Nicholson Baker has established himself as contemporary fiction's principal detective and dissector of epics that await the reader at close range. Thanks to Baker's extraordinary attention to ordinary objects and processes, restroom paper towels and computer paper perforations have been accorded the same descriptive indulgence as Achilles' shield; tying shoes and writing with a ballpoint pen on a rubber spatula rise to high drama; the fates of popcorn poppers and peanut butter jars are crucial planks in a private political platform, quietly alive with social implications. With unrivaled patience and meticulousness, Baker tweezes poetry out of a seemingly prosaic environment, which brims for him with compacted extravagance, ingrown gorgeousness. As one reviewer puts it, “Baker doesn't just count the angels on the head of a pin; he does long division with the feathers in their wing tips.”¹ In The Mezzanine (1988) and Room Temperature (1990) in particular, a studied intimacy presides; happily banished to contemplation, Baker offers the radiant residue of extended meditation. He is exquisitely fussy, drawing out the hidden heritage of a drinking straw or awakening the layered etymology of a neglected noun from the grave of casual usage. The following sample among the scores of reflections that constitute his first novel suggests the lush weave that Baker creates:

Why can't office buildings use doorknobs that are truly knob-like in shape? What is this static modernism that architects of the second tier have imposed on us: steel-half-U handles or lathed objects shaped like superdomes, instead of brass, porcelain, or glass knobs? The upstairs doorknobs in the house I grew up in were made of faceted glass. As you extended your fingers to open a door, a cloud of flesh-color would diffuse into the glass from the opposite direction. The knobs were loosely seated in their latch mechanism, and heavy, and the combination of solidity and laxness made for a multiply staged experience as you turned the knob: a smoothness that held intermediary tumbleral fallings-into-position. Few American products recently have been able to capture that same knuckly, orthopedic quality (the quality of bendable straws) in their switches and latches; the Japanese do it very well, though; they can get a turn-signal switch in a car or a volume knob on a stereo to feel resistant and substantial and worn into place—think of the very fine Toyota turn-signal switches, to the left of the steering wheel, which move in their sockets like chicken drumsticks: they feel as if they were designed with living elbow cartilage as their inspiration.

(The Mezzanine, 27)

And on and on he goes, zealously invested, utterly open to association, metaphor, and fresh diction (“tumbleral” and “knuckly” are particularly effective examples in the passage above), all in an effort to do justice to the little things, to get them right.

Baker acknowledges that he has always had this “cast of thought,” with its penchant for what governs things so small: “I would write in my notebooks about all these ambitions of writing enormous books, huge subjects for novels, but the only time I actually felt pleasure writing was when I had turned the lens a little bit and was focusing on something carefully and was able to revolve it in my mind. … What it feels like is that … I have some pressing point I want to make about the coils of a toaster.”² Contemporary man lives amidst innumerable bits of manufacture; made things line every desk, shelf, counter, and pocket. As Henry Petroski writes in The Evolution of Useful Things, “Virtually all urban sensual experience has been touched by human hands, and thus the vast majority of us experience the physical world, at least, as filtered through the process of design.”³ Nicholson Baker is eager to disclose that rich tangle of invention, the vivid infrastructure that largely constitutes what and how perception is accomplished. As James Kaplan maintains in Vanity Fair, “In an American book-writing generation that seems to span the talent gamut from A to C, Nicholson Baker is out there at the end of the alphabet, quite alone. His unmistakable voice, his razor-sharp comprehension of culture high and low, his mighty-Wurlitzer skill with the language—all move him out of the lit pack, straight into suede-elbow proximity with the timeless ones, the echt practitioners.” “Pure-octane-wise, not many are in Baker's league,” Kaplan continues, awed by Baker's “broad, jaw-droppingly knotty matrix of usable reference.”⁴ Novelist David Shields concurs in a piece for the Village Voice, in which he attributes to this “artistically adventurous, passionately intellectual writer” the power of transfiguration: “He is a kind of literary Statue of Liberty: give him our wretched refuse and he'll turn it into poetry.”⁵ From such a glamorous vantage point, calling Baker a master of trivial pursuit does a disservice to the wealth of all he coaxes out of anonymity.

