Baker, Nicholson 1957-

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BAKER, Nicholson 1957-

PERSONAL: Born January 7, 1957, in New York, NY; son of Douglas and Ann (Nicholson) Baker; married Margaret Brentano, 1985; children: Alice, Elias. Education: Attended Eastman School of Music, 1974-75; Haverford College, B.A., 1980.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Melanie Jackson Agency, 915 Broadway, Suite 1009, New York, NY 10010.

CAREER: Worked variously as an oil analyst, word processor, and technical writer, 1980-87; full-time writer, 1987—. Founder of the nonprofit organization American Newspaper Repository.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Book Critics Circle Award, 2001, for Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Mezzanine, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1988.

Room Temperature, Grove Weidenfeld (New York, NY), 1990.

Vox, Random House (New York, NY), 1992.

The Fermata, Random House (New York, NY), 1994.

The Everlasting Story of Nory, Random House (New York, NY), 1998.

A Box of Matches, Random House (New York, NY), 2003.

Checkpoint, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Vintage Baker, Vintage Book (New York, NY), 2004.

NONFICTION

U and I, Random House (New York, NY), 1991.

The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Random House (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor of stories and essays to periodicals, including Atlantic and New Yorker.

SIDELIGHTS: Critically acclaimed author Nicholson Baker is known for writing comic novels that are essentially plotless. A Baker book, in fact, can consist almost entirely of digression, with virtually no plot, action, dialogue, or characterization. This offbeat approach comes naturally to Baker, although at first he tried to make his work more conventional. "I had a whole elaborate plot worked out with [my first novel]," the author told Harry Ritchie in the London Sunday Times. "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. I felt enormous relief that I didn't have to pretend to do something that didn't interest me."

Baker's first novel, The Mezzanine, celebrates the trivia of daily existence. The slim volume revolves around the largely uneventful lunch hour of the protagonist, a young office worker named Howie who uses his lunch break to buy shoelaces, eat a hot dog and a cookie, and read from second-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. "What Howie observes of his equally worn laces—it made the variables of private life seem suddenly graspable and law-abiding—could also be said of Baker's technique," David Dowling wrote in Contemporary Novelists. "Whether it is a record player arm, a doorknob, a straw or a shoelace, his disquisitions make one feel the private life matters, can have logic, and even beauty. Sometimes his examinations have the aridity of a consumer magazine report, but mostly Baker surprises and charms with images which are both ingenious metaphors for the emotional subject, and exact in their own right."

Robert Taylor of the Boston Globe noted, "The plot might in summary sound either banal or absurdist, when in fact it is a constant delight." The substance of the novel is derived not from the plot, but from the inner workings of Howie's mind. Through Baker's fascination with minutiae, Howie muses about a myriad of everyday objects and occurrences, including how paper milk cartons replaced glass milk bottles, the miracle of perforation (to which he gives a loving tribute), and the nature of plastic straws, vending machines, paper-towel dispensers, and popcorn poppers.

"What makes Howie's ruminations so mesmerizing is the razor-sharp insight and droll humor with which Mr. Baker illuminates the unseen world," said New York Times Book Review contributor Robert Plunket. Barbara Fisher Williamson, writing in Washington Post Book World, called Baker's descriptions of ordinary items "verbal ballets of incredible delicacy." Brad Leithauser, in the New York Review of Books, cited Baker's precision by quoting a passage from The Mezzanine: "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." Though some critics considered Baker's technique a gimmick, many praised his mastery of observation. Plunket said The Mezzanine's "135 pages probably contain more insight into life as we live it than anything currently on the best-seller lists." Williamson called it "the most daring and thrilling first novel since John Barth's 1955 The Floating Opera, which it somewhat resembles. It is innovative and original. . . . It is wonderfully readable, in fact gripping, with surprising bursts of recognition, humor, and wonder."

