As selfactualizing privacies, stories also offer their author stable presence when, for a nine-year-old, life is a diary of assaults: playground reprisals, silent treatments, lunchroom snubs, insults and retorts, rumors. There are endless rules, prohibitions, and numbing conformities about smoking and running in slick shoes and chewing too quickly and watching after your brother and how to “Stop, Drop, and Roll” if your clothes catch fire. (“Horrifying” is perhaps Nory’s most frequent adjective, and the world warrants it.) There are the intricacies of who is whose friend to contend with, as well as the heartbreak of public ridicule, the impressive cruelty of hallway pranks, and the difficult politics of tattling. Thanks to their structure and frankly pedagogical aims, Nory’s stories appreciate and guard her against widespread indeterminacy, the rude behavior of her peers, and the general senselessness adults seem powerless to understand, much less correct. Her fables update Aesop to suit the real predicaments of her having been displaced to a new country and a new school. They ramify into

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more and more gruesome plot complexities, operatic hallucinations, and moral dilemmas, but Nory’s stories typically lead to reassurance, nurture, justice, and universal sympathy. Against obstinate predators, fire, and fangs (an intense issue for a girl who intends to become a dentist some day), they offer a reliable buffering of “dear childs.” This accounts for Nory’s complaint that the best part of the Achilles story is “when a person who was half deer and half human took care of him, and fed him with deerskin”—the part where rescue and cure, rather than violent revenge, dominate (95). As renowned child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim explains, stories enable children to cope with conscious and unconscious pressures alike. They credit and lend coherence to their deepest preoccupations. To contend with anxiety, “the child fits unconscious content into conscious fantasies, which then enable him to deal with that content. It is here that fairy tales have unequaled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child’s imagination which would be impossible for him to discover as truly on his own. Even more important, the form and structure of fairy tales suggest images to the child by which he can structure his daydreams and with them give better direction to his life.”4 Nory has digested all the familiar motifs (separation-and-return cycles, trials, talismans, spells, recognition scenes) and fabulous populations (witches, mermaids, talking animals) to fortify her art; all the authenticating conventions are available. The most delicious sort of dawdling—Arno Strine’s lascivious preoccupations in The Fermata made wholesome—stories reformulate the day and chase nightmares. They help her to bear up when she loses track of her classmates in a strange neighborhood, and they help

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to make long car rides bearable. At one point in the coil of one of her “Mariana stories,” Nory “had become totally emerged in telling it to herself” (63). In that lucky malapropism, immersion in narrative and emergence of a coherent self from it are recognized as complementary satisfactions. No Baker protagonist exercises his or her inclination toward storytelling apart from demonstrating an aptitude for words themselves. It is clear that Nory is coming to terms with the world and language simultaneously. As she contentedly concludes one of the episodes of The Everlasting Story, Nory is impressed by “how many adventures happen to a pencil line while you’re just writing a simple word” (171). Hers is indeed another of Baker’s lexical egos on display. Nory defends her Americanisms against British diction as stoutly as she does the fat girl against mockery (21–22); meanwhile, she greedily tucks away the new word “confiscate” like a smuggler (45). She reaches for metaphor to accommodate her many sensitivities, finding regular success for so young a creative writer, as exemplified by her relating the “open feeling” she gets when she is granted an apology to “the feeling of scrumpled paper of the unhappiness going away from your chest” (52). Nory’s wide and private lexicon proves over and again how usefully delightful languages are when they are “nice and hard” (81). Here is an alphabetized selection, all tantalizing handles to grab for as the vague world hurries past: angel-may-care, boffled, clong, coosh, discombobbledied, ear-gnashing, fair-weatherfriendish, frazzledly, heroriously, pillish, quease, scrabjib, scribbages, scrummaging, snibbets, swopped, teenagery, woggle. When Nory bridges computer and classical realms by alluding

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to “Virgil Reality,” there is no resisting the charm of novelty, which is essential to any poet’s success. When she accepts a “flap of ham,” worries about “ladybugs of blood” on the piano keys, alludes to the “oystery part” around the heart, or comments on “a solar flare of apple juice” discharged from a broken mug, she proves herself the true heir of coinage-happy Howie, Mike, and Jim in Baker’s other novels. (Nor could “U” or “I” help but approve.) When she notes “one pacific spot” in a frightening movie or calls people-eaters “carnibels,” the errors are simply too right to be counted wrong. (Nory’s assimilation of the tale of Achilles, especially the episode in which “the Watersticks led from the Alive to the Unalive” [57], represents the sort of thing that would gratify and flummox her classics teacher at the same time.) No wonder her parents have a video of Nory first learning the word “elbow” (56)—it is as crucial a stage of her growing up as her first step. Nory’s verbal delectation at so early an age recalls that of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, making The Everlasting Story of Nory read like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. Her fairy tale logic is sweet and most endearing, but in the serious matter of words, Nory is not out to be adorable. On the contrary, she constantly takes other authors to task for linguistic misdemeanors. Rudyard Kipling’s story of Rikki Ticki Tavi, for instance, falls short for her because “a cobra couldn’t call itself ‘Nag’ or ‘Nagaina’ because the cobra’s tongue is so thin it couldn’t make an N sound. A cobra would probably call itself ‘Lah,’ if anything” (42). People should not use “sprain” and “strain” interchangeably, she reasons: “A sprain is worse than a strain—they are two totally different things. A lot of kids didn’t realize that” (63). It also stands to reason that orth-

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odontists must have a hard time finding employment in England since the term the English use for retainers—“false palates”—is so repellent (82). (On the other hand, the English call horse chestnuts “conkers” for the way they can suddenly strike you on the head, an etymology that very much satisfies Nory [84].) And the complexities of spelling and metaphysics collide when Nory considers “love,” which strikes Nory as “one of the most important of all the words that seemed to be spelled wrong on purpose, just to confuse you” (254). Still, dentistry does provide the saving grace of calling the suction tube a “Mr. Thirsty,” so as to seem friendlier to children (98). French and Chinese give her fits of exultancy to offset the fits of consternation, for they add to the arsenal of the marvelous. Even the board game Battleship is worth playing by virtue of the challenge it offers her to come up with as many different ways as possible to say “Ouch” when she is hit (236–37). And there are the consoling prescriptions of grammar worksheets, which assigned geometric shapes to parts of speech, for Nory to think back upon when she feels unnerved at Threll Junior School. She is already nostalgic for that cozy thrall: “They were specially designed as part of the Montessori system, so all that time she had spent thinking about why a black triangle was like a noun, because it had a wide base and just sat there steadily being whatever noun it was, was just time that could have gone ‘poof’ away, as far as her teachers now were concerned. But she liked knowing that a red circle stood for a verb because it rolled. You could use it for other things you learned later, for instance you could say to yourself, ‘Mass is a blue triangle, energy is a red circle’” (111).

