B & Me Read online

  This is a fair question, and I may not have had a particularly good answer for it until something seemingly minor happened that winter. One day it was warm enough to walk and read on the beach, but cold enough to require the use of a cheap ski mask I’d bought for just that purpose. On the way out the door I discovered that I had misplaced my ski mask. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I became distressed—­unduly distressed—and this became a mystery layered atop the mystery of the missing ski mask. Why was I so upset about it? Surely it’s a comfort to discover that a thing you require is inexpensive—it restores your faith that a society based on money and private property can provide for basic needs—and what losing such a thing might suggest to an already frustrated mind is that one’s trust in the system has been misplaced. Yet even though I was fairly poor at the time, I could have afforded a new ski mask. But that wasn’t good enough. I kept looking for my ski mask, and I began to panic when all my efforts to find it—you know you’re in a panic when you start looking under sofa cushions—failed. I doubled-checked the cottage, then triple-checked it. The ski mask could not possibly have been anywhere else. I kept careful track of it and was quite sure it was in the house. Eventually the missing ski mask took on the quality of an emblem—it stood for my basic inability to grasp how the world worked: elementary physics, the universe. This led to a thought I had no desire to think: there was something wrong with my life. Instead of living in some bohemian flat in Paris preparing for a literary life, I was living in a shack in New Jersey watching scrambled porn. My whole life was scrambled, it seemed. What did I do about all this? I just kept looking for my two-dollar ski mask, becoming more and more distraught. It wasn’t mixed in with any of the laundry I’d not done in more than a month, and it wasn’t hidden beneath any of Emma’s vintage furniture, none of which I’d ever moved. Finally, having slogged my way through the last few stages of grief, I ended the search, called off the rescue, and broke down sobbing for my precious ski mask. A short while later I went to the beach anyway and found the ski mask on the path from the road to the shore, having dropped it there on my way home the day before.

  The story of my ski mask is not interesting—the ski mask itself is insignificant—unless the real subject of the story is what was happening in my mind, unless the ski mask was a symbol of my mind. A symbol of what? Of fooling myself. I was getting a lot of reading done in New Jersey, true, but I was also disguising myself by living there rather than in Paris. In losing my ski mask, I was unmasked. I was forced to confront my mistakes. That this was even possible, that some part of me would tell me to go to New Jersey instead of Paris, would foil my ambition and stand in the way of what I truly wanted, was surprising and frightening. Looking back, I realize that it’s similar to what Nicholson Baker was getting at in his early essays: A brain can be “shrunken from neglect” and will find that “its hum of fineness will necessarily be delayed, baffled, and drawn out with numerous interstitial timidities.” That was me again, years later, in the middle of the night, looking up baffled from The Mezzanine, waiting.

  Baker was right about something else too: large thoughts depend on small thoughts. How? Symbolism. A small thought (my ski mask) leads to a large thought (there was something wrong with my life) by finding itself suddenly invested with inordinate significance. These days one rarely hears symbolism discussed in any context other than books, and only then with the dread we associate with high school and undergraduate English courses. But what the story of my insignificant ski mask reveals is that symbols are not reserved for literature. Quite the opposite. Symbols are what transport us from ordinary experience to general truth and monumental decision making. Symbols appear in books only because they first appear in life (and later, books themselves become a symbol of how hard we’re willing to work to understand ourselves). That’s how our brains process experience. Insignificant objects playing an important role in our growth and thought is how we naturally, even biologically, organize experience into memory, into a life narrative.

  That’s why Emma was more disturbed by my reading than my porn. She preferred a story on a screen to a story on a page because she had forgotten how to recognize the inestimable value of insignificant things.

  22

  HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? IN A SPAN OF ABOUT A HUNDRED YEARS—the period of Emma’s life, roughly—we’ve all become quite comfortable with the idea that what a writer writes might first appear on paper, but if all goes well will eventually wind up on a screen: a movie screen in the first part of the twentieth century, a television screen midcentury, a computer screen at the turn of the millennium. Just as written storytelling began to emerge as a true art form—some argue for Flaubert on this point, but I hold with those who favor Henry James—a whole new medium for stories was born with moving pictures. Many have expressed concern over the paper-to-screen trend, but the more prevalent view is to see it as an advance. Why not watch a story on a screen? It’s spectacular. It’s easier. Ever since, those who have found themselves drawn to telling stories have been forced to choose: on the one hand, you can be solely responsible for a book that will reach an audience dwarfed by the audience for film (and you may hope it winds up on a screen anyway); on the other, you can write a screenplay that might eventually reach a huge audience, but by the time it does it probably won’t resemble your work much and you’ll receive little credit for it (beyond handsome remuneration).

  All pretty familiar, I’m sure. But what about the reader-to-watcher trend that follows the paper-to-screen trend? How does the watcher of a film differ from the reader of a book? I don’t want to launch an attack on film—I like film—but I do want to resist the prevailing opinion that books and films are largely equivalent, that not much gets lost as we happily traipse from one to the other. Moving picture story­telling will never completely displace written storytelling, but even very artful filmmaking threatens books in at least two important ways.