Baker wrote Room Temperature similarly. Again, the book contains little plot: Mike, the narrator, is feeding his new baby girl. The book takes place during the twenty minutes necessary for the baby, nicknamed the Bug, to finish her bottle. During this time Mike's ruminations include nose-picking, breathing, the comma, childhood, love, and eating peanut butter straight from the jar, digressions that again display what Washington Post writer Michael Dirda called a "flair for noticing what we all know but don't quite remember or acknowledge." According to Dirda, Room Temperature is like The Mezzanine in "its microscopic approach to ordinary life, but is altogether more lighthearted, airier." The phrase "room temperature" describes the feel of the baby's bottle and also Mike's world, that of warm daydreams. Comparing Room Temperature with The Mezzanine, Times Literary Supplement contributor Lawrence Norfolk said the meanderings in Room Temperature are "brought closer to the meditations of the character, becoming credible as part of Mike's psychology rather than his author's cleverness. Not word-play but thought-process." Taylor called the work "a big novel unfolding out of small devices so subtly one is scarcely aware of its magnitude until the final page." Dirda described the book as "less sheerly innovative than its more clinical, austere predecessor, . . . yet nevertheless a real charmer, a breath of fresh air, a show-stopping coloratura aria made up of the quirks of memory and the quiddities of daily life."

Critics have compared Baker's writing, noted for its warmth and power of observation, to that of novelist John Updike, who plays a supporting role in Baker's first nonfiction book, U and I. This tribute to Updike is experimental and deliberately nonacademic; early in the book, Baker surprisingly says he has read less than half of Updike's work and does not intend to read any more until he has finished writing U and I. Calling his method "memory criticism," Baker strives to discover how Updike truly influenced him only through what he spontaneously remembers and forgets about the author and his work. Lewis Burke Frumkes, in the New York Times Book Review, described U and I as a "fascinating if unsteady journey of literary analysis and self-discovery, shuttling back and forth between soaring, manic moments of unabashed hero-worship and sober, even critical appraisals of the man who, he says, has haunted, inspired and influenced him beyond any other." Times Literary Supplement contributor Galen Strawson, however, maintained that "the I engulfs the U. In the end, U and I is almost all about Baker." Strawson added, "[Baker] has very little of interest to say about Updike." But according to Chicago Tribune Books critic Joseph Coates, U and I contains "a host of offhand, and sometimes startling, critical observations," making it a "provocative and compelling book for any serious reader of contemporary fiction."

Baker returned to fiction with Vox and The Fermata. In Vox, an Economist reviewer wrote, Baker "turns his hand to something that should be really interesting: sex." The story centers on one phone call between a man and a woman. The two characters in this short novel both call an adult party line, then decide to converse privately, a dialogue Time's Richard Stengel called "the ultimate in '90s safe sex: voices, not hands, caress each other." Readers learn very little about the characters, at least physically, as the book focuses only on what these two strangers say to one another. The conversation is sexual in nature, with some critics referring to this novel as soft porn. But Stengel said to call it just that would miss the point. Stengel preferred to call Vox "an anatomically correct, technology-assisted love story." He also praised Baker for his obvious love relationship with language. "Vox is as much about wordplay," Stengel wrote, "as it is about foreplay."

In The Fermata, Baker continues with a discussion of sexuality. In a Seattle Times review, Michael Upchurch described this novel as "an X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves 'Vox' seeming like mere fiber-optic foreplay." The word fermata refers to a so-called fold in time, which the book's socially shy protagonist, Arno Strine, uses to stop time and thus freeze the motions of other characters. Dowling, writing in Contemporary Novelists, found the author "freezing" spots of time "so that they, or more precisely those [spots] on the bodies of women in the vicinity, can be examined minutely. The device gives the text its typical baroque lassitude, but the hero, despite protesting: 'My curiosity has more love and tolerance in it than other men's does,' comes across as smug, and his eroticism as unpleasantly voyeuristic." Dowling further faults the narrative for taking an "adolescent male fantasy" approach, but adds that despite these flaws, The Fermata "contains some exquisite apercus such as . . . the color of those older Tercels and Civics whose paint had consequently oxidized into state of frescoesque, unsaturated beauty, like M&Ms sucked for a minute and spit back out into the palm for study." However, Upchurch said the novel had an undeniable "warmth and generous spirit," and concluded that The Fermata confirmed Baker "as one of our most gifted and original writers."

The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber is a collection of essays under the categories of "Thought," "Machinery," "Reading," "Mixed," "Library Science," and "Lumber." Baker examines life's simplicities such as toenail clippers and the all-but-forgotten library index card catalog. Some critics said this collection again exemplifies Baker's passion for language. Jennie Yabroff, writing for the online publication Hot Wired, compared Baker to "a hip lit professor who seduces his class into reading deconstructivist criticism by referencing MTV." He "spices up his readings with outrageous metaphors," Yabroff added, to keep his readers involved. Sven Birkerts, for the New York Times Book Review, said Baker settles on "something commonplace yet structurally intricate [such as the nail clippers] and then, with magnified detailing and sly humor" proceeds to take his readers into "hitherto unimagined panoramas." His "incessantly effervescing prose," Birkerts wrote, "tunes" the reader's mind.

