B & Me Read online

  Or perhaps I was thinking all this only because soon, after the doctor arrived and sliced open my hunchback and pinched it empty of every last dollop of malicious infection, I was left with a quite large hole in myself. Known formally as a “cavity wound,” it was tricky, this hole: Infected once, it was susceptible to relapse and needed to heal slowly, from the inside out, like the socket of a pulled tooth. What this meant was that every other day for the rest of my time in Paris I returned to Avenue Victor-Hugo so comely French nurses could lie me down and stuff medicated gauze deep into my negative space.

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  WHICH MAKES TOTAL SENSE BECAUSE ABBY OF VOX, OF COURSE, was another Alice en route to Wonderland, and she too has a preternatural attraction to holes. (Alice, it should be noted, is the precise opposite of Martin Amis. At the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s attention diverts to the rabbit hole only because a book she has been peeking at over her sister’s shoulder contains no dialogue. It’s all prose. What, Alice wonders, could possibly be the use of a book “without pictures or conversation”?)

  Early in Vox, Abby claims that she enjoys the negative space of dialogue, the accidental pauses into which the imagination reflexively plunges. A few pages later there comes a critical instance of just such a chat hole. Jim is describing a streetlight outside his window. The light had begun turning itself on just a moment before. He goes about his description quite patiently because the light itself doesn’t just flick to life like an incandescent lamp. It’s a slow process. For a time, he explains, you can’t even be sure the light is coming on at all: it could be the space around the bulb getting darker. Then there’s this moment, he says, when the streetlight is the exact color of the sky, and that gives the illusion of “a hole in the middle of the tree across the street.” Then we get this:

  There was a pause.

  “Listen,” [Abby] said. “This is getting expensive at a dollar a minute or whatever it is.”

  “Ninety-five cents per half minute, I think.”

  “So give me your number and I’ll call you back,” she said.

  “There was a pause.” What do our imaginations project into this particular negative space? After the pause Abby’s voice has a tone of urgency, and her concern over the call’s cost suggests that she now realizes that the conversation is going to last significantly longer than she originally planned. Jim’s description of an illusory hole is neither vulgar nor obscene, yet for Abby it’s decisive. It convinces her that Jim has something unique to offer, that his is a sensibility with which her own might chime. Jim talks her out of hanging up. The risk that they might not reconnect is too great, he says, and anyway two dollars a minute is a great value. Some pages further on, far enough down the road so that part of what we register is the fact that Abby stored this moment away in memory, she reintroduces the hole theme in a story she tells Jim about masturbating to a fantasy of repainting her apartment:

  And then I thought, wait, I have the money, this time I’ll hire people to paint it for me. And so three painters materialized, and then suddenly there was a large hole in the wall, about three feet off the floor, big enough so that I could fit through so that my legs were standing in the front hall and yet my head and upper body were in the living room. The hole was finished off and lined with sheepskin. I had nothing on.

  Actually this is a fantasy of a story of a fantasy because Abby is jammed into a hole like Tinkerbell and Marilyn Monroe for Jim’s benefit. The scene that follows is certainly “titillating enough,” as that one hostile reviewer remarked—the painters apply stripes of sun-warmed paint to Abby’s butt cheeks and legs, and then there’s a lengthy sequence in which the masturbating Abby envisions herself pleasuring three men at once—but to end a reading of the scene at “titillation” is to make the same mistake Jim makes when Abby’s story is finished. He guesses that the trifecta of fantasy orgasms (“Then all three of them came in me, one right after another, first the one in my mouth, surprisingly enough, then the one in my pussy, then finally the one in my ass”) was what permitted Abby to bring herself to actual orgasm.

  The next sequence is crucial. Not at all, Abby explains. That was “just a picture,” one image among many, and what had actually made her come was a pair of ideas, and for several pages she tries to communicate what these ideas are but the conversation gets sidetracked before she ever gets to them. In other words, Abby’s story is an attempt to depict the working of her mind, which she can’t explain in any other way. That she fails to explain it is important; but regardless, the incorporation of Jim’s fantasy into her own is a tender way of answering Jim’s earlier call for a “stream of confidences flowing from you to me.” Stream of confidences? This is so close to “stream of consciousness” that all serious readers—perhaps not Monica Lewinsky, but certainly professional reviewers—ought to be expected to suspect from just this that while the ostensible subject of Vox might be phone sex, what it’s really about is storytelling and the purpose of literature.

  To make the case a little clearer: Abby’s aggressive honesty (“Impress me with your candor,” she says) leads to an odd admission: Not only does she like holes, she has bizarre fantasies about passing through them. Specifically she imagines getting sucked into the engine of an SR-71 Blackbird (“one of those black secret spy planes”) and instantly becoming “a long fog of blood.” This is a peculiar fetish, to be sure, and actually it’s a subset of an even more general fantasy in which she dematerializes herself so that she can pour down into the grids of holes in telephone handset mouthpieces. Neither the plane nor the dematerialization kill her, she assures Jim, and what’s important is what it feels like to be “turned into some kind of conscious vapor.” The body is no longer a solid: It can fwoosh or stream. This perhaps explains Abby’s unique attraction to bodies of water: “I’d put out for any body of water at all—a pool or a bath or a pond, or an ocean.”