It should not be surprising, nonetheless, that responses to Baker's writings typically emphasize his minor-key commitments. By virtue of the reception of his first two novels, Baker has occasionally been called a minimalist; to be sure, his uncompromising alertness to the discarded and the daily, coupled with (in a strictly traditional sense) the relative plotlessness of his books, may initially lead reviewers to unite him with writers like Raymond Carver. However, Baker will have none of the poverty that the term “minimalism” suggests. On the contrary, his is a persistent war on attenuation. Nor can he be accused of predictability, another charge that tends to be levied against minimalist fictions. Instead, Baker defamiliarizes the landscape by being so in-depth about his inventories, by providing such relentlessly exploded views. In this regard, the opening lines of Jorie Graham's “Erosion” are most instructive:

I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one
simultaneous, cut clean
of sequence. No,
it is our slowness I love, growing slower,
tapping the paintbrush against the visible,
tapping the mind.(6)

When mechanisms are exteriorized, bowels butterflied, and anatomies flayed, nothing can be presumed usual anymore. Baker describes his goal in this way: “I mean, what you really want to be is strange. Because that feeling of strangeness is delightful. There's a hundred ways that I could make you feel uncomfortable. But there's only one or two or three ways that I could make you feel at ease. The whole premise of conceptual art—that you've got to make the viewer kind of worried—doesn't seem very convincing to me. I want the reader to be happy. At some basic level, I want to be writing entertainment.”⁷

Novelist Steven Millhauser, a fellow traveler of sorts when it comes to concentrated mystery and compressed obsessions, provides a more accurate term in his assessment of the miniature, which he says “is an attempt to reproduce the universe in graspable form. It represents a desire to possess the world more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen. We are teased out of the world of terror and death, and under the enchantment of the miniature we are invited to become God.”⁸ Millhauser opposes the charms of the miniature with the awesomeness of the gigantic, which is intimidating because there is “something lush, profuse, unstoppable” about it.⁹ While Baker's fiction definitely has more in common with the patiently, ornately furnished company of the miniature, as Millhauser uses the term, than it does with the spartan decor of the minimalist, it seems to contradict the idea that reduction of scope affords godlike control. In fact, it could be argued that Baker's dilations prove the ungraspability of this world regardless of the size of the grafts that are taken from it. The puzzle is further considered in Millhauser's Martin Dressler, a novel in which the hero chafes at every constraint, not excluding the accomplishment of a given vision: both giganticism and miniaturization, which equally tend toward “obsessive elaboration,” betray “a yearning for the exhaustive, which was the secret malady of the age.”¹⁰ The Baker narrator is a similarly inverted Horatio Alger. Nevertheless, instead of finding refuge in the miniature because the world is too much with him, he is excited to discover that wherever he hunkers down there is too much world. The revelation is not terrifying but compelling, wonderful.

Baker's delightful, astonishing sensitivity to subtle textures accounts for only part of his reputation. Probably the majority of Baker's following—certainly the greater share of the public awareness he has inspired—is due to his uniquely academic twist on the erotic novel, as demonstrated in Vox (1992) and The Fermata (1994). For some, these ventures are aberrations in a promising literary career, or worse, blatant (and, it turns out, successful) plays for bestsellerdom by an eccentric writer otherwise restricted to coterie tastes. Certainly these novels have not been uniformly appreciated by reviewers, several of whom have chastised Baker for chauvinism or sheer vulgarity. However, it seems that the connection between the passion for intricate detail in the first two novels and the intricately detailed passions of the next two does not really represent a departure after all. Voyeurism is a natural extension of other obsessive attentions; whatever the controversies occasioned by the explicit dialogues in Vox and the even more explicit sexual activities in The Fermata, the decision to embody the intrigue of specificity in the bodies of women does seem consistent with the way Baker loves to linger in the earlier works. True, the method may be pornographic by definition, its pleasures being at the expense of the “thingification” of women by an author who rather prides himself on breathing life into things. On the other hand, the reader may remember the argument of William Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, that quintessentially metafictional erotic text, which equates the talents and dedicated observances of the assiduous reader with those of the good lover. This brand of allegiance is frequently given its due in Baker's writings, as is seen, for instance, in the homage-within-a-homage in U and I: A True Story (1991), when Baker's admiration for (and envy) of John Updike leads him to defend narrative “cloggers”—swollen descriptions that interrupt, reroute, or even displace, the horizontal flow of a given story:

