B & Me Page 17

  To slow down a bit. Baker’s sex books mostly obey the usual constraints of the pornography genre: episodic sexual encounters featuring varying combinations of participants and activities, all strung on a loose narrative frame. But while the plots of ordinary pornography tend to be throwaway or comedic pastiche, the interstices of Baker’s sex books hint at aesthetic vision. For example, in addition to its series of time-stopped sexual fantasies, The Fermata is also the story of thirty-five-year-old temp worker Arno Strine’s literary career. Like Jim recalling his pivotal moment in a video store, Arno traces his literary impulse—which results in The Fermata—back to a moment in college when he gave in to an impulse to share with others Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks, a book of canonical 1970s erotica. He purchased several copies of the book and left them lying around campus like Easter eggs, hoping that someone would pick up a copy and read it. The draw of this was that it turned him into a partially empowered puppeteer. His explanation returns to Alice:

  I’m captivated by the simple idea of putting something in the path of a woman, so that she can choose to look at it and read it, or, on the other hand, choose to walk on by.

  In short, Arno is more reader than writer at this stage in his literary development. We all begin as readers, trying to share our reading experiences. But soon enough Arno realizes that the pleasure he takes in distributing books would be heightened if a “woman [were to] encounter [his] very own words.” He goes on to reveal that he had acted on this impulse only “quite recently,” and for the rest of the book he stops time so that he has enough time to write erotic stories that he then places in the paths of a series of surrogate Alices.

  Of note at this point is the character Joyce, a coworker whom Arno idolizes and to whom he eventually reveals the secret of his time-stopping power. Toward the end of The Fermata, Joyce acquires the power herself, and we hear of her using the ability to catch up on work, strip random strangers, and make herself a better sexual partner for Arno. Most important for our purposes:

  She talks of taking a jaunt down to Washington and sucking the presidential dick.

  What’s the lesson of all this? All books are written for Alices, Monica Lewinsky included—and perhaps Lewinsky more than most in that she too has come to be associated with a dress of a particular shade of blue.

  38

  I IMAGINED NICHOLSON BAKER OBSERVING ALL THIS FROM AFAR and snickering in a private sense of fiendish accomplishment. It is encouraging that a novel can still become controversial enough to amount to evidence in a legal battle with wide-ranging historical implications. But even if the ripple effects of Vox ought to rank it among history’s most influential books, it has to be allowed that its influence, like More’s Utopia or Machiavelli’s The Prince, has been a function of readers not having bothered to fully understand it. This was equally true of those who liked the book and those who disliked it. On the one hand, there probably is a fruitful analogy to be made between pornography and ambitious literature (e.g., neither is driven by plot alone; both are kept in home libraries for ease of reconsultation, etc.) (sadly, before Catherine moved in I discarded my meager quartet of films, and she abandoned the sparkly, space-agey toy she’d used to get herself through lonesome times), but to completely erase the difference between the two, as Lewinsky and Clinton had done, is pretty obviously a flawed interpretative technique. And on the other hand, the reaction of those who disliked Vox—including many of its early reviewers—was just as flawed, though the reasons for this are somewhat more complicated.

  What’s the purpose of book reviews these days? Should reviews mostly summarize books so that readers can decide for themselves whether a book’s contents merit further investigation (though such reviews tend to pirate books’ best information and thereby become competing, condensed versions of them)? Should reviews mostly celebrate books, rouse crowds whose attention is tugged at by a whole range of less-demanding media (though the absence of any critical sense leaves even praise feeling hollow and unearned)? Or should reviews stand sentinel against mediocrity, individual reviewers accepting a kind of knighthood of taste that empowers them to scold the literary community as it strays from quality and ambition (though such power has the tendency to run amok, such that a too-strident review can both quash a promising career and make a pariah of the reviewer)? In U and I, Nicholson Baker advises against writers becoming reviewers at all, and in this he may have taken his cue from “The Figure in the Carpet,” in which a newly successful novelist harrumphs, “I don’t ‘review.’ I’m reviewed!” But the truth is that Baker did eventually review, albeit with more personality than reviewers are generally encouraged or permitted to exhibit. But he’s kind of an exception. What reviews are still published these days tend to suffer on at least three fronts: one, they tend to be so short that thematic threads stretching between a writer’s books cannot be properly addressed; two, lacking hindsight, early reviewers too often amount to a first line of defense resisting change to the status quo; and three, like Martin Amis having been compelled to interview Baker, reviewers are often conscripted into service and lack the enthusiasm of a “volunteer reader.”

  In one way or another all these problems manifested in the initial, poor reviews of Vox (which appeared among scattered positive notices). A brief sampling of the vitriol:

  The New York Times: Vox doesn’t aspire to use graphic descriptions of sex to make any sort of larger point. . . . while it’s titillating enough, it’s not particularly revealing or emotionally involving.

  The Washington Post: While Jim and Abby are fully imagined, they become . . . comparatively unrealized during the more extreme pornographic parts of the novel in the hapless way that sex renders us all cartoons.