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As wistful Cinderella and Fairy Godmother at once, Nory uses her imagination to make a hospice for beleaguered bugs, to clarify purposes, to fulfill wishes, and to deflect the obduracies of the world. As an author, she is the loving mother and the cuddled child together, embracing one another in the everlasting round of teller and told. After all, “anything’s possible with a pencil and paper, just about” (157). A good story can puzzle and unpuzzle, caress and captivate, harmonize the past, and woo the future; a proficient writer can protect the idiosyncratic spellings of her princess-heroine which real-life teachers would nonchalantly purge, or craft the Good Result her report card does not contain. The maturing girl learns to thicken her tales with incident, master causal logic, manage a broader vocabulary; therefore, as it proceeds, The Everlasting Story of Nory keeps improving on how to justify the ways of God to man, adults to children, and kids to kids. At the end of the novel, Nory discovers that she has a loose tooth. Thanks in part to her aesthetic development, she is better able to treat the fact as a potential embarkation instead of as an insult to her vocational plans. The Everlasting Story of Nory also faithfully contributes to Baker’s battle against cultural amnesia. As ever with Nicholson Baker, the devil is not in the details but in the neglect of them. The point is made obvious in this novel that as children, people have the propensity—the passion—for minutiae. It is fatal to surrender it—fatal to the “Littleguys” whose intrigues and discoveries are not dispensable for being small, and fatal to those who fail to heed their contributions. Growing up need not be a growing apart, a sleep and a forgetting. Nicholson Baker keeps his readers primed for ceaseless regard, for intricate love, and, always, for another story.

Conclusion

In his fictions and essays alike, Nicholson Baker offers a lavish, interactive vision. Whether it embraces ordinary objects or ambushes intimate behaviors, the foundation of Baker’s prose is really tenderness toward the world and its delicately feathered, intricately bristled, lavishly packed, finely upholstered holdings. Other writers may sweep up particulars in passing overviews or sacrifice them to the severities of a story-oriented readership; for his part, Baker finds heirlooms everywhere, or nested boxes to unpack, or rosaries to turn over to best catch the light. By challenging literary traditions of context and scale, by promoting the descriptive set piece to the stature typically accorded plot and character, and by submitting so many objects and incidents to long division in order to exaggerate “vibratiuncles of comparison,”1 Baker shows that no arena is too small for the staging of finely graduated intellectual entertainments. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in “The American Scholar” assembles and defends “the near, the low, the common” for painstaking inspection, Baker believes that the rewards that lurk in “these suburbs and extremities” effectively compete with those esteemed by any other author.2 So inclusive a connoisseur of the kitsch as Baker undoubtedly remembers the X-ray glasses that used to be advertised in the back pages of comic books, where they were conspicuous in the company of joy buzzers, onion gum, and disappearing-coin contraptions. Worn in the ad by a crazed cartoon voyeur, with his tongue obscenely lolling and his eyes protruding toward his

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shapely, unsuspecting prey, they purportedly could defeat any surface at all. Their promise was the euphoria of being able to invade and clarify with impunity. Consider a gaze so incisive as to be able to defeat any surface and lay bare atomic structures like bulbs in their beds. Nicholson Baker writes as though he has a working pair of these glasses. He not only probes sexual clefts and secrecies, but also needles into the anatomies of mechanisms and nature’s gnarled confidences. He peels back the increments of design that preceded society’s familiar forms and appliances. He even penetrates the language he employs, scraping the rust of careless usage away from the words themselves, stripping them down to their etymological roots. In a sense, Nicholson Baker tests the reader’s power of reconciliation. The man whom Vanity Fair calls “the best writer of our generation”3 is someone who dispenses with so-called massive or worthy subjects to proclaim the virtues of writing with a ballpoint on a rubber spatula or to elaborate on the mystical qualities of toaster coils. He is at once an elegist for outmoded industries, unsung customs, and whatever composts down through the drawer; a self- appointed press secretary for dozens of “busy, cheerful angels of detail”;4 and a thinking man’s eroticist, in whose eccentric perspectives sex becomes scholarly and scholarship sexy. Out of these parallel dispositions and reputations have grown parallel cults of appreciation. One incentive behind this study is to try to increase their respective sizes; another is to demonstrate how they credibly, rewardingly converge. Scrupulousness is the unifying pursuit of Baker’s prose. It is variously conceived as a philosophical priority, a narrative prerogative, and an ethical mandate. Whether he is functioning

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in a given text as a sexual impressionist, a mall glossarist, or a linguistic detective, nothing is ever obvious, or only obvious, to so thorough an inquisitor. Meanwhile, any negligence is criminal negligence. Baker may endure obscenity charges, but for him the worst curse is cursoriness, the real scandals skimming, shortsightedness, and dismissal. He is the enemy of the downsized sensibilities that consign products to oblivion, purge pleasures gone out of fashion, send books to the landfill, and take love for granted. A conservationist of the highest order, Baker teaches the reader what it is to cherish novelties and odd notions, to treat small things and small thoughts with genuine passion. He is supremely attuned to human fetishes and foibles, yet he writes with an eagerness to join in and to forgive. The light he casts is ubiquitous, ruthless, and lovestruck. By demanding an erotics of attentiveness, he does as much as any contemporary writer to keep things on the record.