The only thing I like are the clogs—and when, late in most novels, there are no more in the pipeline to slow things down, I get that fidgety feeling, and I start bending the pliable remainder of the book so that it makes a popping sound, and I pick off the price sticker on the back and then regret doing so and stick it back on because it is a piece of information I will always want to have (a delight, as Updike memorably says of picking at a psoriasis lesion, thereby capturing a whole world of furtiveness we would otherwise not know about, that “must be experienced to be forgiven”). I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage- points of passage.¹¹

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether one can imagine a piece of information that Baker would not want to have, the reader can recognize in this reversal of ranks between central plot and accompanying description a consistent aesthetic. It is as though the caddy were taking the strokes while the golfer lugged the clubs. Or, to return specifically to Baker's sex-obsessed novels, it is as though foreplay were the play itself and not just the mandatory preface. Art for art's sake lies at the heart of the style, subject matter, scholastic disposition, and comic outlook of Nicholson Baker.

Baker is also a brilliant essayist, and here, too, the encyclopedic resolve of the novels is clearly operating. The Size of Thoughts not only delivers several versions of author's creeds, focusing on industry's unsung convergences with daily life, it is also replete with hymns to gadgetry, confection, and the minute architecture upon which people obliviously rely. If many of his subjects are sturdy components of today's lifestyle—modest contributors which Baker has stand for the honor they deserve—others (like the library card catalogue) are threatened with obsolescence, and eulogies evolve into efforts to restore their status. This is not to say that Baker is a Luddite grumbling about the displacement of pure artisanship by soulless products of the factory. Quite the contrary, he celebrates with exacting sympathy the technological pastoral thriving everywhere in the vicinity.

How things work, how things got there, what constitutes human musings and sensations, and any number of “those shaky curved lines … from A to Z” from which awareness is drafted¹²—Baker is consumed with fundamentals. From arriving at a drugstore, to getting the baby to sleep, to reaching orgasm, to rooting out the legacy of a plastic bottle or a bit of slang, he means to revise the very nature of literary adventure.

A WRITER IN THE MAKING

Nicholson Baker was born on 7 January 1957, in Rochester, New York, to parents who had met as art students at Parsons School of Design: Douglas Baker, an advertising executive, and Ann (Nicholson) Baker. Evidently the analytical preoccupations of the author of The Mezzanine hark back to childhood, when Baker typically busied himself with applying personal modifications to model planes and cars; he claims to remember wanting to become an inventor when he grew up. His interest in the arts was encouraged by his mother, who would set him such tasks as drawing the interior of a pillow, and his father, who would accept suggestions from his son for his advertising campaigns. In school, Baker was attracted to music. Taking up the bassoon in fourth grade, Baker grew proficient enough to enroll at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in 1974 with his sights set on composition. He even performed for a short time as a substitute bassoonist for the Rochester Philharmonic. Music has remained an important concern in his writing, its prominence obvious in the titles The Fermata and “Playing Trombone,” as well as in some of the amiable digressions of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature.

