[In the following review, Lorberer applauds The Everlasting Story of Nory for its vivid portrayal of the thoughts and internal feelings of Nory, its nine-year-old protagonist.]

Nicholson Baker, well-known for his phone-sex novel Vox and his voyeuristic fantasy The Fermata, here attempts what in some ways might be his most risky book yet. The Everlasting Story of Nory depicts a year in the life of a nine-year-old American girl attending school in England; its quiet, pastoral tone is more evocative of children's authors such as Robert McCloskey (whose Make Way for Ducklings is cited early on) than of the famed Anonymous. Yet Nory rigorously avoids the cliches of both the innocent childhood remembrance and the darker coming-of-age story, instead chronicling its young protagonist's chaotic thoughts and internal world at the age she is now. This is Baker's forte, of course; as in all his novels, which stretch and pull a single moment of time like taffy. Nory offers an absurdly detailed glimpse of the present, thus showing it to be rich and strange in its very ordinariness.

Baker pulls this off not through plot (of which there is virtually none here) but through his attention to language. While simple enough to be believable coming from a nine-year-old girl, Nory's verbal dexterity shows how both the scientist and the surrealist inhabit a child's consciousness. The book tumbles with hilarious self-explained concepts, self-defined words, self-told stories—in short, with self. As an intriguing foil to Nory's struggle to make meaning, Baker offers the background character of her younger brother Littleguy; his linguistic repertoire of dump trucks and bulldozers serves to remind us that “his head was still basically a construction site.” Although puzzlingly scattershot at first, and verging on sentimentality throughout, Baker's latest novel rewards the reader who sticks with it with an acutely sculpted prose that offers sheer and unabashed delight.