  The Globe and Mail: Baker is ultimately trapped by the vulgarity of his subject. Jim and Abby are obsessed by personal gratification to the exclusion of everything else.

  The Gazette: I . . . cannot recall the last time I was this disappointed in a writer or felt so strongly that I had better things to do than I did while I was reading Vox.

  The Independent: I hope that Nicholson Baker now moves on to matters more robust, leaving this study of infantilism well behind him.

  It’s too easy, I think, to chalk these responses up to jealousy of a youngish and already much-respected writer having suddenly become a best seller. The criticisms echo too closely the themes of the book itself—children’s stories, titillation. The objection was not that Vox was obscene but that it was vulgar in Henry James’s sense of the word, and the critics simply refused to acknowledge that its vulgarity reflected a culture itself becoming more obvious and simple. In other words, critics panned Vox because they hoped it was wrong, and that hope made them incapable of the negative capability that is literature’s only prerequisite and to which Nicholson Baker’s “negative space” had already pointed.

  I thought back on my fight with Catherine over our aborted Vox reading. When I had argued that House of Holes had not struck her as “male jerk-off fantasy,” that, in fact, it seemed to have worked just fine as an emotional lubricant, she claimed that it had been just that one time, and that it had been spontaneous. I countered that a capacity for repeated re-enjoyment with no loss of intensity or pleasure was yet another point of contact between good porn and good books, but she would have none of it. She accused me, essentially, of approaching the business with Lewinskian abandon. Untrue! Rather I had hoped that we could use the books to increase our overall intimacy. Nicholson Baker, I said, could help us redraw a line from the harmony of our intellectual lives to the sensual bond of our physical
lives, enriching both like a good simile. Instead, Nicholson Baker became in Paris the name of the place we could not go.

  39

  PEOPLE STARTED DYING IN PARIS. OR SCRATCH THAT—PEOPLE started dying while we were in Paris. Christopher Hitchens died and then two days later Kim Jong-il died and then the day after that, combining the two, Václav Havel died. These deaths hit me with a kaleidoscopic sense of shifting history—the world was different now—which was perfect because Paris, fairly round on maps, looks a whole lot like a kaleidoscope image.

  You only ever stumble across places you hope to find in Paris. In fact, you have to plan on stumbling across places because it’s useless to study those kaleidoscopic maps: You look up from the map to the city and it’s as though in that instant someone has twisted the tube and now it’s all different. That’s why Catherine and I hadn’t bothered to seek out Shakespeare & Co., Paris’s famous bookstore. We had planned to stumble across it, and in our second week, late at night after a long day at Versailles, we did stumble across it, by which I mean we practically stepped into a puddle of votive candles burning before the store’s front door, a shrine laid out for its famous owner, George Whitman, who had died earlier that day. Whitman did die in Paris, and now everything was different in the literary world.

  I was feeling different too. About ten days before I’d left for Paris I’d noticed that a small lump on my back—a lump that had been there for a couple years but didn’t particularly bother me—had begun to grow. “Grow” was exactly the right word for it because the lump caused me no discomfort, yet I could feel it filling with something. Growing. I used a mirror to look at it, and after I looked at it I decided to get it looked at. My doctor told me not to worry.

  “But I’m going to Paris for a month.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “What is it?”

  “A growth.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s a cyst. Think of it as a big pimple. It’s coming to the surface.”

  “What if it comes to the surface in Paris?”

  “It won’t.”

  “What if it does?”

  She wrote me a prescription for an antibiotic that shrank my growth for a while, but after I’d been in Paris for about a week I started to notice it again. My growth had laughed in the face of that antibiotic. My growth was like a mountain climber determined to summit the surface of my skin, and it would not be deterred by poor conditions. Before long I began to feel less a sensation of growing than a generalized twanging, and if I leaned back against anything—a pillow, say—I experienced shooting tendrils of pain that flickered out to my fingers and tweaked the base of my neck. It was my zit to bear. And I bore it. I bore it everywhere, up hills and down them—up to Sacré Cœur, for example, and back down again. Before long I wasn’t merely reacting to pain, but wincing and twitching my shoulders in anticipation of it, hunching my back—that was the only word for it—to accommodate my ever-bulging and now quite painful growth. Oddly, the pain grew more pronounced the closer I happened to be to the center of Paris. I became more and more hunchbacked the closer I was to Notre Dame.

  When I revealed this to Catherine—a text message sent from a brasserie called La Réserve de Quasimodo—she thought it was perfect because I’d been suffering from the figurative growth of my irrepressible pessimism for years now, and because I’d been crazily vaulting around Paris late at night (not to mention putting on weight, I had to admit—if I was a Dying Slave, I was a fat Dying Slave), and because it enabled her to express everything she’d been feeling in all the months leading up to Paris: She’d been kidnapped and dragged to the former bed and breakfast against her will, and she felt imprisoned and hopeless and despondent and sad.