  First, while the viewers of a film may be very active as interpreters of the characters and images they are presented with, those characters and images must actually have existed in order to have been filmed. That is, they were created by vast teams of set designers, wardrobe specialists, graphic designers, actors, location scouts, animators, and makeup technicians (to say nothing of writers, directors, and producers), and each of these are artists and craftsmen in their own right. The work that is performed by the reader of a book, visualizing figures and places based on verbal descriptions, slopping together images from the wet goo of words, is, in a film, done literally behind the scenes, by that scrolling battalion of names that most people can’t be bothered to sit through at the end of a movie. No matter how exciting or touching a film may be, it’s impersonal in this way, and if we do wind up feeling roused to a sensation of intimacy with a director or an actor, it’s probably an illusion, we’re probably giving them too much credit, credit that rightly belongs to individuals whose names, finally in lights, illuminate only empty theater seats.

  Reading, by contrast, is the product of exactly two conspiring intellects. A reader first decodes chunky, arbitrarily shaped letters and punctuation into words and sentences, and then employs these as props to invent, to produce, the story. As a reader you know that editors and book designers pitch in with the creation of a book, but the sensation you feel if you’re really reading—not just thinking this would be a whole lot more fun on a screen—is terribly personal, like gentle ticklings of silk straps tethering you to a singular, authorial vision. Disembodied, the author directs the book, but it’s readers who act out the story in the feathery nether region of their imaginations. Most
simply put, film is a visual art, a book is not, and an essential intimacy is lost when we move from the latter to the former.

  The second threat is threats. The advent of screens and moving pictures has been profitable in many ways, but a plot-anxiety inflation crisis looms. As film has compiled its own canon, filmmakers striving to make it new have generally attempted to do so less with innovative techniques and inventive stories than with simple raisings of the stakes. Once upon a time it was enough for the thieves of a heist film to snatch a jewel that postfence would let them retire comfortably; now, no caper-flick satisfies unless its bandits pocket billions and are chauffeured to Cannes in denouement. Action films used to please with a threat to a small town and a climactic fistfight; now, heroes dispatch hundreds of interchangeable foes to stave off the end of the world. Monster films once thrilled with man-sized beasts, lagoon creatures, and the like, but the mutants have grown steadily larger, creeping first to titan-height such that a single mammoth might topple a city, and evolving from there to leviathans the size of cities. Digital special effects enabled a quantum leap in stakes inflation. Before the early nineties, say, a film viewer might at least have been called upon to cooperate with effects less immersive than suggestive. But these days it’s practically a rite of spring to go to the movies and learn via coming attractions that the summer will be interrupted at regular intervals by visually convincing global threats, extinction-level events, and sundry judgment days. This is mostly Hollywood, but even independent films have been flooded with a trickle-down effect of serial killers, regime-­ending political crises, and time travel–unravelings of the multiverse.

  That literature has suffered collateral damage from this onslaught can be inferred from the fact that The Mezzanine was initially met (the original reviews were mostly positive) with accusations of being “experimental” and “avant garde” simply because it was about a regular guy on an ordinary lunch break thinking about everyday objects whose significance, like my ski mask, was that they were emblematic of something larger than themselves. That’s the problem of cinematic stakes inflation: It makes ordinary life seem tedious and difficult.

  Up to this point in my study, I’d been thinking that Nicholson Baker and myself, ten years apart, were not really of the same generation, but actually it’s been decades since the advent of screens dumped everyone from Emma Praul on forward into the same generational boat. We don’t all bunk in the same berth (and the crossing of some meridian midcentury meant that children from that point forward would have to learn that stories came from books only after having been introduced to them with moving pictures), but these days pretty much everyone alive is screen-compromised. That’s why Emma, even as her life seemed unfulfilled, righteously clung to her belief that her TV was better than a book. Reading was an act of strenuous will long before it had screens to compete with, and now books must contend with the fact that we have evolved an instinct to leave the work of the imagination to others. Great thoughts are not only reluctant and shy; a part of us actively resists their discovery.

  Whatever the effect of screens, it’s hard to argue that the situation has not grown steadily worse with the rapid growth of their kind and function. But even those who feel no listing of the great vessel in which we all cruise, no teeter as it stuffs its hold with ever-expanding multiplexes and issues handheld electronic devices to each and every mate, must acknowledge an even more profound flop. These days, despite cherished claims, most writers no longer write directly onto paper. Rather, they type onto screens, and if they’re lucky what they write makes a reverse trek to become a book.

