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Nicholson Baker

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File:Nicholson Baker - headshot.jpg
Nicholson Baker in December 2007.

Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is a contemporary American novelist, whose writings focus on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. His unconventional novels deal with topics such as voyeurism and planned assassination, and they generally de-emphasize traditional aspects of plot. Baker's enthusiasts appreciate his ability to candidly explore the human psyche, while critics feel that his writing wastes time on trivia (Stephen King notoriously compared Baker's novel Vox to a "meaningless little fingernail paring")[1].

Life

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in New York City. He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music, and received his B.A. from Haverford College. He lives today with his wife and two children in South Berwick, Maine. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Apart from writing novels, Baker has been a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media. He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library sending thousands of books to a landfill, the elimination of card catalogs, and the destruction of old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm. In 1997, Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts. Mr. Baker has also written a review concerning of Wikipedia for the New York Review of Books; the article is exemplary of the style of his novels in its petite digressions on wikipedia vandalism.

In 1999, he established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries.[2] Based on his research in this area, in 2001 he published Double Fold, in which he accuses certain librarians of lying about the decay of materials and being obsessed with technological fads, at the expense of both the public and historical preservation.

Baker describes himself as having "always had pacifist leanings." [3]

Books by Nicholson Baker

  • The Mezzanine (1988) is Baker's first novel. It presents the thoughts and memories of a young male office-worker as he ascends an escalator to the mezzanine of the office building where he is employed. The novel created the genre for which Baker is best known, and is perhaps its boldest representative. It abounds in long footnotes, including a vivid paean to long footnotes.
  • Room Temperature (1990) mines the same vein as The Mezzanine, though this time the action spans a few minutes at the narrator's home (in Quincy, Massachusetts). Mike is feeding his baby daughter, "the Bug", as her head rests in the crook of his arm. He blows in the direction of a mobile; twenty seconds and two dozen pages later, he is surprised to see the mobile move. Mike's thoughts wander as he contemplates, for example, the possibility of admitting to one's wife that one has been picking one's nose (body functions are discussed extensively, perhaps prompted by the baby's presence), or the juxtaposition of Debussy and Skippy peanut butter jars in a symphonic poem. The novel was received warmly but without great enthusiasm, as an enjoyable if slightly demure domestic follow-up to The Mezzanine. Mike may be expressing Baker's approach to writing when he thinks "...that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected;"
  • U and I: A True Story (1991) is a non-fiction study of how a reader engages with an author's work: partly an appreciation of John Updike, and partly a kind of self-exploration. Rather than a traditional literary analysis, Baker begins the book by stating that he will read no more Updike than he already has up to that point. All of the Updike quotes used are presented as coming from memory alone.
  • Vox (1992) covers an episode of phone sex between two young single people on a pay-per-minute chat line. The book created a mild sensation when it was reported that Monica Lewinsky had given a copy to President Bill Clinton. The sex scenes in the novel, though quite vivid, nevertheless share the basic approach that Baker has taken since The Mezzanine: in this case, he explores two characters' accumulated thoughts and memories in relation to sex. For some readers, Baker's obsession with detail detracted from a hoped-for pornographic effect. Others, in reading the imaginative sex stories that the two protagonists produce for one another, have perceived a budding romantic affection: in the last act they perform before hanging up, the man gives the woman his phone number. The book was Baker's first New York Times bestseller.
  • The Fermata (1994) also addresses the erotic life and fantasy. To quote the dust jacket of one edition: "Arno Strine likes to stop time and take women's clothes off. He is hard at work on his autobiography, 'The Fermata.' It proves in the telling to be a very provocative, funny, and altogether morally confused piece of work." (A fermata is a mark in musical notation indicating a long pause.)
  • The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998) was inspired by Baker's daughter Alice, "the informant", to whom he dedicates the book. In this work, Baker tries to see the world through the eyes of a curious nine-year-old American girl attending school in England.
  • Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001) is a non-fiction book about preservation, newspapers, and the American library system. An excerpt first appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past." The exhaustively researched work (there are sixty-three pages of endnotes and eighteen pages of references in the paperback edition) details Baker's quest to uncover the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and '90s.
  • A Box of Matches (2003) is in many ways a continuation of Room Temperature—similarly mining the narrator's store of reflections and memories, many of them domestic. The narrator is now middle-aged, and has a family. He rises each morning about 5:30, lights a fire in the fireplace, and ponders. The work is admired, although some have found it rather less exuberant than its predecessor.
  • Checkpoint (2004) is composed of dialogue between two old high school friends, Jay and Ben, who discuss Jay's plans to assassinate President George W. Bush. Jay is an unbalanced day laborer who, in the depths of his anger and desperation at Bush's actions and his inability to do anything to stop them, has traveled to Washington, D.C. to kill the president. He considers many far-fetched means of assassination, such as depleted uranium boulders, flying radio-controlled CD saws, homing bullets trained to target the victim by being "marinated" in a tin with a picture of the president, and hypnotized Manchurian scorpions. Ben has met Jay in a Washington, D.C. hotel room, unaware that his friend is planning to commit "a major, major, major crime." Over the course of the novella, Ben discusses what drove Jay to plot an assassination. Reviewers have pointed out that the book is mild, and the planned violence so cartoonish as to be non-threatening.
  • Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008) is a history of WWII in which Baker argues that because Britain was the first to use bombers, the Allies' war against the Axis was immoral. Glenn C. Altschuler criticized Baker's biased and selective use of evidence and calls his premise that if Britain and The United States could not fight a war free of any morally questonable act, they had no right to defend themselves from Nazi Germany "infuriating." [4]

Bibliography

Novels

  • The Mezzanine (1988, Weidenfeld & Nicolson; ISBN 1-55584-258-5 / 1990, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-72576-8)
  • Room Temperature (1990, Grove Weidenfeld; ISBN 0-8021-1224-2 / 1990, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-73440-6 / 1990, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014212-6 / 1991, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014021-2)
  • Vox: A Novel (1992, Random House; ISBN 0-394-58995-5 / 1992, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-74211-5 / 1992, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014057-3)
  • The Fermata (1994, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-75933-6)
  • The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998, Random House; ISBN 0-679-43933-1 / 1998, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-73440-6)
  • A Box of Matches (2003, Random House; ISBN 0-375-50287-4 / 2003, Chatto & Windus; ISBN 0-7011-7402-1)
  • Checkpoint (2004, Random House; ISBN 1-4000-4400-6)

Non-fiction

Further reading

  • Cox, Richard J. Vandals in the Stacks? A Response to Nicholas Baker's Assault on Libraries. Greenwood Press, 2002. ISBN 0-313-32344-5
  • Richardson, Eve, "Space, Projection and the Banal in the Works of Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Nicholson Baker", in Emma Gilby et Katja Haustein (ed.), Space. New Dimensions in French Studies, Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Francfurt, New York and Vienna, Peter Lang, 2005. ("Modern French Identities", 30)
  • Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Nicholson Baker. University of South Carolina Press, 1999. ISBN 1-57003-303-X
  • Star, Alexander. "The Paper Pusher." The New Republic. May 28, 2001. 38-41.

Notes

  1. ^ The Richmond Review
  2. ^ American Newspaper Repository
  3. ^ Charles McGrath, "A Debunker on the Road to WW II," New York Times, March 4, 2008
  4. ^ [1]

External links

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