  Truth be told, Catherine wasn’t feeling all that well herself in Paris. In our second week, she’d become sick, overcome by clogs of mucus in her sinuses. I’d noticed that most sexy French women were sexy because they had a slight overbite that made them look as though they were looking down their noses at everything. Now that Catherine was having to do a lot of head tipping to keep her nose from running, she really was looking down her nose at everything, and she wound up appearing a whole lot more French as a result. This cheered her up, miserable though she was, but it was only a temporary happiness because of course she would get better. Paris was a related problem because it was temporary too. By this point we’d fallen in love with the adorable atelier, and this was sad because being happy in Paris meant that we no longer had Paris to look forward to, and before long we’d be headed back to the former bed and breakfast with few prospects for the future. Late one evening as we lay side by side on the futon, Catherine sniffling and paging through a book of Sophie Calle’s Hasselblad images (which I’d stumbled across at Shakespeare & Co.) and myself terrifiedly viewing online videos of subcutaneous cyst removals (think of éclairs pounded with sledgehammers; spores bursting in slow motion; a volcano’s molten belch; or, it has to be admitted, male ejaculation), we paused to consider what trip we would go on next, to plot our next escape. Paralyzed by despondency, Catherine had no productive ideas. I did, but I hesitated because it meant possibly breaking the ironclad resolution I’d made when I started writing about Nicholson Baker. Then I just said it.

  “How about Maine?”

  Baker was in Maine. Long story short: Baker grew up in Rochester, went to school in Philadelphia (one year abroad, in France), lived for a few years in New York and Boston before his career started to take off, spent most of the nineties in California (his father-in-law taught at Berkeley for half a century), relocated his family to England for a year for reasons that were still unclear to me, and then settled in South Berwick, Maine, where he’d lived since 1998. Even before learning all this I’d taken note of the fact that writers moved to Maine with surprising regularity. It was no Paris, but Maine seemed to rank high among desirable sites from which to conduct a literary life. Not ever having been there I had no idea why. This alone seemed worth investigating, and just before I told Catherine my idea, I told myself that being in Maine did not require me to profane my quest by trying to meet Nicholson Baker. Catherine agreed—not with whether I should meet Baker, but with the proposal in general.

  “I’d love to go to Maine.”

  Using vacation time to plan future vacations is the state of modern life. I set to work sifting through images of summer rentals on Maine’s southern coast and learned there was exactly one bed and breakfast in South Berwick.

  40

  THE NEXT DAY I HAD MY HUNCHBACK REMOVED. I HAD TO STUMBLE across L’Hôpital Américain de Paris because even if I could have read my Paris map the hospital wasn’t on it. Happily, the hospital turned out to be located on Avenue Victor-Hugo. The hunchback removal process was made pleasant by the fact that French nurses sacrifice nothing of fashion to the sterility required of invasive surgical techniques. Scrubs turned out to be a delightful complement to the dangly earrings and artful makeup long championed by overbitten French women.

  The whole episode nicely anticipated a scene near the end of The Fermata. Arno volunteers for a medical study on masturbation-induced carpal tunnel syndrome and fantasizes at length, aloud, about his sexy doctor while she studies him masturbating in the womb-like space of an MRI machine. I say anticipated because at that point, on the day I had my growth milked, I was only about a third of the way into The Fermata. Preprocedure, I spent forty-five minutes reading the book in an examination room, and my laughter at the funny parts flitted out into the hallway, where elderly French people who weren’t even on their last legs because they were on
gurneys were being wheeled from room to room. Does the questionable appropriateness of exuberantly reading a bawdy book in the solemn enclave of an emergency room speak to the larger question of whether Baker’s sex books are inappropriate, as reviewers suggested? Perhaps. It’s true that the trilogy is unwilling to consider the darker side of its subject. For example, the first real-life porn star mentioned in Vox (“One of the tapes has got Lisa Melendez in it who I think is just . . . delightful”) died of AIDS in 1999 at age thirty-five. Also, while no one tends to get hurt as a result of popular storytelling genres, there is a compelling argument to be made that pornography feeds patriarchy and that female porn stars, in particular, are conscripted into the business and compelled to have sex for pay. This is quite similar to book reviewers being forced to critique books they did not choose to read, and while reviewers and sex workers both might take umbrage at the suggestion that they have been coerced, it’s worth noting that only sex workers already have, having once picketed appearances by scholar Catharine MacKinnon, who had claimed that female porn stars were oppressed and that all sex was rape. For me, though, the fact that Baker’s sex trilogy was fantasy, that the books were about fantasy, inoculated them against that kind of vulgar criticism. We have well enough of that other, sick-souled (to use William James’s phrase) view of our sexual lives. Why not a little healthy-mindedness, a little looking on the sexy side? If one of the problems of modern life is that, like reviewers who have forgotten how to fill negative space, we no longer know how to intimately empathize with one another, then perhaps a fantasy depicting intimate empathy should not be criticized for failing to represent a reality it never tried to resemble. “That’s the hole you’re looking for,” a woman in House of Holes says, when she reveals that her vagina is yet another portal to the House of Holes—and what she means is that sexual fantasy is a place to which those whom modern life has left feeling abducted or conscripted or imprisoned might occasionally escape.