B & Me Read online

  Which sounds direr than the book itself. Baker’s earliest reviewers remarked that The Mezzanine is a notably happy book: the Baker-figure is largely conflict-free, even as he attests to intense internal dramas (“incredulousness and resignation”) that result from the malfunction of insignificant objects, bandage wrappers, staplers, tape dispensers, etc. Even more important, The Mezzanine appears happy to be a book and not a movie; it is enthusiastically a book, and what that means—even the early reviewers noted this—is that it doesn’t resemble many other books.

  So I stopped my midnight reading. It wasn’t a good idea to have tried to use The Mezzanine to fulcrum myself out of stress-induced insomnia. The next day I hopped on our landlord’s four-wheeler and motored out past our small lake to a stand of trees that Catherine and I had discovered once the heat broke and we started taking walks through the woods. I hung a hammock between two conveniently spaced elms, and read the rest of The Mezzanine swaying in a breeze that approximated the book’s contented mood. The Baker-figure, who grows only more Baker-like as the story proceeds, tall, bearded at twenty-three, with a mother “interested in materialist analogies for cognition,” has a youthful exuberance that is contagious even as you know, as I did, that his faith in progress won’t last. It’s another of the book’s jokes that you don’t learn the Baker-figure’s name until four-fifths of the way through, “Howie,” which I leave in quotation marks because you don’t hear the name unless others address him (no word as to whether “Howie” thinks of himself in the diminutive, though he doesn’t protest).

  None of the early reviewers I read linked “Howie” to The Mezzanine’s most prominent feature—meditations on how everyday devices work. Most prominent among these is shoes, which pop up three times on a list that “Howie,” early on, makes of connections between insignificant objects and crucial moments in his development as a person. Shoes are critical to The Mezzanine because it’s a broken shoelace that sends “Howie” off on his lunchtime jaunt in the first place, but shoes in general are “the first adult machines we are given to master,” and “Howie” reports that he had gained valuable intellectual confidence when sometime before he had managed to “personalize an already adult procedure” by working out a better shoe-tying methodology for himself. In short, The Mezzanine uses insignificant objects to tell the story of “Howie” ’s mechanical coming of age.

  It’s a little unfortunate that the critical enthusiasm for ­“Howie” ’s attraction to “the often undocumented daily texture of our lives” wound up pigeonholing Baker as a guru of minutiae. That’s another problem with the state of modern literature. A writer’s initial success becomes the name of his or her pigeonhole, and what’s to blame, probably, is a cultural pandemic of repetition addiction, palpable in everything from repeating soundtrack loops, to suburban architecture, to automobile design. Baker warned himself of the dangers of early success—he chided “writers [who] curtail their finer efforts because the merest suggestion of expertise is enough to coast on for a decade”—and admirably he scolded himself before anyone else did: U and I denigrates Baker’s own 1989 essay “Model Airplanes,” and he worries that in the piece’s wake he would “seem to be obsessed with model airplanes.” Pretty much. Because there was no one around to point out that what “Model Airplanes” really did was explain why it was okay to write short, model-like novels: it was an embodiment of an axiom from one of Baker’s earliest essays: “We must refine all epics into epigrams!”

  That kind of discovery of buried, causal connections between disparate works in Baker’s career made me feel as though I had begun to cut out from a tangled, overgrown hedge a trailhead of sorts, and looking down the path I grew as excited as the nameless fictional critic set to the scent of an overlooked meaning in Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet.” Incidentally, Henry James makes an appearance in The Mezzanine, too, inside a protracted footnote near the end of the book that tells a quick history of footnotes. William James is in the book too, though hidden. “Howie” credits his girlfriend, “L” (not “M,” though Margaret Brentano was Baker’s college sweetheart), with a thought similar to the James-Lange theory of emotion. And, more broadly, The Mezzanine may be said to embody what William James claimed of objects and symbolism in The Principles of Psychology, just a few pages after his stream of consciousness diagram: “Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some feature of it as characteristic.”