After a year at Eastman, Baker moved on to Haverford College, where he received his B.A. in English in 1980. The switch from music to literature derived from several subtle inspirations, including Baker's longstanding appreciation of the physical pleasure of books (commented upon by Baker in “Books as Furniture,” among other locations), the rewarding sense of books as repositories of information, and the growing belief, discussed in U and I, that “nothing is more impressive than the sight of a complex person suddenly ripping out a laugh over some words in a serious book or periodical. … I began increasingly to want to be a part of the prosperous-seeming world of books (prosperous in contrast, that is, to the grant-dependent and sparsely attended concerts for living composers, whose ranks I had up until then wanted to join), where there was money for screaming full-page ads and where success was quantified as it was on the Billboard charts.”¹³

Briefly held jobs as a Wall Street oil analyst and a stock broker—“I got very fired up about kind of mystical notions about markets and trading and everything. It was unlike anything I'd grown up with”¹⁴—preceded his moving to Berkeley, California, to live with Margaret Brentano, whom he would marry in 1985, and her parents. A writing workshop with Donald Barthelme at Berkeley helped to strengthen and validate this decision, as would initial publications in toney outlets like the Atlantic and the New Yorker. However, it would be some time before Baker would find his singular voice. After moving to Boston, he worked as a word processor (a job title whose resonance with his fictional eccentricities he would jokingly allude to in The Size of Thoughts) and a technical writer (a job shared by the narrator of Room Temperature), before devoting himself to writing full time by 1987.

The breakthrough came when, in a realization comparable to John Hawkes's infamous dictum about how the conventional components of narrative were in fact the enemies of true fiction, Baker figured that he would dispense with plot altogether: “But I'd start writing, and if the plot were, say, a foot long, I'd find I'd covered an eighth of an inch. So I got rid of the plot,” he told Harry Ritchie in the London Sunday Times. “I felt enormous relief that I didn't have to pretend to do something that didn't interest me.”¹⁵ From this conviction grew The Mezzanine, a book sustained almost solely by the hyperactive ruminations and ultramagnified examinations of a man on his way during his lunch hour to purchase new shoelaces. The combination of omnivorous concern, droll humor, and metaphorical richness characterized a technique that was in itself the most memorable event he had to offer. By 1990, with the completion of his second novel, Baker was well on his way to becoming known as one of the most intellectually satisfying stylists of his generation, having made, in Lawrence Norfolk's words, “a rapid transition from experimental writer to writer of successful experiments.”¹⁶Vox and The Fermata would follow, bringing both more controversial and varied reviews and wide popular success (including profiles in Esquire and Gentleman's Quarterly). As of this writing, Baker lives in Berkeley with his wife and two children.

AFFINITIES AND INFLUENCES

His literary debts and resemblances are a matter of considerable self-consciousness to Nicholson Baker. This is hardly surprising, given his dedication of an entire book to his worshipful speculation about (or jealous obsession with, or imaginative stalking of) John Updike. When it comes to models, Baker says, “every little guy like me has to be constantly doing this measuring process and comparing. When an interviewer asks you what was important to you when you were learning to write, what were the texts, you're tempted to come up with people like Henry de Montherlant or the Brothers Goncourt. You don't want to say John Updike because he's commonplace and familiar and it's not exciting. It felt excitingly provocative to write a book about commonplace, familiar John Updike.”¹⁷ In an on-line interview with Alexander Laurence and David Strauss, Baker also added the following list of writers he likes: “There's Allan Hollinghurst, a gay novelist. I like Samuel Johnson. I like certain poets: Howard Moss, Stanley Kunitz. I'm reading Ronald Firbank right now. Flann O'Brien. I'm a terrible reader. Usually if I actually get to a point of reading a book, there's enough stuff that I'll like. I buy novels for the cover. Beautiful covers are like buying candy.”¹⁸ While he suspects that “imitation is a kind of theft” rather than a form of flattery, Baker acknowledges that “the great enterprise of literature doesn't move forward unless each writer profits from all the different tiny discoveries made by all of his or her predecessors.”¹⁹ Clearly, Baker's writings may readily be categorized with John Updike's lyrical mannerisms and exaltation of the everyday; their shared interest in contemporary sexual mores and their poetic potential is another obvious point of comparison.

