The Mezzanine

After reading Checkpoint, I couldn't resist finding out how Nicholson Baker's books are when he isn't contemplating the death of a president. The Mezzanine demonstrates why reviewers were willing to pay so much attention to his more recent work. For 135 pages, Baker creates compelling reading from an almost plotless situation; in the most literal sense, the entire book transpires as the narrator rides an escalator from one floor to another. But in that ride he makes observations about, well, everything: drug stores, mens room etiquette, shoelaces, milk in bottles vs. milk in cartons, cigarettes being thrown from car windows, and, in an overwhelmingly ironic footnote near the end of a footnote-filled book, footnotes. In making these observations, the narrator captures the life of an office worker at the start of a career, wondering about why the company functions as it does and about the meaning of his place within the company, but also--and more importantly--about the whole host of mundane details that surround this world of work and the life for which that work provides subsistence. You'll shake your head a few pages in, yes, but soon you'll be nodding, agreeing with observations that are so familiar, so obvious, that you can't believe you've never made them until now. A bit dated by the advent of e-mail and the internet--no one sends paper memos back and forth, removing and reinserting staples in an endless loop from department to department, when they can simply CC: the involved parties--this is nevertheless a classic.

Fortunately I didn't give up reading this-novel? before I grasped its true point. This let me enjoy its uniqueness. Surely not a novel. But no, not even "creative non-fiction." Instead, a study in Baker's own unique vision.. I'll label it "The Aesthetics of the Everyday Technological." The, ah, novel is prose-poetry. A hymn to the crafted artfulness of mundane objects, processes, experiences...The plot is minimal. He ascends an escalator one day at work. Big deal. But the plot is only the line on which he strings his beads of close observations of the "usual." It's androgynous; he marries assertive technical description of objects and processes, with sensuous flowing aesthetic experience of them.So herein he gives us enlarged glimpses of soda straws; ice cube trays; perforations; paper vs. hot-air hand-drying in lavatories; paper vs. plastic coin rolls; and more. Oh, and a footnote about footnotes.Plus he can give us a salvo of juicy examples to illustrate experiences. (1) Disruptions of the expected: as in missing a top step, pulling out a Band-Aid thread, drawing a piece of tape, trying to staple a thick memo. (2) "How beautiful graded surfaces are as a class:" as in not only the escalator grooves, but also "the grooves on the underside of the blue whale that must render some hydrodynamic or thermal advantage; the grooves left by a rake in loose soil or by a harrow in a field; the single groove that a skater's blade makes in the ice; the grooves in socks that allow them to stretch, and in corduroy, down which you can run your ballpoint pen; the grooves of records." (3) The "renewing of newness"-as in "whether it was the appearance of another identical Pez tablet at the neck of the plastic Pez elevator... or the sight of one parachutist after another standing for a second in the door of an airplane before he jumped... or the rolling-into-position of a pinball after the previous one had escaped your flippers... or one sticky disc of sliced banana displaced from its spot on the knife over the cereal bowl by its successor... or the uprising of yet another step of the escalator... "So Baker revels in the aesthetics of the technical. But is all this decoration, art? Worse, is it even mature pleasure? Baker says that this renewing of newness "was for me then, and is still, one of the greatest sources of happiness that the man-made world can offer."But isn't this delight in the diurnal, sort of minor, even decadent? Isn't it even what's called "camp"? (In the sense of giving more attention to the less important than is warranted?) During a deep study of coffee mugs, including corny old-fashioned ones, Baker denies this. He says he theoretically disapproves of camp, but then camp "has long been superseded and in the limbo of its demotions can be glibly disparaged."But hold it. Later on, he notes that when you quit a job, things reverse. Big crises recede ("the problems you were paid to solve collapse"), and instead, you remember the small surfaces. The

The undeniable appeal of "The Mezzanine" is almost impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't read it. Try it, sometime; tell someone "It's a 150 page book about what a guy thinks about as he goes up the escalator to his office." Not exactly an easy sell.But it's a fantastic read. This is not just "some guy" who's sharing his interior monologue, it's a guy written by Nicholson Baker. That means he's funnier than you, smarter than you, and his meandering observations are bound to be entertaining. His neuroses are interesting, his thought processes bizarre (but no more bizarre than mine or yours).So if the "plot" of the novel is "a guy goes up an escalator and sits down in his office," what is the novel about? It's about all of the tiny little thoughts that fly through our head, day in and day out. This is significant because these "unimportant" thoughts are our *lives.* All of these idle wonderings are what make us human and what makes each person an individual.So walk a mile in Baker's head, and know him and yourself better.

The narrator of this novel is nuts.... but don't let that stop you from reading this wonderful book! Just be aware it might take you a little while to get comfortable with the quirky way the protatgonist has of thinking about things. After the first ten pages I was laughing out loud but after thirty pages I almost put it down because I didn't know if I could keep handling 2 page footnotes on, say, the physics of what makes shoelaces break! But I stayed with the book and I was glad I did. It is a pleasure to keep up with the narrator as his mind meanders through the minutiae of everyday life. He has a childlike curiosity about the world. Everything fascinates him! He is a lucky man because he enjoys understanding the little things in life and life presents a neverending supply of little things to think about. This is a guy who will never be bored! I also get the feeling that this is the way the mind of a really good scientist works, analytical but childlike as well. Want to know if you will like this book? Here is one sentence, expressing the narrator's admiration for the way the old-style packages of Jiffy Pop popcorn were engineered: "Jiffy Pop was the finest example of the whole aluminous genre: a package inspired by the fry pan whose handle is also the hook it hangs from in the store, with a maelstrom of swirled foil on the top that, subjected to the subversion of the exploding kernels, first by the direct collisions of discrete corns and then in a general indirect uplift of the total volume of potentiated cellulose, gradually unfurls its dome, turning slowly as it despirals itself, providing in its gradual expansion a graspable, slow-motion version of what each erumpent particle of corn is undergoing invisibly and instantaneously beneath it." Whoooh! I can see where this book would be the type of thing you either love or hate, so if the above sentence made you squirm, stay away. But if a smile emerged while you read it I think you will enjoy "The Mezzanine" as much as I did.

I've wondered that every Christmas for most of my life. It's a jolly song about "tidings of comfort and joy" that sounds, due to the minor key, like it should be on the Schindler's List soundtrack. How can Nicholson Baker have known? I've never been inspired to write an on-line review, despite having read many books within the past few years that I've judged to be excellent. This book, however, has affected me like none other that I can remember. It's the kind of book that you will either WORSHIP or DETEST. I don't think there can be any in between. You either get why it's pure genius, or you don't. This book is hysterical in a supremely intelligent way. One other reviewer compared it to Seinfeld. It's like Seinfeld with the intelligence factor cranked up to a thousand, and the subject matter magnified by a million. I've never read anything more fascinating and truly gripping. Baker has a way of describing things so eloquently and differently, that I often thought, "What on earth does he mean by--" just as the beautiful revealing moment occurred and I got it. For example, a sentence from p. 97: "I polished the lenses [of his glasses] with the fifth paper towel, making bribe-me, bribe-me finger motions over the two curved surfaces until they were dry." Those four words, "bribe-me, bribe-me" describe perfectly the motion that most of us undertake several times a day. Has anyone in the history of the world ever described that act in such a succint, clever way? I doubt it. Poetry. Read it immediately, but savor it.