  Importantly, this follows a peculiar admission of Jim’s own. What he fetishizes is advances in book technology, most recently a mechanical spreading device that splays paperbacks wide for hands-free reading. Jim had masturbated, he says, while reading about the new device.

  All of this is critical in the larger context of Baker’s career in that what should be clear by now is that Jim and Abby embody Baker’s transition from mechanical to organic cognitive metaphors. And the fact that everyone who travels to the House of Holes does so via a process quite similar to what Abby describes—in a book published eighteen years later—tells us not only that the evolution is from a Jim-style worldview to an Abby-style worldview, it insists that whatever is being described is lodged deep in an abiding worldview of Nicholson Baker’s.

  Long before then, however, Jim returns Abby’s favor. Late in Vox, he incorporates her spy plane into a fantasy in which he has acquired a technology that allows him to monitor global incidence of orgasm: “Maybe it’s really a big black spy plane I’m in, and what’s this, you’re up here too, flying toward my fan-jet.” But Jim and Abby do not simply play to each other’s fetishes. They complete each other’s fantasies. The listener steps in to provide details or motivations at moments when the storyteller’s imagination hiccups, when the improvisation stalls. Vox depicts cooperative storytelling in three ways. First, while Jim and Abby do not aspire to the étude sentences of Room Temperature, they do deliver longish speeches that re-create lust-altered consciousness. Second, when common diction proves unsatisfying they engage in wordplay, collectively brainstorming neologisms: “yorning” for a combination of yearning and longing, “strum” for masturbation. (Incidentally, Martin Amis’s clai
m over this word is completely false: It appears in none of the books Amis published in the twelve years leading up to Vox.)

  And third, and most important (and despite Baker’s Paris Review claim that writing about sex is “fun”), Jim emphasizes just how torturous it is to craft, on the fly, a fantasy in which an imagined Abby has an encounter with a mysterious stranger. Stuck at a moment of transition, he says:

  It is work getting the two of you together. I feel that any second I’m going to misstep in telling this. It’s very stressful.

  “Now listen,” Abby replies, and she comes to the rescue with a segue so that Jim’s story can continue.

  All of this carries forward into The Fermata, which is an even more fantastic book, and even more a book about how literature works. And it received even more scathing reviews when it was published. “I just found it creepy,” said one reviewer. “Shame on Nicholson Baker for attempting such a trite con job,” said another. Nonsense! Arno spends a great deal of time preemptively defending himself against charges like these, and that fact alone should put a careful reader on critical alert status. The Fermata is about the process of its creation. Arno laments his inability to create a more smoothly flowing narrative, and he reviews himself in noting that his story aligns with a whole literary genre: books featuring monstrous characters invested with supernatural powers. Previous contributors to the genre include Stevenson, Goethe, Wells, Tolkien, and Mary Shelley. (Arno forgot Victor Hugo.)

  The Fermata’s basic premise offers the children’s story counterpoint to this. The book begins with a childish scruples-testing fantasy (“What would you do if you could stop time?”), and becomes, once Arno achieves his superpower, a less allegorical version of comic books, whose intended audience was always pubescent boys catching a whiff of the occult in their newfound ability to masturbate (e.g., The Incredible Hulk is about getting a boner, Iron Man is about having a boner, and Spiderman, in which sticky white goo shoots from the wrists, is about ejaculation, etc.). Add to this Arno’s affinity for British literature, his abandoned master’s thesis on the history of Dover Books, and his claim that his erotic writings align him with Guy de Maupassant (Tales of French Love and Passion), and it starts to get pretty difficult to ignore the fact that The Fermata has a lot to say about evolving literary tastes. It should come as no surprise that The Fermata happily soaks in protracted, association-rich descriptions of genitalia, but these descriptions lack the wearying adult languor that Updike brought to the endeavor, nor do they exhibit the deadly import that Kundera injected into all things sexual, and nor does Baker completely pass over the matter as Ford Maddox Ford did in The Good Soldier, on the argument that sexual desire is a commonplace and “therefore a matter needing no comment at all.” Rather The Fermata’s descriptions of genitalia are buoyant and gleeful, and they do what all good books do. They reveal those private truths of ourselves that become difficult to acknowledge as soon as we’ve lost the kind of adventurous innocence we all felt when we first had the impulse to offer others a glimpse of our own, if only they would show us theirs.