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NOTES

Chapter 1—A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand 1. Thomas Mallon, “The Fabulous Baker Boy,” Gentleman’s Quarterly May 1996, 82. 2. Nicholson Baker, quoted in “Lifting Up the Madonna,” interview with Laura Miller, Salon 10 (23 March–5 April 1996), on-line, Internet (www.salon1999.com/10/bookfront/salon.html), n.p. 3. Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things (New York: Knopf, 1993), ix. 4. James Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” Vanity Fair January 1992, 120, 121. 5. David Shields, “Ludd’s Labors Lost,” Voice Literary Supplement May 1996, 8. 6. Jorie Graham, “Erosion,” Erosion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 56. 7. Nicholson Baker, quoted in Kaplan, “Hot Vox,”125. 8. Steven Millhauser, “The Fascination of the Miniature,” Grand Street Summer 1983, 135. 9. Millhauser, “The Fascination of the Miniature,” 129. 10. Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (New York: Crown, 1996), 275. 11. Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story (New York: Random House, 1991), 73. 12. Nicholson Baker, “Exchange: Pennies for Thoughts,” Atlantic April 1991, 20. 13. Baker, U and I, 28. 14. Baker, quoted in Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” 121. 15. Nicholson Baker, quoted in interview with Michelle M. Motowski, “Nicholson Baker,” Contemporary Authors 135 (1992): 21. 16. Lawrence Norfolk, “Hymn to the Happy Medium,” rev. of Room Temperature, Times Literary Supplement 27 April 1990, 456. 17. Nicholson Baker, quoted in “Lifting Up the Madonna.” 18. Nicholson Baker, quoted in interview with Alexander

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Laurence and David Strauss, Alternative-X (1994), on-line, Internet (www.alt-x.com/interviews/nicholson.baker.html). 19. See Peter Evans, Tiny Curlicues: Nicholson Baker’s “Room Temperature,” Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, no. 37 (Ichigaya, Japan: Hosei University, 1991) which delineates the tributes to Nabokov’s love of arcane studies and diction (16–20). 20. Stanley Elkin, Boswell (New York: Random House, 1964), 203.

Chapter 2—The Mezzanine 1. Robert Plunket, rev. of The Mezzanine, New York Times 5 February 1989, 9. 2. David Gates, rev. of The Mezzanine, Newsweek 2 January 1989, 61. 3. Robert Taylor, rev. of The Mezzanine, Boston Globe 14 December 1988: 78. 4. Barbara Fisher Williamson, rev. of The Mezzanine, Washington Post Book World 13 November 1988, 7. 5. Steven Moore, rev. of The Mezzanine, Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.2 (1989): 249–50. 6. Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 4. Further references to this novel are noted parenthetically in the text. 7. One need only compare this opening to the famous first line of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) from which the story’s gruesome murders will originate: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida” (9). 8. Ross Chambers, “Meditation and the Escalator Principle (On Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine),” Modern Fiction Studies 40.4 (1994): 796.

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9. Chambers, “Meditation and the Escalator Principle,” 795. 10. Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1980), 1. 11. Chambers also notes the etymological relationship between “mezzanine” and “meditation” (“Meditation and the Escalator Principle,” 776) and goes on to fashion an “escalator principle” out of these two rites/writes of passage, both examples of the prolific “fixed interval” treasured in Baker’s text (The Mezzanine, 102). This principle is likewise implied by the title of Baker’s novel The Fermata. 12. Similarly, the narrator’s own name is buried well into the text: it is first divulged during a short conversation in the men’s room (85), and it could easily be missed by readers who have by that time grown accustomed to focusing on the physical bits of the place. 13. Seconding this attitude is Owen Edwards, who in Elegant Solutions: Quintessential Technology for a User-Friendly World (New York: Crown, 1989) rhapsodizes about the Gem paper clip, whose aesthetic virtues may even exceed its pragmatic adequacy: “If all that survives of our fatally flawed civilization is the humble paper clip, archaeologists from some galaxy far, far away may give us more credit than we deserve. In our vast catalog of material innovation, no more perfectly conceived object exists” (n.p.). 14. Offered a standard greeting by his manager in the washroom— “What do you think, Howie?”—he replies, “Abe, I don’t know what to think” (97). Although a standard-enough response, it is one of the better jokes in the novel, for Howie is so exceedingly and perpetually thoughtful, he seldom knows what not to think. On the other hand, the statement is an accurate appraisal of how multidirectional his fanatacism is—he does not know which thought he will end up thinking about at any given time. 15. One recalls the protagonist of Gerald Costanzo’s poem “Introduction of the Shopping Cart,” (in Robert Wallace, Writing Poems, 2d

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ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987) who filled cartons with index cards covered with facts—when the shopping cart was invented, the number of daughters P. T. Barnum had, the true color of the sky on a cloudless day—all following the belief that “Facts reveal useful lives” (185). To invoke the title of another poem (by Richard Wilbur), “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (in New and Collected Poems, [San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988], 233–34). As the dutiful company of our youth, such things deserve better than oblivion. 16. Philip E. Simmons, “Toward the Postmodern Historical Imagination: Mass Culture in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine,” Contemporary Literature 33.4 (1992), 603. 17. Simmons, “Toward the Postmodern Historical Imagination,” 622–23. 18. Simmons, “Toward the Postmodern Historical Imagination,” 605. 19. One could also add that both meditators are religious in their devotions. Having said that Howie is a poet, an archaeologist, and a sociologist, is it such a leap to make a priest of him as well? 20. Albert Goldbarth, “Farder to Reach,” In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, ed. Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones (New York and London: Norton, 1996), 300.

Chapter 3—Room Temperature 1. Baker has identified the “temp” as his paradigmatic character. He is a professional, but he “isn’t engaged the way everyone else” in the office is. “Of course,” Baker explains in the Alternative-X interview with Laurence and Strauss, “the temp is the lowest level on the totem pole, the least promising character, the one with the least amount of power; he is the equivalent of the earplug or the shoelace.” In other words, the temp is simultaneously a liberation and a challenge for the novelist who decides to feature him.