  25

  THESE FIRST FAINT OUTLINES OF WHAT I HAD ALREADY BEGUN TO think of as the real figure in Nicholson Baker’s carpet sent me scurrying back to the beginning of The Mezzanine. About ten pages in, Baker uncorks the first fifty-cent word of his career: “vibratiuncles.” Initially, still reading in the middle of the night, I was annoyed by this word because it meant I had to find a dictionary. That’s a little easier today than it used to be, and the online OED is a wonderful resource to have at one’s fingertips, but it wasn’t actually at my fingertips because I didn’t have my laptop nearby. I sighed miserably and unnestled myself from the sofa, and when I found my laptop I discovered our Wi-Fi wasn’t working. Of course. So I reset the Wi-Fi and had to sit there and wait for it to fix itself. I’ll resist the impulse to go on at length about how it’s the nature of our times that we waste a lot of time sitting and waiting for our things to fix themselves: I’ll simply note that it leaves us characterized by inactivity. Waiting for electronic devices to fix themselves is the modern equivalent of watching water boil. Just when I thought the Wi-Fi was never going to fix itself, it fixed itself. I gave another sigh, this one of relief. And what did I find when I looked up “vibratiuncles”? They’re small vibrations. ­Importantly—because the sentence that uses “vibratiuncles” could just as easily have used “small vibrations”—“vibratiuncles” first appears in the work of eighteenth-century philosopher David Hartley’s theory of mind. It’s an explanation for how sensations link to memory.

  Now we’re getting somewhere. Because even though “vibratiuncles” are, by definition, “diminutive” or “miniature,” the use of the word in The Mezzanine is a clear indication that Nicholson Baker’s interest in the impossibly small and insignificant does not mean he’s obsessed with minutiae. The small is of interest only to the extent that it hints at the large; an active reader infers the epic journey from the epigram. What’s the journey? “Howie” likens his own passage into adulthood to the travels of Balboa, the work of Copernicus. This is similar to science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard’s having once likened his Scientology-founding Dianetics to “a voyage of discovery . . . an exploration into new and nearly uncharted realms” of the human mind. Wacko that he was, Hubbard is relevant to The Mezzanine because “Howie” casually tosses out “engram” as synonymous with “memory.” True, “engram” traces back to the mneme traces of early-twentieth-century zoologist Richard Semon, but the word reached public consciousness only by having been adopted by Scientology in the sixties and seventies as a term for unhealthy memories. And Hubbard died just a year before The Mezzanine was published. (For the record, both Baker and Hubbard were probably thinking of William James, whom John Dewey once praised as “almost a Columbus of the inner world.”)

  All these links and connections were thrilling as I was thinking back on them, because by the end of The Mezzanine you realize that it’s links and connections that amount to the book’s own theory of mind. The common denominator of the many “systems of public transport” described in The Mezzanine is the chain or the train that drives them, which is the book’s metaphor for the work of the brain. Baker hasn’
t yet discovered, or he’s forgotten, the limitation of chains and trains as thought metaphors. At this point he’s still on the prowl for his mother’s materialist analogies, and his tragic, boyish faith in progress tells him that as our machines have improved, so has our understanding of how we think what we think.

  It’s common to forgive young writers the naïveté that is so often coupled with enthusiasm. And I did—I did. I forgave Baker as I approached the end of The Mezzanine out in the hammock, Catherine now with me. It was several days after the clash of our hidden titans, and we never did speak of it, though the hammock offered its own commentary in that it was impossible to divide its elastic rope bed into distinct sides, and the only comfortable position trapped my shin beneath Catherine’s backbone and lodged her ankle under my jaw. She had her laptop screen; I had my book. We lightly swayed. I generally read faster as I approach the end of books, The Mezzanine particularly so. The book was about almost nothing, but it aspired to updating the entirety of literature. When “Howie” worries that newer styles of doorknob don’t really amount to better door-opening devices—“What is this static modernism that architects of the second tier have imposed on us?”—he might as well be speaking of books, of the modernism that Baker might have seen as a chapter better excised from the story of literature. How else to explain the shift from his early tales, dabbling in the fantastic and absurd, seemingly all but disavowed, to this act of what might be called remodernism, which shapes a philosopher’s theory of mind from an archaeological passion for the shallowest strata of contemporary life. And that, rather than the thrill of exploration, is what I’d really begun to feel on having returned to the start of Nicholson Baker’s career: the wonder of an archaeologist sifting through the hard clods of the past and stumbling on a picture petrified in the dirt, a form that sharpens as the millennia are chipped away with dental tools, horsehair brushes, and gentle puffs of breath. This is the feeling you never get as a canon-dabbler, the feeling you can’t share even with those closest to you, even when their limbs are all tangled up with yours.

