Volume 39, Number 7 · April 9, 1992
Secret Histories
By Robert Towers
Vox
by Nicholson Baker
Random House, 165 pp., $15.00
A Case of Curiosities
by Allen Kurzweil
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 358 pp., $19.95
Nicholson Baker is a fiction writer of great charm who may or may not be a novelist. Certainly narrative is the least of his concerns. In The Mezzanine (1988) the 'action' begins with the narrator's entrance into the office building where he works and concludes with his ascent of the escalator to the mezzanine floor. The interval between these two events occupies almost as many pages (135) as Laurence Sterne devoted to the digression-filled gap between the conception and the birth of Tristram Shandy. For Baker, like Sterne, the soul, and indeed the body, of the novel consists of digressions—digressions which in Baker's case are augmented by footnotes that can run for as many as four pages at a time of dense type. In The Mezzanine and in his next book, Room Temperature (1990), in which the 'plot' consists of the narrator's giving a bottle to his six-month-old daughter, the digressions are largely devoted to an examination, under high magnification, of the trivia of ordinary life: the abrasion-rate of shoelaces; the switch from paper to plastic drinking straws and the disconcerting buoyancy of the latter; the superiority, economic and otherwise, of paper-towel dispensers over warm-air blowers in the office men's room; the matching and mixing of paint colors; the shape, function, and history of the comma; the limits of marital intimacy as they apply to such matters as nose-picking and defecation.
Review, 2438 words
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