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2. Nicholson Baker, Room Temperature (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 53. Further references to this novel are noted parenthetically in the text. 3. “Peter Lorre Does a Handstand,” New York Times Book Review 15 April 1990, 17. 4. “Enchanting Domestic Digressions,” Washington Post 7 May 1990, C3. 5. Peter Evans offers another treatment of musical equivalents in the novel. Specifically, he relates the five chapters concerning Mike’s memory-charged night of listening in bed to Patty’s felt-tipped transcriptions about the Bug to “the fast-slow-fast architecture of a classical concerto” (9–12). 6. Evans emphasizes that we are witnessing an aria, rather than plural performances (Tiny Curlicues, 5). The implication is that, despite the seeming wantonness of Mike’s considerations, there is an underlying coherence and singleness of purpose evident in Room Temperature. This appreciation of the novel’s scheme qualifies Laurence Norfolk’s “Hymn to the Happy Medium” in the Times Literary Supplement (27 April 1990), in which review of the novel Norfolk cautions that a style like Baker’s has “no room for local failures. Readers lost in a string of digressions are not regained in the way that a thriller can claw them back” (456). 7. In The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (New York: Random House, 1996), 9. 8. While the fate of Mike’s plans for the comma monograph are left ambiguous, Baker himself takes up a version of the challenge in his discussion of Malcolm Parkes’s overview of the history of punctuation in the West, Pause and Effect, and of its predecessors. See “The History of Punctuation,” in The Size of Thoughts, 70–88. 9. Brad Leithauser provides an eloquent contrasting point of view in his objections to the comma. These specifically pertain to what he perceives to be its unfortunate proliferation among contemporary po-

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ets: “For we seem overrun by deadpan poets who, abandoning the traditional armory of punctuational tools, produce great haunches of text sliced up only by commas—the poetic equivalent of a death by a thousand cuts.” See his “Getting Things Right,” rev. of New and Selected Poems, by Donald Justice, and Strange Relation, by Daniel Hall, New York Review of Books 19 September 1996, 50. 10. Wendy Lesser suggests that this same passage stands for Baker’s own criticism of Room Temperature. Perhaps it fails, she says, because “Mr. Baker just picked the wrong cell.” The majority opinion, nonetheless, is that although the novel’s quirkiness and pedantry may smack of the (writing) lab, the pleasures of the digressions themselves and the luminousness of the writing outweigh any such misgivings. 11. William Carlos Williams, prologue to Kora in Hell, in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 14, 18. 12. Robert Frost, “Education by Poetry,” Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 39. In “The Constant Symbol,” Frost employs metaphor to interrogate metaphor. As it happens, the metaphor he chooses resonates nicely with the circumstances of Room Temperature: “Here is where it all comes out. The mind is a baby giant who, more provident in the cradle than he knows, has hurled his paths in life all round ahead of him like playthings given—data so-called. They are vocabulary, grammar, prosody, and diary, and it will go hard if he can’t find stepping stones of them for his feet wherever he wants to go. The way will be zigzag, but it will be a straight crookedness like the walking stick he cuts himself in the bushes for an emblem. He will be judged as he does or doesn’t let this zig or that zag project him off out of his general direction.” See Robert Frost on Writing, ed. Elaine Barry (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 133. 13. Baker, quoted in “Lifting Up the Madonna.” 14. Perhaps the publication history behind Baker’s first two novels also shows the maintenance of discreteness and integration: portions of

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The Mezzanine and Room Temperature appeared as self-sufficient fictions prior to the completion of the novels. Among them, readers may remember “Shoelace,” New Yorker 21 March 1988, 30–32; “Men’s Room,” New Yorker 15 August 1988, 22–27; and “Room Temperature,” New Yorker 8 January 1990, 31–39. 15. In view of Baker’s regularly confessed worship of John Updike, this contest may be profitably compared with the one in Updike’s story “Walter Briggs,” in which more profound consequences for the marriage seem to be at stake. See Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (New York: Knopf, 1962), 3–11. 16. Baker, The Size of Thoughts, 10.

Chapter 4—U and I: A True Story 1. Galen Strawson, rev. of U and I: A True Story, Times Literary Supplement 19 April 1991, 20–21. 2. Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story (New York: Random House, 1991), 101. Further references to this book are noted parenthetically in the text. 3. Chambers, “Meditation and the Escalator Principle,” 769–70. 4. Chambers, “Meditation and the Escalator Principle,” 772. 5. Rev. of U and I, New Yorker 13 May 1991, 112. 6. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 9. 7. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Knopf, 1989), 104. 8. Updike, Self-Consciousness, 213–14. 9. Baker, “Lifting Up the Madonna.” 10. Updike, Self-Consciousness, 226. At the time of the publication of U and I, of course, the transgressions of Vox and The Fermata were still on the horizon. 11. Strawson, rev. of U and I, 20.

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12. For further comparison, see three more third-person journal excerpts published as “My Life as Harold,” New Yorker 26 June–3 July 1995, 92–93. Dating back to March of 1983 (about nine months after the excerpt found in U and I), they feature more equivocations about his writing ability (provided by “Margaret”) and a brief personal revamping of Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” 13. Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman earns comparably glowing praise from his Master, Lonoff, for already having established a voice “that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head.” The Ghost Writer, 72.

Chapter 5—Vox 1. Some have indicted Baker for venal sins as much as for carnal exposures. Whether Baker “sold out” his highbrow elegance for popular and financial success has been debated by reviewers. What remains incontrovertible is the fact that both Vox and The Fermata enjoyed several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, a distinction that relatively few “literary” novels attain. Current Biography notes that Random House, counting on the novel’s “broad appeal,” came out with a sizable first printing of fifty thousand copies, with Valentine’s Day selected as the publication date; wrapped review copies in brown paper; and promoted a toll-free telephone number featuring explicit excerpts (35). 2. Nicholson Baker, Vox (New York: Random House, 1992), 165. Further references to this book are noted parenthetically in the text. 3. Pico Iyer, rev. of Vox, Partisan Review 60.3 (1993): 496. 4. James Marcus, rev. of Vox, Village Voice 25 February 1992, 66. 5. James Buchan, rev. of Vox, Spectator 14 March 1992, 31. 6. Craig Raine, rev. of Vox, Times Literary Supplement 4 December 1992, 13.

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7. Robert Towers, rev. of Vox, New York Review of Books 9 April 1992, 36. 8. Randall Short, rev. of Vox, New York Times Book Review 16 February 1992, 9. 9. Richard Stengel, rev. of Vox, Time 3 February 1992, 60. 10. Nora Garrison, rev. of Vox, New Yorker 9 March 1992, 93. 11. Philip Roth, Deception (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 44, 72. 12. Garrison, rev. of Vox, 95. 13. Nicholson Baker, The Fermata (New York: Random House, 1994), 84. 14. It bears mentioning that the “climactic” interchange between Jim and Abby does not highlight innovations in diction. During the final phone fantasy, which brings them both to successful conclusion as the novel ends, they opt for time-honored names for actions and appendages. Evidently, even in the case of Baker’s characters, primal desire can overwhelm the search for unusual vocabulary. 15. Garrison, rev. of Vox, 95. 16. Clayton Koelb, “The Text as Erotic / Auto-Erotic Device,” Midwest Quarterly 26.2 (1985): 223–24. 17. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 103. 18. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 66. 19. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 67. 20. Baker, quoted in Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” 120. 21. Roth, Deception, 189. 22. Baker, quoted in Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” 121. 23. Alva Svoboda, “Solitary Pleasures,” rev. of Vox, on-line, Internet, (http://members.aol.com/ajsvob/Solitary/vox.html) accessed 10 June 1996. 24. Baker, quoted in Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” 125.