  I turned to the final chapter of The Mezzanine, and what I saw there made me secretly tachycardic, my heart plucking the hammock ropes like lute strings. It was a very short chapter, just a paragraph, a single brick of text on a single page. But before I began reading it, my eyes flitted over something near the very bottom, three capitalized words. I resisted actually looking at them; I read them, but I saw them only peripherally: “Hallman’s! Hallman’s! Hallman’s!” I’d come to appreciate The Mezzanine, come to feel that it was almost talking to me. Now it actually was talking to me. I began the paragraph. “Howie” is at the top of the escalator, looking back at a cigarette butt trapped and tumbling—clogged—at the spot where the escalator steps disappear into the machine’s inner works. “Howie” ’s train of thought chugs out an analogy: it’s like a jar caught on the conveyor at the end of a supermarket checkout line.

  It’s not “Hallman’s,” but “Hellmann’s”; it’s not me, but mayonnaise.

  26

  IT’S THIS JAR THAT FORMS A SUBTLE BRIDGE TO NICHOLSON Baker’s second novel, Room Temperature, which begins with a cryptic epigraph from Wallace Stevens: “I placed a jar in Tennessee . . .” But even having happily noticed this, I worried over three things the next day, as I finger-pried Room Temperature down from a shelf and motored out to the hammock.

  First, the jacket: The swoopy teal and peach cover of this one, like pastel swirls on the box of a cheap brand of laundry detergent (designed by the same artist who produced the clever cover of The Mezzanine), is so disgusting I refuse to discuss it any further. The publisher (sometime between The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Weidenfeld & Nicolson became Grove Weidenfeld; Baker must have been loyal to George Weidenfeld, a British baron: he had published Lolita with Nigel Nicolson, who left the firm in 1992) was likely aiming for book-to-book continuity, a common practice, though it was this same continuity Baker knew he should resist. Similarly the author photo is again credited to Abe Morell (he would do the photo for U and I as well, after Baker moved to Random House), yet the picture this time around struck me as strange because while Baker is interestingly lit, he appears unusually severe. It’s odd, in general, to see a man in a suit on the floor: He looks as though he’s just fallen and isn’t at all keen on being photographed.

  Second, cosmetic similarity: The title of Room Temperature, like The Mezzanine, promises no thrills—it synonymously flirts with that damning critique, tepid—and a quick flip through revealed that The Mezzanine and Room Temperature each had fifteen chapters and were roughly the same length. Baker, however, had my thought long before I did. He records it as U and I opens:

  A week or so earlier I had finished and sent off a novel, my second, and I was still full of the misleading momentum that, while it makes the completion of novels possible, also generally imparts a disappointingly thin and rushed feeling to their second halves or final thirds, as the writer’s growing certainty that he is finally a pro, finally getting the hang of it, coincides exactly with that unpleasant fidgety sensation on the reader’s part that he is locked into a set of characters and surroundings he knows a bit too well by now to enjoy.

  Not exactly glowing self-endorsement.

