Volume 50, Number 7 · May 1, 2003
A Nice Little Visit
By Cathleen Schine
A Box of Matches
by Nicholson Baker
Random House, 178 pp., $19.95
A Box of Matches begins with the narrator's friendly but unapologetically idiosyncratic announcement: 'Good morning, it's January and it's 4:17 a.m., and I'm going to sit here in the dark.' That is the basic plot of Nicholson Baker's new novel. Each morning, the narrator, a forty-four-year-old man, gets up before dawn and lights the fire, greeting his readers with a cheery 'Good morning,' telling us the time, then easing into what seems, at first glance, to be what my grandmother used to call 'a nice little visit,' but turns out to be the story of a middle-aged man undergoing the opposite of a mid-life crisis. He faces the passage of time by observing his own contentment with gratitude and obsessive detail. Baker describes a mid-life that is ordinary, days that follow other similar days and precede more of the same, days that come and go; and it is that miracle of constant change and continuity, of the fullness of the ephemeral, that this extraordinary little book celebrates with such inspired tenderness.
Review, 1727 words
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