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25. Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels,” Harper’s April 1996, 52.

Chapter 6—The Fermata 1. Nicholson Baker, quoted in Lynn Darling, “The Highbrow Smut of Nicholson Baker,” Esquire February 1994, 78. 2. Robert Parrish, quoted in Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin / Seymour Lawrence, 1994), 96. 3. Baker, The Fermata, 101. Further references to this book are noted parenthetically in the text. 4. Nicholson Baker, “The Size of Thoughts,” in The Size of Thoughts, 16. 5. Strine later incorporates his passion for centrifugation in the plot of an erotic story he composes and buries on the beach for an unsuspecting woman to find after he lifts the Fold. 6. Rhoda Koenig, rev. of The Fermata, New York 7 February 1994, 63. 7. Cathleen Schine, rev. of The Fermata, New York Review of Books 7 April 1994, 15. 8. Trev Broughton, rev. of The Fermata, Times Literary Supplement 18 February 1994, 20. 9. Francine Prose, rev. of The Fermata, Yale Review 82.4 (1994): 123. 10. Baker, quoted in interview with Laurence and Strauss. 11. Baker, quoted in interview with Laurence and Strauss. 12. David Gates, rev. of The Fermata, Newsweek 14 February 1994, 51. 13. Rev. of The Fermata, New Yorker 21 February 1994, 89. 14. Strine echoes the announcement of Jorge Luis Borges of a similar drop into the supernatural via the convergence of common objects: “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an ency-

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clopedia.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, trans. Donald A. Yates (New York: New Directions, 1964), 3. 15. Baker discusses that classroom situation as a generative influence upon The Fermata in the Lynn Darling Esquire profile, “The Highbrow Smut of Nicholson Baker.” 16. Sharon Spencer, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 156. 17. David Shields, rev. of The Fermata, American Book Review 16.5 (1994–95): 10. 18. Darling, “The Highbrow Smut of Nicholson Baker,” 78. 19. There is nothing to match human mating for ludicrousness, agrees John Barth’s Todd Andrews, who counsels lovers not to include a plate mirror in the room if they hope to keep their fantasies alive. John Barth, The Floating Opera (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 124. 20. They also have something in common with Baker’s early story “Snorkeling” (1981), which features a device called a Sleep Diode that enables its user to “charge” his sleep needs to professional sleepers and thereby devote himself entirely to idiosyncratic invention. This prototype for fermata-like capabilities is comparably seductive: the protagonist overextends his credit and has to pay off his debt to SleepSharers by signing a “consciousness release form” and becoming a “sleep drone” himself.

Chapter 7—Uncollected Works 1. Nicholson Baker, “K.590,” The Best American Short Stories 1982, ed. John Gardner and Shannon Ravenal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 117. Further references to this work are noted parenthetically in the text. 2. It should be noted that William Wordsworth turns to such “spots of time” in The Prelude in order to relieve the depression caused by

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NOTES TO PAGES 113–132

“trivial occupations” (line 291), whereas Baker consistently obtains nourishment not apart from but through such occupations. See William Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude (1799), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams et al., 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1979), 2: 239. 3. Nicholson Baker, “Playing Trombone,” Atlantic Monthly March 1982, 39. Further references to this work are noted parenthetically in the text. 4. Stanley Elkin, The Living End (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 148. 5. Nicholson Baker, “Subsoil,” New Yorker 27 June–4 July 1994, 67. Further references to this work are noted parenthetically in the text. 6. Richard Wilbur, “Potato,” New and Collected Poems (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 345–46. 7. Nicholson Baker, “China Pattern,” New Yorker 3 February 1997, 68–69. 8. Nicholson Baker, “From the Index of First Lines,” New Yorker 26 December 1994–2 January 1995, 83. Line references are noted parenthetically in the text. 9. Bert O. States, “On First Looking into Baker’s Index,” Salmagundi 109/110 (Winter/Spring 1996): 154.

Chapter 8—The Size of Thoughts 1. David Shields, rev. of The Fermata, American Book Review 16.5 (1994–95): 10. 2. Mallon, “The Fabulous Baker Boy,” 82. 3. David Shields, “Ludd’s Labor’s Lost,” Voice Literary Supplement May 1996, 8. 4. Francis Spufford, rev. of The Size of Thoughts, New Statesman and Society 22 March 1996, 10.

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5. Eric Korn, rev. of The Size of Thoughts, Times Literary Supplement 6 April 1996, 22. 6. Irving Malin, rev. of The Size of Thoughts, Review of Contemporary Fiction 16.3 (1996): 201. 7. Michael Wood, rev. of The Size of Thoughts, New York Review of Books 20 June 1996, 65–66. 8. Sven Birkerts, rev. of The Size of Thoughts, New York Times Book Review 14 April 1996, 12–13. 9. Birkerts, rev. of The Size of Thoughts, 13. 10. Baker, The Size of Thoughts, 3. Further references to this collection are noted parenthetically in the text. 11. Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax,” in Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne and Jonson, ed. Hugh Kenner (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 489. 12. Albert Goldbarth, “Keepers of the Flame,” Iowa Review 26.2 (1995): 92. Goldbarth quotes from Baker’s “Discards” in this piece. The two writers are allied in their desire to properly honor imperiled or extinct things. When Goldbarth eulogizes the loss of whole classes of objects—transistor radios with earplugs, automats, carbon paper—his pangs, like Baker’s, extend beyond the objects themselves to the people who crafted and were defined by them. 13. Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 141–42. 14. Pico Iyer, “In Praise of the Humble Comma,” Time 13 June 1988, 80. 15. Evans, Tiny Curlicues, 21. 16. Hollinghurst reportedly discloses in this novel (New York: Pantheon, 1994) that homosexuality is also “the secret triumphant undertheme of all pastoral verse” (93), a revelation that is bound to entice a lyrically minded provocateur like the author of Vox and The Fermata. 17. Evans suggests that while the protagonist of Room Temperature fantasizes about the opportunity to engage in the enormous read-