  Third, the problem of direct correspondence: The book appeared to be about fatherhood (I picked this up from interviews—Baker claimed to have finished it on Father’s Day, 1989, but once again he probably meant a draft, as Father’s Day, 1989, came a month and a half before U and I’s claim that Baker’s second novel was completed “a week or so” before August 6, 1989), and while as a very young man I had played with the idea of adopting a baby girl as a “single father” (it seemed a strange plan only when I revealed it to others), I eventually left behind the whole idea of parenthood, surrogate or otherwise. The various concordances between my literary life and Nicholson Baker’s had made it clear that I should read him, but what would happen when he tackled a subject that held no interest for me? Catherine, either. She had decided against children very early, when she was barely more than a child herself, and it wasn’t until she was thirty-six that she was able to find a doctor willing to clog and laser-weld her fallopian tubes. That delay may account for why she now seemed less disinterested in children than peeved that scientists hadn’t yet found a way to completely eliminate that period of life, youth, that tends to be romanticized and artificially prolonged even as it is only ever recalled with mixed feelings. “I never want children,” I’d known Catherine to say. “Never!” Nevertheless, once fall settled in she began to grow worried for the remaining farm kitten, still living on the farmhouse roof. Adopting the kitten was out of the question, hissingly rejected by our own imperious feline, but Catherine often wandered outside to coax the little girl down from her coyoteproof roost with infant coo calls of “Baaa-by! Where’s the Baaa-by?” Both purred through mutually comforting periods of cradling and nuzzling before retiring to a room and a roof of their own, respectively.

  All these worries more or less evaporated as soon as I climbed into the cradle of the hammock and nuzzled up to Room Temperature, which opens with a cradling scene: “I was in the rocking chair giving our six-month-old Bug her late afternoon bottle.” Actually, “scene” overstates it, as Room Temperature is characterized by compressed time. “It was three-fifteen on a Wednesday” begins chapter two, and just a few lines later the narrator, a new Baker-figure (“Mike” this time around, a reviewer of television commercials) offers up his “theory of knowledge”:

  . . . with a little concentration one’s whole life could be reconstr
ucted from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected.

  So the total elapsed time of Room Temperature, shrink-wrapped into the time it takes to bottle-feed an infant, is even shorter than the lunch-and-escalate elapsed time period of The Mezzanine. I cheered inwardly at this. Even as Nicholson Baker was conscientiously monitoring the rising index of stakes inflation in the screen-­compromised world, he was actively reducing the stakes in his own work. Like The Mezzanine, Room Temperature is made up of Mike’s benign musings, but while “Howie” ’s corporate bildungsroman is systematic and workmanlike—bullet-pointed, at times—Mike’s strings of images and memories, coming seemingly randomly, are triggered by the objects he chooses to attend to from his seat in the nursing room. “Howie” is in motion, surveying conveyors as he is conveyed. Mike is static, but rocking the Bug is “like riding a slow train.”

  The title of the book describes the implied milk of the feeding (Our Bodies, Ourselves: “Formula or breast milk should be warmed to room temperature . . .”), but it also characterizes the quiet story itself with the faintest of Goldilocks references: not too hot, not too cold—just right. That’s mostly in the background, a fairytale allusion shifting and darting behind painted philodendrons at the rear of the stage. Even a drive-by “Princess and the Pea” reference gets more play. But what’s in the foreground—Bug—points to an even more archetypal children’s story. Who’s the Bug? Baker’s daughter, Alice. Room Temperature is dedicated to Alice (“For Alice”), and we’re already in Wonderland when we turn the page and recognize Wallace Stevens’s cryptic jar in Tennessee as a flask placed in Alice’s path. Read me. I was still on page one when I stumbled across the first of the book’s several Carrollian-sounding names, “Dr. Momtaz,” “Grevel Lindop,” and “Neimtzov” (Baker has cited the other famous anagrammist, Nabokov, as an even more crucial influence than Updike), all of which suspiciously appear within twenty pages or so. I paused for a time and did some eager tinkering in the margins. “Grevel Lindop” comes close to “developing,” and “Neimtzov” looks briefly like “time zone,” but none of the names in the book actually anagram into anything. Momtaz and Neimtzov are real surnames, and Grevel Lindop is a real British literary critic (the Times Literary Supplement is draped over Mike’s knee for most of the twenty-minute feed). So was I not then peering through some kind of looking glass? I was. A quarter of the way in, just as I was about to give up on the Alice reference, Mike tells a story of discovering a bouquet of inspection slips tucked into the various pockets of a recently purchased sport coat: the color of the ARMHOLE PRESSING slip is described as “Alice blue.”