Donald Barthelme, by virtue of his wit and insatiable appetite for cultural debris, is another connection; indeed, before “digressing” into the fascination with Updike that will come to dominate the book, U and I opens with the narrator's decision to write a critical appreciation of Barthelme in the wake of his recent death. That book provides a grab bag of literary influences, ranging from the canonical to the pop cultural, which the narrator imagines providing in response to future interviews: “The Tailor of Gloucester, Harold Nicolson, Richard Pryor, Seuss's If I Ran the Circus, Edmund Burke, Nabokov, Boswell, Tintin, Iris Murdoch, Hopkins, Michael Polanyi, Henry and William James, John Candy, you know, the usual crowd” (67). One could add Proust to the stew, as well as the effervescent excesses of Stanley Elkin, who makes what he refers to in Boswell as “an ethic of filled drawers”;²⁰ Frederick Exley, who will also be noted in U and I for his ruthlessly funny confessional fictions A Fan's Notes and Pages from a Cold Island; progressive rock groups like Talking Heads; and, it would be fair to say, the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Any assessment of the achievement of Nicholson Baker must necessarily be a work in progress, for it traces the arc of an ongoing career, but his critical impact and popular appeal indicate a lasting presence. Yet in spite of the inventiveness and unpredictability of his writings to date, Baker has already crafted a signature style, which unites a jeweler's intensity of focus, a forensic scientist's ferocity for detail, a monk's humble delight in private discipline, and a satirist's sensitivity to oddities and errors. Best of all, despite the width and depth of his learning, Baker is not the starched, dry lecturer who sacrifices interest for information. It is useful to think of him as a sensual lexicographer or as an archaeologist foraging at the cellular level of contemporary culture. He is as alive to nuance and the pleasure principle as anyone writing today. There may be a handful of contemporary American novelists of his generation, including Richard Powers or William T. Vollman, who can compete with his intellectual wattage, but the great swaths they cut cannot be mistaken for Baker's swift, intricate incisions.

Baker's fictions and essays plumb the inner configurations to deliver itemized awe. While the assault of the culture's ephemeral spectacles goes on, conditioning viewers with brief blurs of fame, news flashes, and instant gratifications, Nicholson Baker slows sensation down. Wherever his attentions descend, they return unexpected, and unexpectedly precious, dividends.

Notes

1. Thomas Mallon, “The Fabulous Baker Boy,” Gentleman's Quarterly May 1996, 82.

2. Nicholson Baker, quoted in “Lifting Up the Madonna,” interview with Laura Miller, Salon 10 (23 March-5 April 1996), on-line, Internet (www.salon1999.com/10/bookfront/salon.html), n.p.

3. Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things (New York: Knopf, 1993), ix.

4. James Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” Vanity Fair January 1992, 120, 121.

5. David Shields, “Ludd's Labors Lost,” Voice Literary Supplement May 1996, 8.

6. Jorie Graham, “Erosion,” Erosion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 56.

7. Nicholson Baker, quoted in Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” 125.

8. Steven Millhauser, “The Fascination of the Miniature,” Grand Street Summer 1983, 135.

9. Millhauser, “The Fascination of the Miniature,” 129.

10. Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (New York: Crown, 1996), 275.

11. Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story (New York: Random House, 1991), 73.

12. Nicholson Baker, “Exchange: Pennies for Thoughts,” Atlantic April 1991, 20.

13. Baker, U and I, 28.

14. Baker, quoted in Kaplan, “Hot Vox,” 121.

15. Nicholson Baker, quoted in interview with Michelle M. Motowski, “Nicholson Baker,” Contemporary Authors 135 (1992): 21.

16. Lawrence Norfolk, “Hymn to the Happy Medium,” rev. of Room Temperature, Times Literary Supplement 27 April 1990, 456.

17. Nicholson Baker, quoted in “Lifting Up the Madonna.”

18. Nicholson Baker, quoted in interview with Alexander Laurence and David Strauss, Alternative-X (1994), on-line, Internet (www.alt-x.com/interviews/nicholson.baker.html).

19. See Peter Evans, Tiny Curlicues: Nicholson Baker's “Room Temperature,” Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, no. 37 (Ichigaya, Japan: Hosei University, 1991) which delineates the tributes to Nabokov's love of arcane studies and diction (16-20).

20. Stanley Elkin, Boswell (New York: Random House, 1964), 203.