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ing accomplished by Coleridge, Coleridge’s gift for making up words is something whose sheer audacity Mike cannot imitate, however earnestly he indulges in that practice himself (Tiny Curlicues, 21–22). 18. Baker reiterates this plea in “The Author vs. the Library,” New Yorker 14 October 1996, 50–53, 56–62. 19. Baker, quoted in “Lifting Up the Madonna.” See for comparison Alexander Theroux’s exhaustive dedication in The Primary Colors (New York: Henry Holt, 1994) to the “biographies” of “red,” “yellow,” and “blue,” each of which runs approximately as long as “Lumber.” 20. Michael Blumenthal, “Inventors,” Modern Poems, ed. Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1973), 843. 21. Baker, quoted in “Lifting Up the Madonna.” 22. Anthony Grafton, “The Possible Demise of the Footnote,” National Public Radio 7 September 1996, excerpted in The Chronicle of Higher Education 11 October 1996: B9. 23. Baker does confide in “Lifting Up the Madonna” that Martin Amis told him that “strum,” which appears prominently in Vox, was Amis’s own coinage in London Fields. Baker’s attitude toward “imitation” is more embattled in this interview than in “Lumber.” He decides that writers would really enjoy seeing their ideas “tagged” and surfacing in the works of other writers—proof that their peers had in fact read them.

Chapter 9—The Everlasting Story of Nory 1. Nicholson Baker, The Everlasting Story of Nory (New York: Random House, 1998), 93. Further page references to this book are noted parenthetically in the text. 2. Robert Coover, Pricksongs & Descants (New York: Dutton, 1969); William H. Gass, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (Boston: David R. Godine, 1968),

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172–206. Especially relevant among Coover’s stories are “The Gingerbread House,” “The Elevator,” and “The Babysitter.” 3. Debbie is still her best friend, largely because her appetite for puns and collaborative storytelling rivals and validates Nory’s. 4. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 7.

Conclusion 1. Mallon, “The Fabulous Baker Boy,” 82–83. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: Random House, 1981), 61. 3. James Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” Vanity Fair, 126. 4. Baker, “The Size of Thoughts,” 16.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Nicholson Baker Books The Mezzanine. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988; London: Granta, 1989. Room Temperature. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990; London: Granta, 1990. U and I: A True Story. New York: Random House, 1991; London: Granta, 1991. Vox. New York: Random House, 1992; London: Granta, 1992. The Fermata. New York: Random House, 1994; London: Chatto and Windus, 1994. The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. New York: Random House, 1996; London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. Includes the following: “Changes of Mind,” “The Size of Thoughts,” “Rarity,” “Model Airplanes,” “The Projector,” “Clip Art,” “Reading Aloud,” “The History of Punctuation,” “A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst,” “Leading with the Grumper,” “The Northern Pedestal,” “Mlack,” “Wedding,” “Recipe,” “Ice Storm,” “Discards,” “Books as Furniture,” “Lumber.” The Everlasting Story of Nory. New York: Random House, 1998.

Uncollected Prose and Poetry “Snorkeling.” New Yorker 7 December 1981, 50–55. “K.590.” The Best American Short Stories 1982. Ed. John Gardner and Shannon Ravenal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. 116–23. (First published in the Little Magazine [1982].) “Playing Trombone.” Atlantic Monthly March 1982, 39–58. “Subsoil.” New Yorker 27 June–4 July 1994, 67–70, 72–74, 76–78. “Infohighwaymen.” New York Times 18 October 1994, A25.

199 BIBLIOGRAPHY

“From the Index of First Lines.” New Yorker 26 December 1994–2 January 1995, 83. “My Life as Harold.” New Yorker 26 June–3 July 1995, 92–93. “The Remedy.” New York Times Magazine 18 August 1996 38–39. “The Author vs. the Library.” New Yorker 14 October 1996, 50–53, 56–62. “China Pattern.” New Yorker 3 February 1997, 68–69.

Separately Published Parts of Books “Shoelace.” New Yorker 21 March 1988, 30–32. (Incorporated into The Mezzanine) “Men’s Room.” New Yorker 15 August 1988, 22–27. (Incorporated into The Mezzanine) “Room Temperature.” New Yorker 8 January 1990, 31–39. (Incorporated into Room Temperature) “Exchange: Pennies for Thoughts.” Atlantic April 1991, 18, 20. (Incorporated into U and I: A True Story)

Works about Nicholson Baker Selected Interviews Interview with Alexander Laurence and David Strauss. Alternative-X. 1994. On-line posting. Internet. (www.alt-x.com/interviews/ nicholson.baker.html) Accessed 10 June 1996. Comments on writing procedures and kinships, with a particular focus on the nature of time and literature as spurred by discussion of The Fermata. Interview with Eric Lorberer. Rain Taxi 3.2 (1998). On-line posting. Internet. (www.raintaxi.com/baker.htm) Accessed 19 July 1998. Focuses on Everlasting Story of Nory, its autobiographical components, and its relationship to Baker’s other writings.

200 BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Lifting Up the Madonna.” Interview with Laura Miller. Salon 10 (23 March–5 April 1996). On-line posting. Internet. (www.salon1999. com/10/bookfront/salon.html) Accessed 10 June 1996. Responds to public reaction to his “sex books” and relates the obsession they cover to those evident in Baker’s earlier fiction and in the essays in The Size of Thoughts. “Requiem for the Discarded.” Interview with David Dodd. Library Journal 121 (15 May 1996): 31–32. Defends card catalogs against the incursion of computer technology, which represents an insensitive dismissal of a beautiful, historically significant creation.

