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 bru