  Nicholson Baker, as it happens, took early note of the fact that his was the first generation of writers to have the option of writing directly onto a screen. That’s how he works, in fact. It now seems ho-hum that U and I begins with Baker sitting down to write on a “keyboard,” but it would have read nearly as science fiction when it first appeared in 1991. Even earlier, too. Baker has claimed that he wrote The Mezzanine in a furious three-and-a-half-month stretch—from August 1 to November 17, 1987 (he really means a draft, as excerpts had already appeared in The New Yorker)—on a Kaypro portable computer that he purchased in 1985. His shift from writing short stories and brief essays to a book-length manuscript coincides with his having traded the hair trigger keys of his Olivetti electric typewriter for the flatter array of springy ergonomic buttons and the pulsing light of slightly blurry green letters. If Mark Twain gets credit for having submitted the first typewritten manuscript, then The Mezzanine should perhaps be regarded as the first literary novel of note to have been composed entirely on a screen.

  23

  BUT WAIT. ISN’T A LIGHT-EMITTING COMPUTER MORE LIKE A movie projector? Baker may have had just such a thought, as not long after he finished U and I he wrote an essay about the history of movie projectors.

  “The Projector” begins with a detailed analysis of a projector-room scene in Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob. A small-town projectionist is among the Blob’s early victims (a hobo, several teenagers, and a lonely dishwasher get it first), and actually it’s a metascene in that it comes at a similarly plot-heavy moment in the projected film within the film. Baker performs various nifty hermeneutic tricks here—in keeping with the theory of stakes inflation, he notes that while the 1958 Blob was a “giant protean douche bag,” the upgrade was “far peppier and more enterprising”—but what truly piques his interest is the scene’s glaring omission: The projectionist projects the film within the film not with the huge, flat projection platters that even by 1988 were multiplex SOP, but with an ordinary upright-spool projector of the kind most would associate with late-evening holidays, when the family has grown tired of bickering and someone breaks out the shoebox of eight-millimeter reels. Or scratch that. Because Baker’s interest is not piqued by this at all. Rather, he finds it “terrifying.”

  What’s he afraid of? Even if a certain fondness for schlocky movies is apparent from the care with which Baker surveys projector-room scenes in “The Projector,” Nicholson Baker actually couldn’t care less about films and screens. Or rather, he cares a great deal. “I’ve always tried to write unfilmable books,” Baker told his Paris Review interviewer, “starting with The Mezzanine. Maybe this little black-and-white word mound can still be imposing in a world in which we have macro lenses and all kinds of lush cinematography. Maybe prose can be more visual than film.” In other words, even though the ostensible subject of “The Projector” is film, it’s really about something else, and a whole worldview slips out neatly from Baker’s observation that the remake of The Blob “brings every detail, or almost every detail of the first film up to date.” That’s how the world works, even literature, and that’s actually what The Mezzanine is about. The problem with The Blob, however, the “terrifying reality” of it, is what it didn’t update, what it couldn’t bring itself to update, because the truth is that platter projection systems damage film, threaten the medium. It’s odd that Baker notes this, because if you tug almost any thread hanging loose from the tapestry of his early career, what comes gushing out along with the string is the belief that progress is possible and measurable in insignificant things. The point he makes here, however, is that sometimes the world makes changes that seem like advances, but really aren’t. And when that’s the case, when we’ve mucked something up that was perfectly good to begin with, we’re reluctant to admit it and so we disguise ourselves to ourselves instead. “The Projector” is Baker’s first faint note of complaint, and just as his own writing moves from the page to the screen, the real object of his growing concern i
s not projectors but paper.

  24

  BUT THAT’S GETTING A LITTLE AHEAD OF THINGS. Baker started to worry; I started to grow comfortable. I grew comfortable as a function of a disturbing middle-of-the-night realization: My struggles with Baker’s footnotes said a whole lot more about me as a reader than they did about The Mezzanine as a novel.

  In chapter two, you realize that the book has begun in medias res, at its moment of greatest action. That’s a plot-anxiety joke. You sense from the beginning that the journey, such as it is, will end at the top of the escalator, and though there’s no moment when the Baker-figure says “Then I stepped on the escalator . . .” or “Then I felt myself tugged up to speed with the escalator’s hidden conveyor . . . ,” or whatever—the story sort of hiccups forward—you realize pretty early on that the bulk of the book will be made up of midride musings about events stretching back to a few minutes before lunch. So, total elapsed time: a little more than an hour for lunch, plus the walk from the door to the escalator, then the odd jump to the protracted ride. The period of greatest action, then, the book’s most plotful stretch, is over before you even start to look for such a thing. This insight into how the book worked cracked the barrier of frustration I threw up at having been slowed down by the footnotes. Sometime during chapter two I began to understand that The Mezzanine is about how hard it is for a modern reader to read it. That is, it’s a book that demands that if you’re going to follow it then you’ll have to climb to another level in your own mind, ascend to your own personal mezzanine, return from the lunch hour of regular life, and get back to the work of sustaining attention to what and how you think. The book has many footnotes, sure, but even the nonfootnote sections have the tone of a footnote, a tone that assumes that you’re reading because you want to be reading, that you’re reading something that you could have skipped, but didn’t. That’s modern literature. You can choose to skip it—many people do.