Selected Critical Analyses and Profiles “Baker, Nicholson.” Current Biography Yearbook 1994. Ed. Judith Graham. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1994. 33–36. Sketches relevant biographical data while tracking the growth of Baker’s reputation to date. Chambers, Ross. “Meditation and the Escalator Principle (On Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine).” Modern Fiction Studies 40.4 (1994): 765– 806. Using Descartes and Marcus Aurelius as prominent touchstones, insightfully examines The Mezzanine in terms of its development of alternative styles of reflective thought. Darling, Lynn. “The Highbrow Smut of Nicholson Baker.” Esquire February 1994, 76–80. Considers how Baker risks feminist retribution with Vox and The Fermata, which Baker explains in terms of challenges to the writer and the reader. Also contains Baker’s response to accusations of having “sold out.” Elkin, Stanley. The Dick Gibson Show. New York: Random House, 1971: 229. Evans, Peter. Tiny Curlicues: Nicholson Baker’s “Room Temperature.” Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, no. 37. Ichigaya, Japan: Hosei University, 1991. Structural analysis of Room Temperature showing

201 BIBLIOGRAPHY

underlying logic connecting apparently random digressions. Points out novel’s parallels to Nabokov, Coleridge, and classical music. Hall, Dennis. “Nicholson Baker’s Vox: An Exercise in the Literature of Sensibility.” Connecticut Review 17.1 (1995): 35–40. Contends that Vox explores the reifying power of language to inspire in the reader, in keeping with the eighteenth-century literature of sensibility, the experiences it depicts. Kaplan, James. “Hot Vox.” Vanity Fair January 1992, 118–21, 125–27. Celebratory overview of Baker’s minutely detailed fiction, which looks forward to the expansion of his cult following with the imminent appearance of Vox. Mallon, Thomas. “The Fabulous Baker Boy.” Gentleman’s Quarterly May 1996, 82–85. Introduces Baker’s alertness to “epic tininess” in The Size of Thoughts as a natural extension of the precision practiced in the fiction. Saltzman, Arthur. “To See a World in a Grain of Sand: Expanding Literary Minimalism.” Contemporary Literature 31.4 (1990): 423–33. Puts forth The Mezzanine, among other fictions, to debate the concept of minimalism as an arid, restrictive style, redefining it as a mode of inquiry. Shields, David. “Ludd’s Labor’s Lost.” Voice Literary Supplement May 1996, 8. Inspired by the appearance of The Size of Thoughts, lauds Baker’s combination of intellectualism and democratic access to contemporary culture, noting possible connections between Baker and other West Coast authors. Simmons, Philip E. “Toward the Postmodern Historical Imagination: Mass Culture in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine.” Contemporary Literature 33.4 (1992): 601– 24. Treats Baker’s novel as indicative of a postmodern departure from modernist nostalgia for master historical narratives (as depicted by Percy) in favor of the valuing of mass cultural surfaces. States, Bert O. “On First Looking into Baker’s Index.” Salmagundi 109/

202 BIBLIOGRAPHY

110 (Winter/Spring 1996): 153–62. Explains the craft and impact of Baker’s “definitive poem about poetry,” correlating it to other “offspring of the indexical imagination” like The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Walkenbach, John. The Nicholson Baker Fan Page. On-line posting. Internet. (www.cts.com/browse/jwalk/nbaker/) Accessed 17 July 1996. Gives synopses and excerpts of Baker’s major works, as well as links to sample interviews and book reviews. Williams, William Carlos. Quoted in J. Hillis Miller, “William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 972–92.

INDEX

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 17 Amis, Martin, 196n. 23 Ammons, A. R.: “Garbage,” 159, 160 Aurelius, Marcus: Meditations, 29–30 Baker, Ann (Nicholson), 9 Baker, Douglas, 9 Baker, Nicholson: “The Author vs. the Library,” 196n. 18; “Books as Furniture,” 9, 155–57; “Changes of Mind,” 36, 134–37; “China Pattern,” 126; “Clip Art,” 144–45, 154–55; “Discards,” 152–55, 195n. 12; The Everlasting Story of Nory, 166–78; “Exchange: Pennies for Thoughts,” 8; TheFermata, 6, 9, 11, 45, 63–64, 69, 82–106, 132, 143, 144, 149, 161, 189n. 10, 195n. 16; “From the Index of First Lines,” 126–30; “The History of Punctuation,” 147–48, 187n. 8; “Ice Storm,” 152; “K.590,” 107–13, 117; “Leading with the Grumper,” 149; “Lumber,” 157–65, 196n. 23; The Mezzanine, 9, 11, 15–31, 32–35, 44, 47–48, 52, 56, 64, 74, 80–81, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 101, 112–13, 121, 131, 140, 144, 146, 152, 158, 160, 169, 171– 72, 176, 188–89n. 14; “Mlack,” 150–51; “Model Airplanes,” 124, 140–42; “My Life as Harold,” 60–61, 189–90n. 12; “The Northern Pedestal,” 150; “A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst,” 148–49, 195n. 16; “Playing Trombone,” 9, 113–21; “The Projector,” 142–44; “Rarity,” 138–40; “Reading Aloud,” 145–47; “Recipe,” 151–52; Room Temperature, 1, 9, 32–48, 50–51, 52, 56, 63, 64, 79, 81, 86, 87, 101, 112–13, 122, 131, 138, 148, 151, 171, 176, 195–96n. 17; “The Size of Thoughts,” 47–48, 137–38, 180; The Size of Thoughts, 8, 10, 88, 131–65; “Snorkeling,” 193n. 20; U & I: A True Story, 7, 9–10, 11– 12, 49–62, 63, 79, 101, 104, 112, 131–32, 142, 161, 164, 176; Vox, 6, 11, 63–81, 82, 85, 89, 95, 104, 132, 146, 149, 161, 189n. 10, 195n. 16, 196n. 23; “Wedding,” 136 Barth, John: The Floating Opera, 15, 193n. 19

204 INDEX

Barthelme, Donald, 12, 51, 58 Barthes, Roland: The Pleasure of the Text, 75 Beckett, Samuel, 32 Bettelheim, Bruno, 174 Birkerts, Sven, 75, 133, 146 Blumenthal, Michael: “Inventors,” 159 Borges, Jorge Luis: “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 21; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 193n. 14 Boswell, James, 13, 53 Boyle, Sir Robert: History of the Air, 33, 44 Brentano, Margaret, 10 Broughton, Trev, 85–86 Buchan, James, 65 Burke, Edmund, 13 Butterfly Effect, 38, 42 Camus, Albert: “The Myth of Sisyphus,” 119 Candy, John, 13 Carver, Raymond, 4 Chambers, Ross, 19, 21, 50, 149–50, 185n. 11 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 148, 195–96n. 17 comedy, 8, 11, 15, 86, 103–4, 124–25, 126, 131, 133, 145 Coover, Robert: Pricksongs & Descants, 170 Costanzo, Gerald: “Introduction of the Shopping Cart,” 185–86n. 15 Dahl, Roald, 122 DeQuincey, Thomas, 132, 148, 160, 161 defamiliarization, 21–22, 65–66, 82–83, 94, 124–26, 127–29, 142, 151, 172 description. See style dialogue, 64–81 Dickens, Charles, 160

205 INDEX

Dickinson, Emily, 129, 173 Dirda, Michael, 34 Donne, John, 158 Dryden, John, 161 Edwards, Owen, 185n. 13 Eliot, George, 160 Elkin, Stanley, 1; Boswell, 13; The Living End, 116 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 63, 70; “The American Scholar,” 179 epiphany, 23, 25–26, 36–37, 64, 77, 112–13, 128–29, 137–38, 150 erotica. See sexuality ethics. See morality Evans, Peter, 148, 187nn. 5–6, 195–96n. 17 Exley, Frederick, 13 Firbank, Ronald, 12 Flaubert, Gustave, 160 Franzen, Jonathan, 81 Frost, Robert: “The Constant Symbol,” 188n. 12; “Education by Poetry,” 41 Gardner, John, 107 Garrison, Nora, 66, 68 Gass, William H.: “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” 170; Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, 7, 75, 99 Gates, David, 15, 87–88 Gibbon, Edward, 132 Goethe, Johann, 160 Gogol, Nikolai: “The Overcoat,” 190n. 12 Goldbarth, Albert: “Farder to Reache,” 31; “Keepers of the Flame,” 143, 195n. 12

206 INDEX

Grafton, Anthony, 160–61 Graham, Jorie: “Erosion,” 4 Hawkes, John, 10 Hawthorne, Nathanael, 161 Hollinghurst, Alan, 12, 148–49 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 13, 23 Hunt, Leigh, 158–59 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The, 122 Iyer, Pico, 64, 147 James, Henry, 13, 133, 134, 160 James, William, 13 Johnson, Samuel, 12, 53, 132, 158, 160 Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 176; Ulysses, 25 Kaplan, James, 3, 180 Keats, John, 125; “Eve of St. Agnes,” 89; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 40 Kidder, Tracy, 147 Koelb, Clayton, 75 Koenig, Rhoda, 85 Korn, Eric, 133 Kunitz, Stanley, 12 language, 2–4, 10–11, 15–16, 23–25, 36–37, 43, 45–47, 51, 55–56, 67– 76, 80–81, 87–88, 91–95, 99, 104, 109, 115–16, 118, 126–28, 131– 33, 140–42, 143, 148–51, 157–62, 166–68, 169–70, 173–77, 179, 191n. 14, 195n. 16 Leithauser, Brad, 187–88n. 9 Lesser, Wendy, 34, 36, 188n. 10

207 INDEX

Malin, Irving, 133, 134 Mallon, Thomas, 1, 131 Marcus, James, 64–65 Marvell, Andrew: Upon Appleton House, 138, 170 metaphor, 16–17, 23, 34, 40–44, 55, 70–71, 74–75, 76, 109–10, 136, 159, 175–76, 188n. 12 Mill, John Stuart, 132 Millhauser, Steven, 5; Martin Dressler, 5–6 miniaturism, 4–6, 32, 47–48, 55–56, 65–66, 167 minimalism. See miniaturism Montaigne, Michel de, 163–64 Moore, Steven, 15 morality, 97–103, 104, 116, 118–19, 156, 172–73 Moss, Howard, 12 Murdoch, Iris, 13 music, 9, 34–35, 37–38, 107–21, 187nn. 5–6 Nabokov, Vladimir, 13, 21, 54, 58, 160, 162; Pale Fire, 20 Newman, John Henry, 132 Nicolson, Harold, 13 Norfolk, Lawrence, 11 O’Brien, Flann, 12 O’Brien, Tim, 53 O’Connor, Flannery: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” 184n. 7 Pater, Walter, 132 Percy, Walker: The Moviegoer, 27 Petroski, Henry, 3 Plunket, Robert, 15 Polyani, Michael, 13

208 INDEX

Pope, Alexander, 23, 159; Essay on Criticism, 162 postmodernism, 27–28, 94, 129, 162 Pound, Ezra, 23 Powers, Richard, 13 Prose, Francine, 86 Proust, Marcel, 13, 28, 160 Pryor, Richard, 13 Raine, Craig, 65 Roth, Philip: Deception, 67; The Ghost Writer, 52, 190n. 13 Ruskin, John, 132, 160 Sand, George, 160 Schine, Catherine, 85, 87 Seuss, Dr. (Theodore Geisel), 13 sexuality, 6–7, 12, 45, 63–106, 132, 148–49, 179–80, 195n. 16 Shakespeare, William, 33 Scheherezade, 67 Shields, David, 3–4, 101, 131, 132 Short, Randall, 65 Simmons, Philip E., 27 Spencer, Sharon, 94 Spufford, Francis, 132 States, Bert O., 128 Stein, Gertrude, 150 Stengel, Richard, 65 Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy, 134 Stevens, Wallace: Sunday Morning, 40 Strawson, Galen, 49, 59, 60 structure. See style style, 6–8, 10–14, 15–20, 21–25, 28–29, 34–44, 50–56, 60, 62, 63–64,

209 INDEX

68, 72–75, 87–96, 106, 126–29, 131–36, 141, 146, 150–51, 166– 71, 175–77, 179–81, 191n. 14 Svoboda, Alva, 79–80 Swift, Jonathan, 161–62; Tale of a Tub, 161 Talking Heads, 13 Taylor, Robert, 15 Theroux, Alexander: The Primary Colors, 196n. 19 Tintin, 13 Towers, Robert, 65 Updike, John, 7, 11–12, 49–62, 161; “Incest,” 53; Rabbit Is Rich, 61; Self-Consciousness, 55–56; “Walter Briggs,” 189n. 15; “Wife-Wooing,” 54; The Witches of Eastwick, 62 Vollman, William T., 13 voyeurism. See sexuality Ward, Geoffrey C., 155 Whitman, Walt, 160 Wilbur, Richard: “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” 186n. 15; “Potato,” 124 Williams, William Carlos, 16; Prologue to Kora in Hell, 41 Williamson, Barbara Fisher, 15 Wood, Michael, 133 Wordsworth, William: The Prelude, 193–94n. 2