Baker returned to fiction with his novel The Everlasting Story of Nory, which relates the childhood story of Eleanor Winslow, a nine-year-old American girl who attends school in England. Again, Baker manipulates language to set the story apart. Baker demonstrates through his young protagonist, Eric Lorberer wrote in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, "how both the scientist and the surrealist inhabit a child's consciousness." Nory entices the reader with her self-defined concepts of the world, her stories, and her own peculiar language in her attempt to find meaning. Carol Herman, in Insight on the News, refers to Nory as a literary gem that "presents the fears, dreams and ideas of a prepubescent schoolgirl whose preoccupations are more innocent than erotic and as such all the more stunning." Though Baker has a young daughter, Herman found that the author did not write from a father's perspective. Rather, he let Nory speak for herself.

Baker stirred much controversy with Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, in which he rails against the commonplace destruction of index-card files, newspapers, and other paper documents at many modern libraries across the United States. Although he admits computerized files may be more efficient, the demise of the actual paper products, especially the newspapers and old books, saddens him. According to Margaria Fichtner, writing for the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, Baker blames the loss of "at least 925,000 books," many rare, on modernization. Baker has invested his own money in a non-profit organization, American Newspaper Repository, through which he attempts to preserve as many old newspapers as he can. In his book, he scolds many large libraries, including the Library of Congress, for their practices. Librarians, such as Francine Fialkoff in her Library Journal article, defended such library modernization practices; she said Baker just "doesn't get it." Though Fialkoff bemoaned Baker's negativity, other critics praised him for publicizing the loss of original publications. Baker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his effort.

In an interview, Baker told Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr of National Public Radio that he wrote A Box of Matches "only by the light of a fire," because he did not want "to let incandescent light intrude on my consciousness." This 2003 novel focuses on the little things. "I want the books to be about things that you don't notice when you're noticing them," Baker told Freymann-Weyr. Protagonist Emmett, a forty-four-year-old married man, lights a fire every morning, using only one match each time, then sits down to think. He will perform this ceremony for thirty-three days, one day for every match in a box. Emmett, wrote Walter Kirn in the New York Times Book Review, is "something of a homebody Thoreau, camped out in the Walden Woods of his own living room." The book captures Emmett's often-funny ruminations. "There is gentle humor at work here," Michael Upchurch wrote for the Seattle Times. Some critics have described the humor as melancholic. Someone going through a mid-life crisis worries a lot and reminisces. "There's nothing else like" A Box of Matches, wrote Upchurch, except another book by Baker. David Gates in Newsweek praised A Box of Matches as one of Baker's most "satisfying" books yet.

Baker attracted attention with his next book, Checkpoint, which is made up completely of a conversation between two old high school friends, one of whom, Jay, wants to kill President George Bush because of the war in Iraq. The other friend, Ben, tries to talk him out of it. The two friends have not seen each other for many years, and Ben is successful while Jay has lost his job and has become obsessed with his assassination plots. Although Baker has Jay base much of his argument for assassination on real facts about the war, his ideas for completing the task tend to be fantastical. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Ron Charles noted, "Jay's argument swings wildly from an insane rant to caustic political analysis. Though most of his weapons—Bush-seeking bullets and a giant uranium ball—are clearly delusional, his final plan is pedestrian and deadly. While largely agreeing with his friend's recitation of Bush's sins, [Ben] struggles to calm [Jay] and get him to abandon his illegal plot." Writing a month before the book appeared in stores, Charles noted that the book could be seen as a threat and lead to Baker being investigated but that the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI would not comment on whether or not Baker was of interest to them. As for Baker, he told David Gates of Newsweek, "I don't think I should stand behind any part of the book. These are the miseries, these are the doubts that you have. I had Jay say them as forcefully as I could, because I think the left has to think about this a little more carefully. And it also seemed like, if I'm going to get myself in trouble in a book, why shouldn't I just be indiscriminately outrageous?"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Saltzman, Arthur M., Understanding Nicholson Baker, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1999.

PERIODICALS

America, June 4, 2001, Peter Heinegg, "Bureaucrat, Spare That Book!," p. 27.

Atlantic, January-February, 2003, Thomas Mallon, review of A Box of Matches, pp. 190-193.

Booklist, March 15, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of The Everlasting Story of Nory, pp. 1178-1179; February 15, 2001, Mark Knoblauch, review of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, p. 1087.

Boston Globe, December 14, 1988, Robert Taylor, review of The Mezzanine; April 18, 1990, Robert Taylor, review of Room Temperature, p. 70.

Christian Science Monitor, July 30, 2004, Ron Charles, "It's Only Fiction, but Is It Legal?," p. 11.

Columbia Journalism Review, July, 2001, James Boylan, review of Double Fold, p. 67.

Economist, April 4, 1992, review of Vox, p. 109.

Entertainment Weekly, March 11, 1994, p. 28; January 17, 2002, Troy Patterson, review of A Box of Matches, p. 85.

Esquire, February, 1994, p. 76.

Guardian (Manchester, England), April 5, 1990.

Harper's Bazaar, February, 1994, p. 84.

Independent (London, England), September 6, 1989.

Insight on the News, August 31, 1998, Carol Herman, review of The Everlasting Story of Nory, p. 36.

Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, April 11, 2001, Margaria Fichtner, "Writer's Anger Is Painful, and His Book about Library Discards Is Disturbing," p. K4872.

Library Journal, January, 1994, p. 157; May 1, 1998, Kay Hogan, review of The Everlasting Story of Nory, p. 135; May 15, 2001, Francine Fialkoff, "Baker's Book Is Half-Baked," p. 102; June 15, 2002, "Baker-Inspired Backlash at LC?," p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1990.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 1, 1990, p. 6.

Micrographics and Hybrid Imaging Systems Newsletter, September, 2001, "Fighting Back against the Double Scold," p. 7.

New Republic, May 28, 2001, Alexander Star, review of Double Fold, p. 38.

New Statesman, April 6, 1990, p. 38.

Newsweek, April 16, 2001, Malcolm Jones, "Paper Tiger: Taking Librarians to Task," p. 57; January 13, 2002, David Gates, review of A Box of Matches, p. 60; August 9, 2004, David Gates, "Target," p. 50.

New York Review of Books, August 17, 1989, Brad Leithauser, review of The Mezzanine, p. 15; April 7, 1994, p. 14; June 20, 1996, p. 65.

New York Times Book Review, February 5, 1989, p. 9; April 15, 1990, p. 17; April 14, 1991, Lewis Burke Frumkes, review of U and I, p. 12; February 13, 1994, p. 13; April 14, 1996, Sven Birkerts, review of The Size of Thoughts, p. 12; February 2, 2003, Walter Kirn, review of A Box of Matches, pp. 7, 10.

Observer (London, England), April 1, 1990.

Philadelphia Inquirer, April 15, 1990.

Publishers Weekly, November 29, 1993, p. 52; February 7, 1994, p. 42; March 30, 1998, review of The Everlasting Story of Nory, p. 66; April 2, 2001, review of Double Fold, p. 53; October 14, 2002, Jeff Zaleski, review of A Box of Matches, p. 62.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1998, Eric Lorberer, review of The Everlasting Story of Nory, p. 242.

San Francisco Chronicle, July 8, 1990, p. 3.

San Jose Mercury News, March 18, 1990, p. 20.

Searcher, June, 2001, review of Double Fold, p. 6.

Seattle Times, February 27, 1994, Michael Upchurch, review of The Fermata, p. F2; January 12, 2003, Michael Upchurch, review of A Box of Matches, p. L10.

Sunday Times (London, England), September 3, 1989; April 8, 1990, p. H8.

Time, February 3, 1992, Richard Stengel, "1-900-Aural Sex," review of Vox, p. 59; May 11, 1998, R. Z. Sheppard, review of The Everlasting Story of Nory, p. 80.

Times Literary Supplement, September 15, 1989, p. 998; April 27, 1990, Lawrence Norfolk, review of Room Temperature, p. 456; April 19, 1991, Galen Strawson, review of U and I, p. 20; April 5, 1996, p. 22.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 28, 1991, Joseph Coates, review of U and I, p. 7.

Washington Post, May 7, 1990, Michael Dirda, review of Room Temperature, p. C3; September 23, 1990.

Washington Post Book World, November 13, 1988, Barbara Fisher Williamson, review of The Mezzanine, p. 7.

Wilson Quarterly, summer, 2001, James Morris, review of "Double Fold," p. 125.