Volume 51, Number 17 · November 4, 2004
Unanswered Prayer
By Lorrie Moore
Checkpoint
by Nicholson Baker
Knopf, 115 pp., $15.95
Whatever serious subject the novelist Nicholson Baker explores, we must never forget that he is also being at least a little funny. Fond of the brisk, improvisatory miniature and heir to the cerebral comedy of Donald Barthelme, he still can seem a little misunderstood by those who would read any of his fiction as a grinding axe. Baker is not, as Leon Wieseltier suggested recently in a review of Baker's new novel, Checkpoint, in The New York Times Book Review, an attention-seeker, participating in 'the politics of the sewer.'[*] (Much of Baker's work is quiet to the point of prayer: his last novel, A Box of Matches, about a middle-aged man getting up every day before sunrise, reads like a prose poem to fire and dawn.) And although Baker is often interested in talk, and even wild talk, as Wieseltier correctly notes (Baker's most famous novel, Vox, is about phone sex), he has this in common with most of the writers who ever lived.
Review, 1458 words
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