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  THAT SAID, THE FERMATA WAS THE LEAST COMPELLING (THOUGH the longest) of Baker’s books I’d read so far. Or maybe I just had a hard time getting into it because Catherine and I were fighting. We’d been fighting with each other, she’d been fighting her cold, and I’d been fighting figurative and literal systemic infections, for years, it seemed, and what all that added up to was that I was reading about sex almost continually in Paris while having almost none of it myself. This left me in a foul mood. Not in the least because I’d been projecting Catherine into every one of Baker’s sex scenes, and even though I wasn’t wholly absorbed in The Fermata, I laughed out loud at a lot of it, which made me crave Catherine all the more.

  To speak more broadly, I wasn’t sure whether my frustration with The Fermata was a function of my innate negativity or a more general annoyance that is supposed to result from experiencing Arno’s frustration as he lists the books that he consulted to help him write his own: Cardano’s The Book of My Life, Santayana’s Persons and Places, Baring’s The Puppet Show of Memory. We’re supposed to recognize from this list, I think, that writers overcome the obstacles of writing by reading other books. Yet here the process felt too naked. The Fermata seemed too normal in this regard, as though Baker bent too far toward the light of his critics in trying to prove that he could write a straightforward novel. The book contains some of the same literary lessons as Vox (e.g., Joyce instructs Arno on the importance of specificity of detail), but can a truly good book be made of a halting attempt to write a good book? Wasn’t that a metabridge too far? Yet I sensed from the beginning that The Fermata was absolutely key to my coming to an understanding of Baker’s underlying vision.

  I began to think this when Ernest Renan popped up in chapter one. What was a stodgy old British literary critic, a sometime companion of Henry James—James once called Renan “hideous and charming—more hideous even than his photos, and more charming even than his writing”—doing popping up in a book that one critic described as “straight porn”? Furthermore, what was Henry James himself doing popping up nine chapters later, right after the come-face scene that sent Updike (and others, I now realized) into a dither? I think I actually have an answer to that last one because at this point we can hardly call ourselves careful readers if stumbling across Henry James does not inspire us to recognize, as with “stream of confidences” in Vox, that William James is an uncited presence in The Fermata too. When Arno, in the book’s opening paragraph, claims that he does not “inquire into origins very often,” he quietly echoes Pragmatism’s assertion that the truth of a thing is best measured not by an attempt to gauge its origin, but by an assessment of its practical effects. And a few pages later, when Arno poignantly admits that his ability to stop time is “the one thing that makes [his] life worth living,” a careful reader hears the faint reference to what is perhaps James’s most famous essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” (“The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?” Baker told The Paris Review. The savvy interviewer followed immediately with a question about James, though James’s essay went unmentioned.)

  These associations aren’t exactly hiding in the book, but they’re not a surface-level response either. If most readers these days crave a less demanding experience, the so-called beach read, then a reading of this sort might be likened to the contemplative labor of a high-tech beachcomber, one of those serious fellows who paces the dunes wearing thick headphones, trowel in one hand and metal-detecting wand in the other, sweeping rhythmically and janitorially over the sands, half-hoping for a treasure, a gold watch or a wedding ring temporarily removed and then forgotten, and the other half taking a simple pleasure in the trance state produced by the search itself. Can The Fermata be a “good” book merely because it repays such a reader with shiny trinkets of thought, because it has an internal rationale for what it says and does? Can we still like a book if it fails in an essential, unnameable way but steers us closer to its author’s worldview? What do we mean when we say a book has failed anyway? That it has not entertained us? Why should it entertain us, and not the other way around? Are we not diverted by a book—“caught” by it, to use Henry James’s phrase—precisely because it inspires us to entertain it as we might entertain an offer or a proposal? When did we start expecting books to entertain us without any flex of mental muscle on our part? One hears these days many citations of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” but wouldn’t an even better literary world result if readers not only willfu
lly suspended modernity-induced cynicism and negativity but actively fought and strived to believe an author’s belief, if only incompletely, for an instant, and to the extent it might be fathomed through a fantasy? In other words books shouldn’t entertain us, we should entertain them, and, in keeping with the central metaphor of this book, to read in any other way is to be like a sexual partner who expects to be stroked to climax while offering no strokes in return. It’s only such a dysfunctional relationship—a willed exertion of disbelief—that explains how even a casual beach reader might avoid stumbling across the basic mission statement of The Fermata, which is articulated by Arno at the very dawn of his literary career.

  Happily, he’s on a beach at this moment. A long search for a surrogate Alice into whose path he can place an early literary effort yields a young sunbathing woman absently finger-digging in the sand alongside her towel. Arno stops time so that he can sit down beside her and peck out the first of The Fermata’s stories within the story: the sexual adventures of Marian the Librarian. Story completed, he plants his fresh manuscript just beneath the young woman’s fingers so that it will be promptly excavated. He goes on to live out a common writer’s fantasy, seeing his work read in public by a stranger. But more important than that is the thrill he feels when he first sits down to write, a treasure not even half buried in the dirt: