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Room Temperature
A story in which the author examines the little details of home life. The action takes place in the moments before, during and after the feeding of Bug, the baby. Nicholson Baker is the author of Vox, The Mezzanine, The Fermata, U & I and Thoughts.
116 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 1990
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About the author
Nicholson Baker
37 books963 followersNicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in Manhattan in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. He has published sixteen books--including The Mezzanine (1988), U and I (1991), Human Smoke (2008), The Anthologist (2009), and Substitute (2016)--and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays. He has received a National Book Critics Circle award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, the Herman Hesse Prize, and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999, Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano (co-author with Baker of The World on Sunday, 2005), founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save a large collection of U.S. newspapers, including a run of Joseph Pulitzer's influential daily, the New York World. In 2004 the Repository’s holdings became a gift to Duke University. Baker and Brentano have two children; they live on the Penobscot River in Maine.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 127 reviews
December 7, 2013
The fact is a large cadre of klutzes (call them Baker-deniers) consider our man Nicholson to be a lightweight author. An inward bourgeois bore picking fluff from his well-gazed navel. Stephen King is to blame thanks to his ungenerous quote about thumbnail pickings (this coming from a man that publishes his thousand-page turds and seems to be morphing into some freakish wax cyborg creature). Baker’s books are unique and freeing because the man writes about whatever he pleases and has a sincere belief that other people will find his observations and thoughts illuminating and amusing—and we do, mostly. The fact he has taken up writing protest songs when he might otherwise be sinking into lazy old-age proves this man is kick-ass and four times as intelligent and thoughtful as King and his cronies. This was his second novel and began the fine tradition of inventively structured novels making the quotidian comedic, gentle, beautiful, and downright precise. Be a Baker believer.
December 12, 2009
As a writer and a parent, it's hard not to appreciate Room Temperature, Baker's fictionalized essay revolving around a 20-minute episode of rocking his daughter to sleep. It's also not hard to a little put off by it.
Reading it as a parent is a bit like listening to Charles Dobson, in that both seem intent on convincing you how perfect their families are within the bounds of the ideologies they live by. The fact the Dobson comes at it from a fundamentalist Christian angle while Baker follows the code of the educated elite is largely irrelevant; both leave you feeling a bit icky afterwards, knowing you'll NEVER be as a good a parent as they are.
It's obvious Baker loves his wife and child intensely, enough to write multiple pages on how his wife's massive pre- and post-natal ingestion of peanut butter translates into breast milk, which then translates "into the subtle gradients of flushes and blue shadows of my own daughter's face," and then to spend 10 more pages imagining a symphony he wants to write which starts to the thunderous smack of the conductor opening a sealed jar of Skippy. To anyone but him, though, it can't help feeling a bit self-indulgent to think this alone makes for interesting reading.
The writing itself, as with most of Baker's work, reminds me most of Eddie Van Halen's (or better, Steve Vai's) guitar work, in that when reading him (or listening to Van Halen or Vai) you can't really deny you're in the presence of genius, but you also get the feeling that both of them are more interested in showing off their chops than forming a lasting piece of work that an audience can connect to.
This is all to say that I appreciate, even at times like, Room Temperature. But even at 116 pages it's a bit of a slog waiting for pearls of transcendence amidst pages and pages of riffage.
(Let it be known that I wrote this entire review while rocking my own 6-month-old daughter in my lap. She didn't go to sleep.)
Reading it as a parent is a bit like listening to Charles Dobson, in that both seem intent on convincing you how perfect their families are within the bounds of the ideologies they live by. The fact the Dobson comes at it from a fundamentalist Christian angle while Baker follows the code of the educated elite is largely irrelevant; both leave you feeling a bit icky afterwards, knowing you'll NEVER be as a good a parent as they are.
It's obvious Baker loves his wife and child intensely, enough to write multiple pages on how his wife's massive pre- and post-natal ingestion of peanut butter translates into breast milk, which then translates "into the subtle gradients of flushes and blue shadows of my own daughter's face," and then to spend 10 more pages imagining a symphony he wants to write which starts to the thunderous smack of the conductor opening a sealed jar of Skippy. To anyone but him, though, it can't help feeling a bit self-indulgent to think this alone makes for interesting reading.
The writing itself, as with most of Baker's work, reminds me most of Eddie Van Halen's (or better, Steve Vai's) guitar work, in that when reading him (or listening to Van Halen or Vai) you can't really deny you're in the presence of genius, but you also get the feeling that both of them are more interested in showing off their chops than forming a lasting piece of work that an audience can connect to.
This is all to say that I appreciate, even at times like, Room Temperature. But even at 116 pages it's a bit of a slog waiting for pearls of transcendence amidst pages and pages of riffage.
(Let it be known that I wrote this entire review while rocking my own 6-month-old daughter in my lap. She didn't go to sleep.)
June 25, 2016
The Idea of Second Rank Artists, and a Connection Between Similes and Autism
In older art history, artists were ranked first, second, third... this common practice in connoisseurship, in art instruction (in the French Academy) and in earlier 20th century art history. The practice has fallen out of use for obvious reasons -- it has no articulated relation with historical meaning, and it is detached from politics, identity, and context -- but it is implicitly a strong presence in the teaching of art and art history, because it helps determine which artists are taught. The same happens in music and literature.
In practical terms, a second-rank artist is one that doesn't need to be taught or included in a textbook. Such an artist can be pushed out of the curriculum because of lack of space or time. In line with connoisseurial practices, such choices aren't reasoned: they're just made. It can be difficult, therefore, to know why certain artists, writers, or composers aren't in a given textbook or seminar. For me, Nicholson Baker is a good example of the issue. He is, in my reading, a strongly, clearly second-rank author, by which I mean if I had to choose between teaching him and teaching Pynchon, Updike, DeLillo, or Wallace to represent the 1980 and 1990s, I'd reluctantly have to omit Baker. Of course this sounds horrible, but it is the sort of decision that's made every day in classrooms and by editors, and it's hardly a slight to say of Baker that he's solidly second-rank: he'll be there, in every larger anthology and history.
What is it, then, that makes his second-rank status so clear? For me the entire notion of rankings comes up when I am distracted, in my reading, by thinking of the influences that shaped the author's work. (Same for music and visual art.)
Baker's influences
Baker's wonderful book "U and I" gives the most eloquent possible testimony to his permanent state of infatuation with Updike, and to his equally affectionate, but oddly distanced, relation to Nabokov. Both authors are guiding spirits in "Room Temperature" in the literal sense of that expression: I can sometimes see Baker's sense of them guiding his choices of words and turns of phrase. Updike is certainly the inspiration for "Room Temperature's" fidelity to the most commonplace subjects (the book is about the narrator bottle-feeding his infant daughter).
Other voices also speak over Baker's shoulder: DeLillo, Pynchon, Barthelme, and further afield Dickinson, Hopkins, Wordsworth, even Tennyson. For me the most intriguing one -- even though I'm fairly certain this wouldn't have occurred to Baker as he wrote -- is Raymond Roussel, especially the "New Impressions of Africa." Baker's trope of choice is the simile, and his rhetorical device of choice is the anaphora (formulas repeated clause by clause). He strings together similes: this is like this, and like this, and like this. Roussel's poem is the most drastic text I know in this regard: it's pathologically committed to endless, apparently disconnected comparisons. Roussel is present with uncanny exactitude in passages like this, which describes the shape of his baby daughter's nostril:
"The Bug's nostril had the innocent perfection of a Cheerio... a tiny dry clean salty ring, so small, with the odd but functional smallness of the tires on passenger planes, or of the smooth rim around the pistil of the brass pump head you fitted over a tire's stem valve to inflate it..."
And this passage, describing the sound Bug's nostril makes when the air was released:
"...like the sound strong dogs made as they strained at leashes... or the faint, high, sonar-like suffix of sound that the expensive kind of textured rubber balls added to the prosaic bounce of external impact on concrete..." (p. 39).
All this is compulsively detailed and improbable, like Roussel, and despite its faithful attachment to the products of American manufacturing from the 1950s to the 1980s, it's also persistently faintly surreal.
Proust is another presence in "Room Temperature." It may be especially difficult to say useful things about Proust's influence, because it has diffused so widely; he can seem to be present whenever a narrator is deliberate and meditative. But some of Baker's sentences and pages are almost formulaic rehearsals. Here is an especially clear (and successful) one:
"Possibly because I had been hit with the romance of negative spaces so early, I had turned against it, and become impatient with art historical discussions in college that drew attention to the painted light between tree trunks as opposed to the real trunks themselves, and with the overemphasis in science classes on 'paradigm shifts' to the detriment of 'normal science'; but it felt good years later to come back around, as you almost always did eventually, to acquiescing to the partial truth of some overhyped observation--and I was pleased to have returned to an appreciation of negative space not by leafing through a book of Klimt's landscapes or by reading about William James's 'intention of saying a thing,' but by recognizing that it was more truthful to downplay the scribble and focus on the hand-slide in my wife's record of our life." (pp. 20-21)
Proustian formulae: beginning with a conditional; proceeding with two clauses describing a past condition; moving on, past a semicolon, with a reversal or new insight, followed by an abstract formulation ("the partial truth of some overhyped observation"); then onward through several clauses of examples, themselves harmoniously arranged but surprising and insightful in their combinations; and ending with something on the specific, present-tense experience of the narrator. (In this case, about listening to his wife writing a diary.)
These are exact mirrorings, not transformations. The only un-Proustian thing about the sentence I quoted may be the American colloquial "as you almost always did eventually." And the only un-Roussellian thing about Baker's lists is the fact that Baker is sane, so they terminate eventually.
Similes and Autism
Reviewers have liked to say that Baker's similes provoke a "smile of recognition" (that's from an endorsement on the back cover of my copy), and they do, especially for me: he and I are very close in age, and we spent time in the same parts of the States. I am in that respect his ideal reader, because I recognize every description and allusion in the entire book, from stacked checkers to Bic pen ads to individual diagrams in Time-Life books, and including even a science display he describes in Philadelphia, now long gone. But "recognition" doesn't make me especially happy, and I think I seldom smiled. For me, his allusions and similes are at their best when their precision forces their ordinariness into surrealism, or when they build to unexpected insights rather than connecting dots I hadn't seen were linked. But they don't seem often to do either.
Most of the time his preferred similes are to mechanical operations. I'm sure I'm not the first to say there's an autism about Baker's work. It's a mild autism, as they say: manifesting in a preference for mechanical operations. The most interesting autistic-spectrum quality, however, is the way Baker's narrator is always wondering what his wife Patty thinks of things. A general incapacity to understand people's feelings, coupled with an interest in experimenting to find out what people feel, is also part of autism, and it is happily on display throughout the book, most prominently when she saves some inspection papers he found in a pocket, and makes a mobile out of them to entertain Bug. "She'd saved them! She'd made permanent use of them!" -- has special resonance if it's thought of as part of the narrator's ongoing experiments. (p. 15)
From this perspective, too, the many similes and the recognition (the safety) they elicit are like millions of madeleines: they answer Proust's fetishism with a democratic nostalgia, which is nevertheless autistic in its potentially endlessness. Everything, eventually, will become an object of nostalgia: speaking of the latches that still close tray tables on airlines, he writes: "I felt pity and shame for American plane engineers who had failed to see that thirty years of improvements in the on/off switch, the suitcase closure, the cassette ejection system, the umbrella lock, the calculator button.. were demanding that we dig deeper and find some subtler sort of click or even a clickless but convincing thumplet." (p. 46)
The best passage in the book, for me, is one toward the end in which he wonders why he makes a certain breathing sound when he smiles in bed, but not when he's up, and he suddenly concludes with an insight that he prints all in italics. It's homey, ordinary, and domestic, like everything else in the book, but it's also a bit fanatical, a little touched, and that's what makes it different than the many hundreds of other comparisons out of which the thought of the book is painstakingly constructed:
"No, the explanation had to be that smiles became more audible only at bedtime because toothpaste altered the chemical characteristics of one's saliva in such a way that encouraged an unusually loud, sticky effervescence along the gum line." (p. 106.)
In older art history, artists were ranked first, second, third... this common practice in connoisseurship, in art instruction (in the French Academy) and in earlier 20th century art history. The practice has fallen out of use for obvious reasons -- it has no articulated relation with historical meaning, and it is detached from politics, identity, and context -- but it is implicitly a strong presence in the teaching of art and art history, because it helps determine which artists are taught. The same happens in music and literature.
In practical terms, a second-rank artist is one that doesn't need to be taught or included in a textbook. Such an artist can be pushed out of the curriculum because of lack of space or time. In line with connoisseurial practices, such choices aren't reasoned: they're just made. It can be difficult, therefore, to know why certain artists, writers, or composers aren't in a given textbook or seminar. For me, Nicholson Baker is a good example of the issue. He is, in my reading, a strongly, clearly second-rank author, by which I mean if I had to choose between teaching him and teaching Pynchon, Updike, DeLillo, or Wallace to represent the 1980 and 1990s, I'd reluctantly have to omit Baker. Of course this sounds horrible, but it is the sort of decision that's made every day in classrooms and by editors, and it's hardly a slight to say of Baker that he's solidly second-rank: he'll be there, in every larger anthology and history.
What is it, then, that makes his second-rank status so clear? For me the entire notion of rankings comes up when I am distracted, in my reading, by thinking of the influences that shaped the author's work. (Same for music and visual art.)
Baker's influences
Baker's wonderful book "U and I" gives the most eloquent possible testimony to his permanent state of infatuation with Updike, and to his equally affectionate, but oddly distanced, relation to Nabokov. Both authors are guiding spirits in "Room Temperature" in the literal sense of that expression: I can sometimes see Baker's sense of them guiding his choices of words and turns of phrase. Updike is certainly the inspiration for "Room Temperature's" fidelity to the most commonplace subjects (the book is about the narrator bottle-feeding his infant daughter).
Other voices also speak over Baker's shoulder: DeLillo, Pynchon, Barthelme, and further afield Dickinson, Hopkins, Wordsworth, even Tennyson. For me the most intriguing one -- even though I'm fairly certain this wouldn't have occurred to Baker as he wrote -- is Raymond Roussel, especially the "New Impressions of Africa." Baker's trope of choice is the simile, and his rhetorical device of choice is the anaphora (formulas repeated clause by clause). He strings together similes: this is like this, and like this, and like this. Roussel's poem is the most drastic text I know in this regard: it's pathologically committed to endless, apparently disconnected comparisons. Roussel is present with uncanny exactitude in passages like this, which describes the shape of his baby daughter's nostril:
"The Bug's nostril had the innocent perfection of a Cheerio... a tiny dry clean salty ring, so small, with the odd but functional smallness of the tires on passenger planes, or of the smooth rim around the pistil of the brass pump head you fitted over a tire's stem valve to inflate it..."
And this passage, describing the sound Bug's nostril makes when the air was released:
"...like the sound strong dogs made as they strained at leashes... or the faint, high, sonar-like suffix of sound that the expensive kind of textured rubber balls added to the prosaic bounce of external impact on concrete..." (p. 39).
All this is compulsively detailed and improbable, like Roussel, and despite its faithful attachment to the products of American manufacturing from the 1950s to the 1980s, it's also persistently faintly surreal.
Proust is another presence in "Room Temperature." It may be especially difficult to say useful things about Proust's influence, because it has diffused so widely; he can seem to be present whenever a narrator is deliberate and meditative. But some of Baker's sentences and pages are almost formulaic rehearsals. Here is an especially clear (and successful) one:
"Possibly because I had been hit with the romance of negative spaces so early, I had turned against it, and become impatient with art historical discussions in college that drew attention to the painted light between tree trunks as opposed to the real trunks themselves, and with the overemphasis in science classes on 'paradigm shifts' to the detriment of 'normal science'; but it felt good years later to come back around, as you almost always did eventually, to acquiescing to the partial truth of some overhyped observation--and I was pleased to have returned to an appreciation of negative space not by leafing through a book of Klimt's landscapes or by reading about William James's 'intention of saying a thing,' but by recognizing that it was more truthful to downplay the scribble and focus on the hand-slide in my wife's record of our life." (pp. 20-21)
Proustian formulae: beginning with a conditional; proceeding with two clauses describing a past condition; moving on, past a semicolon, with a reversal or new insight, followed by an abstract formulation ("the partial truth of some overhyped observation"); then onward through several clauses of examples, themselves harmoniously arranged but surprising and insightful in their combinations; and ending with something on the specific, present-tense experience of the narrator. (In this case, about listening to his wife writing a diary.)
These are exact mirrorings, not transformations. The only un-Proustian thing about the sentence I quoted may be the American colloquial "as you almost always did eventually." And the only un-Roussellian thing about Baker's lists is the fact that Baker is sane, so they terminate eventually.
Similes and Autism
Reviewers have liked to say that Baker's similes provoke a "smile of recognition" (that's from an endorsement on the back cover of my copy), and they do, especially for me: he and I are very close in age, and we spent time in the same parts of the States. I am in that respect his ideal reader, because I recognize every description and allusion in the entire book, from stacked checkers to Bic pen ads to individual diagrams in Time-Life books, and including even a science display he describes in Philadelphia, now long gone. But "recognition" doesn't make me especially happy, and I think I seldom smiled. For me, his allusions and similes are at their best when their precision forces their ordinariness into surrealism, or when they build to unexpected insights rather than connecting dots I hadn't seen were linked. But they don't seem often to do either.
Most of the time his preferred similes are to mechanical operations. I'm sure I'm not the first to say there's an autism about Baker's work. It's a mild autism, as they say: manifesting in a preference for mechanical operations. The most interesting autistic-spectrum quality, however, is the way Baker's narrator is always wondering what his wife Patty thinks of things. A general incapacity to understand people's feelings, coupled with an interest in experimenting to find out what people feel, is also part of autism, and it is happily on display throughout the book, most prominently when she saves some inspection papers he found in a pocket, and makes a mobile out of them to entertain Bug. "She'd saved them! She'd made permanent use of them!" -- has special resonance if it's thought of as part of the narrator's ongoing experiments. (p. 15)
From this perspective, too, the many similes and the recognition (the safety) they elicit are like millions of madeleines: they answer Proust's fetishism with a democratic nostalgia, which is nevertheless autistic in its potentially endlessness. Everything, eventually, will become an object of nostalgia: speaking of the latches that still close tray tables on airlines, he writes: "I felt pity and shame for American plane engineers who had failed to see that thirty years of improvements in the on/off switch, the suitcase closure, the cassette ejection system, the umbrella lock, the calculator button.. were demanding that we dig deeper and find some subtler sort of click or even a clickless but convincing thumplet." (p. 46)
The best passage in the book, for me, is one toward the end in which he wonders why he makes a certain breathing sound when he smiles in bed, but not when he's up, and he suddenly concludes with an insight that he prints all in italics. It's homey, ordinary, and domestic, like everything else in the book, but it's also a bit fanatical, a little touched, and that's what makes it different than the many hundreds of other comparisons out of which the thought of the book is painstakingly constructed:
"No, the explanation had to be that smiles became more audible only at bedtime because toothpaste altered the chemical characteristics of one's saliva in such a way that encouraged an unusually loud, sticky effervescence along the gum line." (p. 106.)
December 6, 2021
A beautiful, quiet, seriously charming piece of work. The tactics Baker employed in The Mezzanine are this time focused on the domestic realm, in this case a man feeding and rocking his infant daughter. Of course, this is only the launching pad for the author’s many digressions. Baker’s prose is borderline photorealistic, and (at least in these early works) plot takes a back seat to poetic onslaughts of gloriously obsessive detail. But while conventional storytelling and plot are mostly ignored, there is no shortage of human warmth and hilarity on offer here. As pyrotechnic and technically impressive as the writing is, at the end of the day this is still primarily the story of a proud, loving father enjoying a quiet moment alone with his child, it’s just that it happens to be written about in the way only this author could.
Room Temperature is my third book by Nicholson Baker and it’s another winner for me. I’ll definitely be reading more of his work going forward, and this one will definitely be getting a reread (or several).
Highly recommended.
Room Temperature is my third book by Nicholson Baker and it’s another winner for me. I’ll definitely be reading more of his work going forward, and this one will definitely be getting a reread (or several).
Highly recommended.
February 20, 2023
As microscopic about small things as early Baker books generally are, so little surprise there. He packs a lot of studying into his sentences - larded, some part of me wants to say - that is specialized and particular. Is the book interesting? To see the conceit play out and to observe the steadfastness the author shows to completing his self-appointed study of minor matters we take for granted, yes. Occasionally humourous when one reads a truly laboured sentence that might be deliberately so.
November 19, 2011
I almost romantically love Nicholson Baker. Is there anybody else who could describe what you see upon opening a peanut butter jar as "the lunar surface"?! It seems that there must be at least one other such person, but what if NB is literally the ONLY one?
I've complained of other books for using "too many modifiers." And NB slings them almost as much as Jackson Pollock does paint, yet i love his prose. So maybe, for precision's sake, my complaint should've been that in books where the modifiers seem too plentiful, what i really don't like is that too many of them are uninteresting and/or ordinary and/or unenlightening.
Rarely does a writer's word choice activate my visual mind and link it to my linguistic pleasure center. NB seems to manage this rare feat at least once every 5 pages. He's known for his acute observations and i join the throng who say he earns such renown. I submit the following quote from p.4 as a description of how his observations work (emphasis mine): "a tricky lateral sort of comparison, in which the two terms threaten to be insufficiently disparate in some respects for the connection to work properly."
You will not find plot or story in this book, but you will find a lot of character, especially that of the narrator. If you can't abandon expectations of those common novelesque elements, then you'll probably struggle to enjoy this book.
Unless you can simply enjoy the language.
Or if you can appreciate what i think was NB's goal and that i feel are well expressed in the following three excerpts:
I had been trying to reconstruct all the transitions between all the subjects (Bach on the radio, the theory of lift, the possibility of infinite-speed gearboxes, new bicycle designs that took better advantage of the thigh muscles, etc.) that we had talked about since we'd driven off at 6:30 that morning (p18)
...with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected (p41; e.g., the 20min a father spends rocking his 6-month old daughter to sleep)
How could my mother ever have expected us to "draw the inside of a pillow"? Nothing ... could have prepared my sister and me for the impossible mental involution of attempting to imagine one's pencil investigating the poorly lit interior surfaces of one's own pillow (p54; the pillow, of course, being the analog of the narrator's life)
In the end, i felt this was the story of a man coming to grips with his actual mundane life, learning to appreciate the importance of being a husband and a father, and peacefully accepting that he will not achieve the exciting dreams of youth: Mike Beal won't compose a work for the symphony and he won't write a 400-page proslogium on the importance of the comma. Nicholson Baker will write a work that shows how valid Mike Beal's life is nonetheless. (I trust that the irony is not lost on the dreamers and other wannabe novelists out there, especially those who noticed the biographical similarities between narrator and author.)
I've complained of other books for using "too many modifiers." And NB slings them almost as much as Jackson Pollock does paint, yet i love his prose. So maybe, for precision's sake, my complaint should've been that in books where the modifiers seem too plentiful, what i really don't like is that too many of them are uninteresting and/or ordinary and/or unenlightening.
Rarely does a writer's word choice activate my visual mind and link it to my linguistic pleasure center. NB seems to manage this rare feat at least once every 5 pages. He's known for his acute observations and i join the throng who say he earns such renown. I submit the following quote from p.4 as a description of how his observations work (emphasis mine): "a tricky lateral sort of comparison, in which the two terms threaten to be insufficiently disparate in some respects for the connection to work properly."
You will not find plot or story in this book, but you will find a lot of character, especially that of the narrator. If you can't abandon expectations of those common novelesque elements, then you'll probably struggle to enjoy this book.
Unless you can simply enjoy the language.
Or if you can appreciate what i think was NB's goal and that i feel are well expressed in the following three excerpts:
I had been trying to reconstruct all the transitions between all the subjects (Bach on the radio, the theory of lift, the possibility of infinite-speed gearboxes, new bicycle designs that took better advantage of the thigh muscles, etc.) that we had talked about since we'd driven off at 6:30 that morning (p18)
...with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected (p41; e.g., the 20min a father spends rocking his 6-month old daughter to sleep)
How could my mother ever have expected us to "draw the inside of a pillow"? Nothing ... could have prepared my sister and me for the impossible mental involution of attempting to imagine one's pencil investigating the poorly lit interior surfaces of one's own pillow (p54; the pillow, of course, being the analog of the narrator's life)
In the end, i felt this was the story of a man coming to grips with his actual mundane life, learning to appreciate the importance of being a husband and a father, and peacefully accepting that he will not achieve the exciting dreams of youth: Mike Beal won't compose a work for the symphony and he won't write a 400-page proslogium on the importance of the comma. Nicholson Baker will write a work that shows how valid Mike Beal's life is nonetheless. (I trust that the irony is not lost on the dreamers and other wannabe novelists out there, especially those who noticed the biographical similarities between narrator and author.)
July 11, 2021
The thing about Baker is that he often tries to do something a little different, which is both his strength and weakness, over his career he has produced some great work, as well as some absolute stinkers.
This is a really interesting idea, but the problem is that it lacks subtlety and restraint, favouring a deluge of specialist and clunky words which just make him look like he’s tried far too hard to confuse or impress. This was only 116 pages long, but at times it felt like ten times that as you battled, hacked and waded your way through the dense, rambling verbiage.
What worked beautifully well in “Mezzanine” (the predecessor to this), seems to have failed spectacularly in here. Baker’s attention to detail, placing the banal under a microscope would maybe work, if this wasn’t weighed down with such overwrought, pretentious drivel.
October 5, 2013
Not for the faint of heart. Many people have lauded this book for it's rather deep study of the mental meanderings of a father feeding his infant daughter. And, while I found many of the passages very interesting, funny, and clever, and also found much of this pedantic and a sort of pretentious super-intellectual discourse. From musings over several pages about whether his breath could actually affect the movement of a mobile across the room to recollections of incidents in his marriage and in his life, you are obliged to ride in this car no matter where it takes you. Here is an example:
"Even so, when Patty's handwriting paused for a moment that evening soon after Bug was born, and I held in my mind a tiny pen-sound that I felt sure was a comma, I didn't at first think of literary punctuation at all, but of the distant preliterate sight of Mal Green's markings on my horn etudes. The idea of the comma as an oasis of respiration, a point of real as opposed to grammatical breath, of momentary renewal and self-marshaling in the dotty onslaught of sixteenth notes, overlaid itself on my idea of the comma as a unit of simple disjunction in written English. How had we come up with this civilized shape? I wondered. Timidly and respectfully it cupped the sense of a preceding phrase and held it out to us. It recalled the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiraling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas, half-spent tubes of antifungal ointment, falcon or airplane wings in cross section: there was a implied high culture in its asymmetrical tapering swerve that gave it a distinct superiority over the Euclidean austerity of the full point, or period."
And this is just the first half page of an 11 page discourse on the comma. In it, he recalls how he once wanted to write a full dissertation on this form of punctuation, and he verily accomplished that in this chapter. Fortunately, this book is only 116 pages long, or I would have abandoned it long before finishing. Truly, Baker offers insightful and comical moments that I found endearing, but it took some plodding to get there.
There are certainly people who will love this book, and I find no fault in that, but I felt that, if you were considering this read, you should know what you are in for.
"Even so, when Patty's handwriting paused for a moment that evening soon after Bug was born, and I held in my mind a tiny pen-sound that I felt sure was a comma, I didn't at first think of literary punctuation at all, but of the distant preliterate sight of Mal Green's markings on my horn etudes. The idea of the comma as an oasis of respiration, a point of real as opposed to grammatical breath, of momentary renewal and self-marshaling in the dotty onslaught of sixteenth notes, overlaid itself on my idea of the comma as a unit of simple disjunction in written English. How had we come up with this civilized shape? I wondered. Timidly and respectfully it cupped the sense of a preceding phrase and held it out to us. It recalled the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiraling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas, half-spent tubes of antifungal ointment, falcon or airplane wings in cross section: there was a implied high culture in its asymmetrical tapering swerve that gave it a distinct superiority over the Euclidean austerity of the full point, or period."
And this is just the first half page of an 11 page discourse on the comma. In it, he recalls how he once wanted to write a full dissertation on this form of punctuation, and he verily accomplished that in this chapter. Fortunately, this book is only 116 pages long, or I would have abandoned it long before finishing. Truly, Baker offers insightful and comical moments that I found endearing, but it took some plodding to get there.
There are certainly people who will love this book, and I find no fault in that, but I felt that, if you were considering this read, you should know what you are in for.
November 3, 2010
i love the mezzanine so much that i haven't dared to read another baker book since i fell for the mezz about 10 years ago. i stumbled across a cheap used copy of this, his second novel, on a recent work trip to kuala lumpur and decided that it was time for me to delve into other baker (i do very much want to read the anthologist, among other titles), and was rewarded.
following in the verbose, minutiae-focused style of the mezzanine, room temp is a series of short meditations and paranoid musings on the narrator's memories and ponderings and the possible implications on his life from boy to man, his marriage, his daughter. while the narrator is given a different name than that of the narrator in the mezz, they are fully interchangeable, essentially 'the same guy (quite a lot of baker himself, from what i can glean)'. if, like me, you like that guy, that's a great thing. the ramblings on and consideration given to topics such as noses, bathroom visits, fear of the implications of saying something trivial but gross to your significant other, and the guilt associated with stealing from your mother's purse do nothing if not hold up a mirror to the reader's own psyche - whether it matches baker's or not. a reader with the willingness to be entertained in part at his own expense or admission will enjoy the moments-of-humanity-turned-stream-of-consciousness this book.
following in the verbose, minutiae-focused style of the mezzanine, room temp is a series of short meditations and paranoid musings on the narrator's memories and ponderings and the possible implications on his life from boy to man, his marriage, his daughter. while the narrator is given a different name than that of the narrator in the mezz, they are fully interchangeable, essentially 'the same guy (quite a lot of baker himself, from what i can glean)'. if, like me, you like that guy, that's a great thing. the ramblings on and consideration given to topics such as noses, bathroom visits, fear of the implications of saying something trivial but gross to your significant other, and the guilt associated with stealing from your mother's purse do nothing if not hold up a mirror to the reader's own psyche - whether it matches baker's or not. a reader with the willingness to be entertained in part at his own expense or admission will enjoy the moments-of-humanity-turned-stream-of-consciousness this book.
Read
July 15, 2025Couldn’t finish.
An overeducated spiel, written in an inhumane, smarmy, teacher’s pet affect, an exercise in pedantry so needlessly ornate and mind-numbingly uninventive that I believe I am right in calling Baker the James Joyce of the bureaucracy. He purports to show the workings of the mind—but these are not the workings of the mind! These are the workings of a deeply artificial and affected overeducated middle-class mind preoccupied with being “interesting.” He is a nerd who approaches literature with the soulless enthusiasm of the straight-A student who, having been the victim of intense psychological abuse at home, views even the most abject of his professors as vectors of liberating beneficence. The saucer-eyed glimpses he is only too eager to pile on us, of his internal monologue and private life, made me viscerally uncomfortable, and the descriptions he gives us of his “relationship” are so treacly and sexless that how he ever came to conceive a child at all—and how any woman, not to mention census bureau, could have possibly let him—is a mystery to me. Pleasant, lifeless, devoid of edge, devoid of irony, devoid of life. Unintelligent, uncurious, and uninspired. Why he decided to become a writer is beyond me. Like a golden retriever, he would been happy anywhere, doing anything. And surely, wouldn’t his talents have been better used as a border agent for a fascist dictatorship, who smiles at his charges as he confiscates their passports? Good Lord. Nicholson Baker should be ashamed of himself. If I didn’t suspect he’d like it so much I would love to see him eternally condemned in the afterlife to eating his own shit. Fuck this book and fuck him. I found nothing beautiful or meaningful in this book.
An overeducated spiel, written in an inhumane, smarmy, teacher’s pet affect, an exercise in pedantry so needlessly ornate and mind-numbingly uninventive that I believe I am right in calling Baker the James Joyce of the bureaucracy. He purports to show the workings of the mind—but these are not the workings of the mind! These are the workings of a deeply artificial and affected overeducated middle-class mind preoccupied with being “interesting.” He is a nerd who approaches literature with the soulless enthusiasm of the straight-A student who, having been the victim of intense psychological abuse at home, views even the most abject of his professors as vectors of liberating beneficence. The saucer-eyed glimpses he is only too eager to pile on us, of his internal monologue and private life, made me viscerally uncomfortable, and the descriptions he gives us of his “relationship” are so treacly and sexless that how he ever came to conceive a child at all—and how any woman, not to mention census bureau, could have possibly let him—is a mystery to me. Pleasant, lifeless, devoid of edge, devoid of irony, devoid of life. Unintelligent, uncurious, and uninspired. Why he decided to become a writer is beyond me. Like a golden retriever, he would been happy anywhere, doing anything. And surely, wouldn’t his talents have been better used as a border agent for a fascist dictatorship, who smiles at his charges as he confiscates their passports? Good Lord. Nicholson Baker should be ashamed of himself. If I didn’t suspect he’d like it so much I would love to see him eternally condemned in the afterlife to eating his own shit. Fuck this book and fuck him. I found nothing beautiful or meaningful in this book.
February 23, 2020
Wonderful, breath-taking and highly unusual as Baker goes beyond stream-of-consciousness into almost full-on word-association territory, in an attempt to prove the hypothesis that it is possible to extrapolate a person's whole life (history and personality) from 20 minutes of uninterrupted thoughts. This is a lunatic conception, but I was convinced (almost!) so 4.5 stars rounding down to 4.
February 21, 2018
Very short novel (novella?) of 116 pages. I would probably rank this 3.5 stars if possible. This book is cut from the same mold as Baker's The Mezzanine, which I liked better. One problem may be personal to how I read this book--with a break. Given the short length, and the intensely detailed level of observation, I believe I would have enjoyed it better if I had read it straight through.
February 7, 2023
A sweet, but highly digressive, novella about a young father's reflections while caring for his infant daughter over an afternoon.
If relationships, examined through a nested series of convoluted, bordering on self-indulgently erudite, tangents about air pressure and commas interests you— Room Temperature will be right up your alley.
If relationships, examined through a nested series of convoluted, bordering on self-indulgently erudite, tangents about air pressure and commas interests you— Room Temperature will be right up your alley.
December 24, 2019
Nicholson Baker is becoming a favorite — his exhausting descriptions (of the use of commas, of the sound of opening peanut butter jars, of picking noses) are so much fun! An entire novel, and an entire world!, are contained within the 20 minutes needed to give a baby a bottle.
dnf
January 12, 2025dnf @ 24%
This short book contains the rambling thoughts of a father feeding his infant daughter. I was expecting the slow, musing nature of the narrative, but I can't bring myself to slog through the dense prose of an author who chooses words so you will call him 'erudite'.
This short book contains the rambling thoughts of a father feeding his infant daughter. I was expecting the slow, musing nature of the narrative, but I can't bring myself to slog through the dense prose of an author who chooses words so you will call him 'erudite'.
November 30, 2022
Rather lovely detailed stream of consciousness, impressive how naturally it reads like idle mind wandering. I found it very hard to get thru, an embarrassing discovery for a 120-page book — multiple pages without paragraphs scare me, folks!
I did like bottle feeding my baby while reading about this guy bottle feeding his baby, though it proved logistically challenging.
I did like bottle feeding my baby while reading about this guy bottle feeding his baby, though it proved logistically challenging.
September 10, 2025
Put me asleep in Panama City. Some good touchy feely stuff towards the beginning, but then turned into an NB waxfest of knobs and gears and handsome pulses of electricity between wire routes.
March 21, 2020
great descriptions of baby
September 26, 2025
Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker
Nine out of 10
Everything seems to be perfect about this major work, included on The Guardian’s 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list - https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - so short that one is tempted to say ‘piece of cake’, clearly brilliant, with references that cover an immense, overwhelming range – which, anticipating might be quiet the big thing…too clever and magnificent by far for the under signed, alas –from Klimt to William James, from the Doge’s Venetian Palace – now anyway closed with that fucked up Corona Virus, mother fucker you, so again…what is exactly the point of reading about this since it is closed and furthermore …we are all going to die…well, those of us over fifties and men, my wife told me exuberantly are much more likely to go and meet whatever Maker there is in paradise- to Delacroix, Gaudi, Ernest Borgnine – of all people – Tintin no less…
However, along with more familiar characters, writers, paintings, actors, cartoon figures, we have all sorts of people, experts, that do not ring any bell and then those of us who just want to pretend we are educated, erudite and somewhat sophisticated will soon face the panic – as if that malign Covid XIX were not enough – of seeing we get so little of what this obviously brilliant author – but why does he have to know so much and write about it so that we get envious of his knowledge and then stop functioning…when I say we, I mean maybe there are some others who will have issues with reading something oh so challenging as this…
There is pleasure in reading about Palestrina and thinking this is someone that has been present in some books before, ergo it means this Room Temperature confirms the fact that this reader knows even about someone more obscure, who means nothing for a Trump voter for instance – but hey, those people get their ‘information from the guy who thinks Nambia and Tanzaninia are countries and as Seth Myers has hilariously put it, if you tell him about Bangladesh, he would ask you …why „is Ladesh hot? Because he would want to ‘bang’ Ladesh in case you did not get that.
Soon, the joy of getting into the rhythm of the exquisite, ever more sophisticated, intellectual, overwhelming, challenging, provocative, intense, erudite novel is abruptly diminishing and is replaced by an ever increasing sense of ineptitude, incompatibility, and we may think of the quintessential Flow by the co – founder of Positive Psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a fabulous work in which the expert explains the conditions needed to reach the Ultimate state of Bliss, Being in the Zone or Flow, one of which would be to have challenges which meet our skills – in other words, many think that bliss comes from sitting in front of the television – which is so fucked up today when you keep getting the alerts…these many thousands have died, it is coming near you, stay in the house …do not touch yourself…fuck, what do you mean? What else is there to do locked inside, especially when you have a spouse like mine, who just had yet another yelling outburst and a declaration of war, following which one needs to evacuate, not sit inside.
Studies made by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others have demonstrated that we need to avoid lethargic states for Maximum Pleasure, concentrate, have constant feedback and forget all else during those intense activities, which could range from mountain climbing to surgery –as in the surgeon who does it not the patient that needs it, though the latter would be better off, that might not bring him to the Zen Zone – from playing tennis to ballet dancing, and speaking of tennis, it is like this…if you have a partner that plays so much worse than you, there is no satisfaction there, just when the opposite happens and you go against one that sends powerful shots in the field and you have no ability to withstand such an accomplished assault…
The latter experience seems to be the case of Room Temperature, where Nicholson Baker knows so much better this art, literature, philosophy, literary criticism Game – together with so many others, painting for instance – that there is a crushing sensation of extreme incompetency when advancing further in a book that looked so accessible with its meager 120 pages and benign introduction with the baby Bug that is fed by her father from a bottle, only to move somewhat abruptly to such unknown entities as Coleridge’s marginalia – yes, the poet rings a bell, but his marginalia…what is that? this is joking too, even if the under signed might be acutely aware now, thanks to Nicholson Baker that he has missed so much schooling – Francis Thomson and his review of Yeats’s early poetry, Isaac Casaubon, Murphy with his modernist bed design and quite a few more…
On a more self-congratulatory note – though the conclusion is that the book is surely adorable and so high up in the sky that the best magnifying glasses would not help this reader understand it, without titanic, gargantuan – here, let me insert some sign of culture – efforts this novel – perhaps it is this goddamn virus that is haunting all of us that is the cause, without it, all these references to the most obscure big names – unknown expect for the insiders, the crème de la crème, the illuminati the Wise Men and Women would be accessible…
As a final proof of the ermeticism experienced by the undersigned, the note will end with the exact notes that have been recorded in the phone…granted, they seem incomprehensible because they reflect the cultural shock experienced when reading, but they are also inept in parts on account of the fact that most are dictated to this stupid Samsung 9 plus and it translates them, quite abhorrently, into written sentences…the result is here:
Foe period of endemic trouble that's not the best option Ho too clever and demanding by far If one e looks at the 101 10 pages of this book it would be tempting to say it's easy well it is not it is complex elaborated and really complex it is for connoisseurs
was in the rocking chair giving our six-month-old bug her late afternoon bottle...Patty was at work I had pulled the windowshades halfway down: sunlight turned their stiff fabric the luminous deep- fat -fried colour of a glazed doughnut... the movement of the Wings of the Birds going toWord Boston was remarkably similar to the flapping of a small dogs' ears as it run full speed the storyteller is pleased that is reminded of the puppy it seemed a treaty lateral sort of comparison then we have a peculiar description of a sweater which makes the story teller feel 'particularly fatherly and head of householdish!'😁 the wife works 3 days a week at an advertising firm and he works too as a technical writer for a medical imaging company the wife has got them health insurance
Mother ate peanut butter straight from the jar with a spoon and then he did too to only this is an occasion for an elaborate complex in me description
And then, 18 or so years later, not long after Patty's urine pinkened conclusively in the plastic Vial, she asked me to pick up a small jar of peanut butter which is the way to say maternity test when positive or negative whatever it is
Wife also eats straight from the peanut butter jar on occasion for a Shakespeare quote 'big bellied with wanton wind'
'Brief fuss of pubic Hair shedding into la elaborate lasso Shapes '
Singing to the Bug while reading review on Coleridge's marginalia
I would have have fits of indignation that made me think of ChopinHauer philosopher Fury at the idle cracking of buggy whips by coachmen on his street'
some character in a series loved by his father recorded the darling of a number through the door or and then he could guess what the number is by redialing
Francis Thompson review of Yeats's early poetry
penny for your thoughts ridiculously Cheap evaluation it should be BA Kingdom
I aloan of all people in the world have the ability to see individual molecules as they vibrated about 2 feet below the ceiling in the dark'
his mother gave some lessons art classes at the memorial art gallery negative spaces lesson and draw the inside of a pillow
Klimt William James Delacroix Gaudi Venetian Doge palace Ernest Borgnine Tintin Isaac Casaubon who is that...
Murphy Bed modernism design who is Murphy
Debussy la mer Palestrina Sibelius
Many shocking challenging details...inside of a pillow
50% wish
35% fondness
15% genuine pleasure
Artificial
Jewish protestant Catholics Shape of nose
Is this only for the Elite for the crème de la crème the only ones who can get references to 2 modern design two names that are familiar only to a very very small circle Maybe song
Tennyson ratified high-altitude waterfalls
Nine out of 10
Everything seems to be perfect about this major work, included on The Guardian’s 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list - https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - so short that one is tempted to say ‘piece of cake’, clearly brilliant, with references that cover an immense, overwhelming range – which, anticipating might be quiet the big thing…too clever and magnificent by far for the under signed, alas –from Klimt to William James, from the Doge’s Venetian Palace – now anyway closed with that fucked up Corona Virus, mother fucker you, so again…what is exactly the point of reading about this since it is closed and furthermore …we are all going to die…well, those of us over fifties and men, my wife told me exuberantly are much more likely to go and meet whatever Maker there is in paradise- to Delacroix, Gaudi, Ernest Borgnine – of all people – Tintin no less…
However, along with more familiar characters, writers, paintings, actors, cartoon figures, we have all sorts of people, experts, that do not ring any bell and then those of us who just want to pretend we are educated, erudite and somewhat sophisticated will soon face the panic – as if that malign Covid XIX were not enough – of seeing we get so little of what this obviously brilliant author – but why does he have to know so much and write about it so that we get envious of his knowledge and then stop functioning…when I say we, I mean maybe there are some others who will have issues with reading something oh so challenging as this…
There is pleasure in reading about Palestrina and thinking this is someone that has been present in some books before, ergo it means this Room Temperature confirms the fact that this reader knows even about someone more obscure, who means nothing for a Trump voter for instance – but hey, those people get their ‘information from the guy who thinks Nambia and Tanzaninia are countries and as Seth Myers has hilariously put it, if you tell him about Bangladesh, he would ask you …why „is Ladesh hot? Because he would want to ‘bang’ Ladesh in case you did not get that.
Soon, the joy of getting into the rhythm of the exquisite, ever more sophisticated, intellectual, overwhelming, challenging, provocative, intense, erudite novel is abruptly diminishing and is replaced by an ever increasing sense of ineptitude, incompatibility, and we may think of the quintessential Flow by the co – founder of Positive Psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a fabulous work in which the expert explains the conditions needed to reach the Ultimate state of Bliss, Being in the Zone or Flow, one of which would be to have challenges which meet our skills – in other words, many think that bliss comes from sitting in front of the television – which is so fucked up today when you keep getting the alerts…these many thousands have died, it is coming near you, stay in the house …do not touch yourself…fuck, what do you mean? What else is there to do locked inside, especially when you have a spouse like mine, who just had yet another yelling outburst and a declaration of war, following which one needs to evacuate, not sit inside.
Studies made by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others have demonstrated that we need to avoid lethargic states for Maximum Pleasure, concentrate, have constant feedback and forget all else during those intense activities, which could range from mountain climbing to surgery –as in the surgeon who does it not the patient that needs it, though the latter would be better off, that might not bring him to the Zen Zone – from playing tennis to ballet dancing, and speaking of tennis, it is like this…if you have a partner that plays so much worse than you, there is no satisfaction there, just when the opposite happens and you go against one that sends powerful shots in the field and you have no ability to withstand such an accomplished assault…
The latter experience seems to be the case of Room Temperature, where Nicholson Baker knows so much better this art, literature, philosophy, literary criticism Game – together with so many others, painting for instance – that there is a crushing sensation of extreme incompetency when advancing further in a book that looked so accessible with its meager 120 pages and benign introduction with the baby Bug that is fed by her father from a bottle, only to move somewhat abruptly to such unknown entities as Coleridge’s marginalia – yes, the poet rings a bell, but his marginalia…what is that? this is joking too, even if the under signed might be acutely aware now, thanks to Nicholson Baker that he has missed so much schooling – Francis Thomson and his review of Yeats’s early poetry, Isaac Casaubon, Murphy with his modernist bed design and quite a few more…
On a more self-congratulatory note – though the conclusion is that the book is surely adorable and so high up in the sky that the best magnifying glasses would not help this reader understand it, without titanic, gargantuan – here, let me insert some sign of culture – efforts this novel – perhaps it is this goddamn virus that is haunting all of us that is the cause, without it, all these references to the most obscure big names – unknown expect for the insiders, the crème de la crème, the illuminati the Wise Men and Women would be accessible…
As a final proof of the ermeticism experienced by the undersigned, the note will end with the exact notes that have been recorded in the phone…granted, they seem incomprehensible because they reflect the cultural shock experienced when reading, but they are also inept in parts on account of the fact that most are dictated to this stupid Samsung 9 plus and it translates them, quite abhorrently, into written sentences…the result is here:
Foe period of endemic trouble that's not the best option Ho too clever and demanding by far If one e looks at the 101 10 pages of this book it would be tempting to say it's easy well it is not it is complex elaborated and really complex it is for connoisseurs
was in the rocking chair giving our six-month-old bug her late afternoon bottle...Patty was at work I had pulled the windowshades halfway down: sunlight turned their stiff fabric the luminous deep- fat -fried colour of a glazed doughnut... the movement of the Wings of the Birds going toWord Boston was remarkably similar to the flapping of a small dogs' ears as it run full speed the storyteller is pleased that is reminded of the puppy it seemed a treaty lateral sort of comparison then we have a peculiar description of a sweater which makes the story teller feel 'particularly fatherly and head of householdish!'😁 the wife works 3 days a week at an advertising firm and he works too as a technical writer for a medical imaging company the wife has got them health insurance
Mother ate peanut butter straight from the jar with a spoon and then he did too to only this is an occasion for an elaborate complex in me description
And then, 18 or so years later, not long after Patty's urine pinkened conclusively in the plastic Vial, she asked me to pick up a small jar of peanut butter which is the way to say maternity test when positive or negative whatever it is
Wife also eats straight from the peanut butter jar on occasion for a Shakespeare quote 'big bellied with wanton wind'
'Brief fuss of pubic Hair shedding into la elaborate lasso Shapes '
Singing to the Bug while reading review on Coleridge's marginalia
I would have have fits of indignation that made me think of ChopinHauer philosopher Fury at the idle cracking of buggy whips by coachmen on his street'
some character in a series loved by his father recorded the darling of a number through the door or and then he could guess what the number is by redialing
Francis Thompson review of Yeats's early poetry
penny for your thoughts ridiculously Cheap evaluation it should be BA Kingdom
I aloan of all people in the world have the ability to see individual molecules as they vibrated about 2 feet below the ceiling in the dark'
his mother gave some lessons art classes at the memorial art gallery negative spaces lesson and draw the inside of a pillow
Klimt William James Delacroix Gaudi Venetian Doge palace Ernest Borgnine Tintin Isaac Casaubon who is that...
Murphy Bed modernism design who is Murphy
Debussy la mer Palestrina Sibelius
Many shocking challenging details...inside of a pillow
50% wish
35% fondness
15% genuine pleasure
Artificial
Jewish protestant Catholics Shape of nose
Is this only for the Elite for the crème de la crème the only ones who can get references to 2 modern design two names that are familiar only to a very very small circle Maybe song
Tennyson ratified high-altitude waterfalls
July 12, 2012
My very first exposure to Nicholson Baker's work was his first, The Mezzanine, and Room Temperature, his second, is cut from the same rich cloth. Although its physical setting is unwavering and mundane—a Boston living room in early fall, a father in a rocking chair feeding his newborn daughter and rocking her to sleep—that setting is lavishly described in jewel-sharp detail, and Baker uses it as a springboard for a fractal efflorescence of prose that still amazes me. This slim book is to streams of consciousness as the Amazon is to rivers; it is to trains of thought as the Train à Grande Vitesse is to that poky ride-em at your local amusement park. And Baker does it all with such tenderness and immediacy that I still almost weep to think of it.
Among its few pages, Room Temperature also encapsulates itself:
I have enjoyed most of Nicholson Baker's later work too, but this... this is the root of it all.
Among its few pages, Room Temperature also encapsulates itself:
I certainly believed, rocking my daughter on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected; that is, that there was enough content in that single confined sequence of thoughts and events and the setting that gave rise to them to make connections that would proliferate backward until potentially every item of autobiographical interest—every pet theory, minor observation, significant moment of shame or happiness—could be at least glancingly covered[...]There, in its nutshell, is Baker's project—and although he acknowledges immediately thereafter that such an enterprise cannot truly reproduce the entirety of a life, I do not think that anyone could have done a better job of proving this assertion than Baker does here amid the making of it.
(p.41)
I have enjoyed most of Nicholson Baker's later work too, but this... this is the root of it all.
September 2, 2012
I would give this book 3.5 stars if I could.
I cannot believe this is the same author who wrote House of Holes. I'm both shocked and delighted about that. While I think I loathed House of Holes (maybe it was me, not the book?), Room Temperature was almost completely softer and...(looking for the right word)...lovelier than HOH. I say "almost" because Baker still did use some stark flashbacks and relatively "colorful" metaphors but they were ding-dang BRILLIANT in use.
It's 3 stars instead of 4 because for some reason, the story didn't grab me with both hands and make me sit and eat it. I mean, it's 116 pages, and it took me 64 days to finish. Sixty-four! Days! To finish 116 pages. But when I did pick it up, I was truly transported into his "remember whens" and bought it. I don't know why I kept putting it down?
If you're a new parent (or fixin' to be), you'll relate. If you're an empty-nester, it'll take you back. I'm somewhere in between, and I did relate. Maybe I'll read it again in 15 years or so. (If you've never had a child, I still think you'll like the prose and Baker's construction.)
I cannot believe this is the same author who wrote House of Holes. I'm both shocked and delighted about that. While I think I loathed House of Holes (maybe it was me, not the book?), Room Temperature was almost completely softer and...(looking for the right word)...lovelier than HOH. I say "almost" because Baker still did use some stark flashbacks and relatively "colorful" metaphors but they were ding-dang BRILLIANT in use.
It's 3 stars instead of 4 because for some reason, the story didn't grab me with both hands and make me sit and eat it. I mean, it's 116 pages, and it took me 64 days to finish. Sixty-four! Days! To finish 116 pages. But when I did pick it up, I was truly transported into his "remember whens" and bought it. I don't know why I kept putting it down?
If you're a new parent (or fixin' to be), you'll relate. If you're an empty-nester, it'll take you back. I'm somewhere in between, and I did relate. Maybe I'll read it again in 15 years or so. (If you've never had a child, I still think you'll like the prose and Baker's construction.)
July 8, 2008
Nicholson Baker is known to lovingly detail anything crossing his scope. Here, the referents in the narrator's survey return him to his great loves; his love for his newborn daughter ("Bug") and his wife. All that is familiar is set out plainly, props supporting the overwhelming emotion and affection. From a description of an attempt to appreciate a color, "Celadon," the narrator outlines a device often brought to a relationship -- to get to know the other better and become more dear, we seek to appreciate that which the partner enjoys, only to never quite peg it down, as the partner is a dynamism who has continued on.
October 17, 2015
I have a lot of patience with books. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I knew this wasn't a novel following a plot going in, and that is not why I stopped reading it. I read the positive reviews, and I wanted to like the book.
The first chapter and much of the first third of the book felt like the showing off just how many things he knows and how interesting his observations of the world around him are. But the part where the main character licks his daughters nostrils really brought home the whole weirdness of the book and made me wonder why I was reading it.
The first chapter and much of the first third of the book felt like the showing off just how many things he knows and how interesting his observations of the world around him are. But the part where the main character licks his daughters nostrils really brought home the whole weirdness of the book and made me wonder why I was reading it.
December 4, 2017
I first read this book in the early '90s and its structure and circulatory approach to its story had a profound effect on how I view structure, chronology, literature, story telling and my own thought processes.
I still find a lot to enjoy and admire, though I was a bit disappointed by his rather pretentious, education-signalling language choices. Apart from that, it's one of the most pure & lovely books I know, pulling together all sorts of random thoughts until the reader feels they really know, and rather like, the narrator.
I still find a lot to enjoy and admire, though I was a bit disappointed by his rather pretentious, education-signalling language choices. Apart from that, it's one of the most pure & lovely books I know, pulling together all sorts of random thoughts until the reader feels they really know, and rather like, the narrator.
July 9, 2008
Of NB's first three books, this always seemed to me the second runner-up — but a recent re-read makes me wonder if it's his best, subtlest, (quietly) brilliant performance to date. An update of Burton's "Digression of the Air"?
August 20, 2010
Nicholson Baker manages to disgust, annoy, and thrill me, sometimes on the same page. This is his second novel after The Mezzanine, and it is the thoughts of a new father as he feeds his daughter a bottle.
Only a new father would wax poetic about licking his baby's nostril. Ugh.
Only a new father would wax poetic about licking his baby's nostril. Ugh.
July 10, 2016
Maybe I would have been irritated if it had been more than a hundred pages, but worth it for the scene with the suit pockets alone. Made me want to move to Quincy, procreate, and eat lots of peanut butter.
December 25, 2014
Amounts to one big riff with a baby that maybe could've used a little more tying together but it's short so whatever
February 12, 2021
Pages 108 - 110
“Of course the percussion section would be entrusted with the carrying out of this novelty, just as they had been the ones to master and legitimize the exotic cymbales antiques that Debussy himself had introduced into orchestration. I imagined the premiere in St. Louis or Pittsburgh: the solemn nod from the conductor, the jar of Skippy Creamy held high, label outward, yet close enough to the surreptitious microphone that no detail of its first breath would be lost: the moment of top-coated strain, the moment of soundless lid-turning, and then the humble fup of the sound itself: sound made from the sudden arrival of the possibility of sound, circular thunder. Was it program music? Only in the sense (as I would have to explain at defensive length in the program notes) that the daintily vortical second movement of La Mer was program music: and indeed the sound of the air entering the peanut butter jar was meant lovingly to sum up Debussy’s lifelong fascination with approximate breathing; his wish for a music whose harmonic progressions, although they might sound stifled in the concert hall, would once out of doors enter into a collaboration with the open air and float joyfully over the tops of the trees, his piano preludes whose titles (“Voiles,” “Le Vent dans la plane,” “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’ air du soir,’ “ “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest,” Brouillards,” and so on) repeatedly made aerial references, the recollections by Gabriel Pierne and Camille Bellaigue that his piano technique was accompanied by his “puffing noisily during the difficult passages” and by “a kind of hiccup or harsh puff” to mark the beginning of every bar. I worried that the audience wouldn’t have time to get all this if the jar opened too readily, and therefore I hoped that the percussion would by chance encounter one of those infrequent Peter Pan or Skippy Creamies that was the product of an improperly calibrated piece of screwing machinery, so that as he struggled covertly to turn the lid, increasingly embarrassed and frustrated, his jaw clenched, his fiercely whispered “You little piece of shit!” sizzling from the loudspeaker horns, his membership in the musicians’ union suddenly open to doubt, and as he fussily excused himself to go backstage and run the jar under hot water for a minute, we all might use that lucky delay to think of the meteorological greatness stored and quality-sealed in La Mer, or, more likely, of times when we had undergone similar failures with jars of peanut butter (or jelly or spaghetti sauce) -- when we, or I at least, determined to succeed on a third attempt, pre-twisted my hands and allowed the drumstick of thumb flesh on my right hand to settle over the slight tractive fluting on the lid, while the fingers of the same hand clamped to its curvature, all of them leaning to one side, as a row of knees in a concert hall will all lean to accommodate a late-arriving ticket holder.”
“Of course the percussion section would be entrusted with the carrying out of this novelty, just as they had been the ones to master and legitimize the exotic cymbales antiques that Debussy himself had introduced into orchestration. I imagined the premiere in St. Louis or Pittsburgh: the solemn nod from the conductor, the jar of Skippy Creamy held high, label outward, yet close enough to the surreptitious microphone that no detail of its first breath would be lost: the moment of top-coated strain, the moment of soundless lid-turning, and then the humble fup of the sound itself: sound made from the sudden arrival of the possibility of sound, circular thunder. Was it program music? Only in the sense (as I would have to explain at defensive length in the program notes) that the daintily vortical second movement of La Mer was program music: and indeed the sound of the air entering the peanut butter jar was meant lovingly to sum up Debussy’s lifelong fascination with approximate breathing; his wish for a music whose harmonic progressions, although they might sound stifled in the concert hall, would once out of doors enter into a collaboration with the open air and float joyfully over the tops of the trees, his piano preludes whose titles (“Voiles,” “Le Vent dans la plane,” “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’ air du soir,’ “ “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest,” Brouillards,” and so on) repeatedly made aerial references, the recollections by Gabriel Pierne and Camille Bellaigue that his piano technique was accompanied by his “puffing noisily during the difficult passages” and by “a kind of hiccup or harsh puff” to mark the beginning of every bar. I worried that the audience wouldn’t have time to get all this if the jar opened too readily, and therefore I hoped that the percussion would by chance encounter one of those infrequent Peter Pan or Skippy Creamies that was the product of an improperly calibrated piece of screwing machinery, so that as he struggled covertly to turn the lid, increasingly embarrassed and frustrated, his jaw clenched, his fiercely whispered “You little piece of shit!” sizzling from the loudspeaker horns, his membership in the musicians’ union suddenly open to doubt, and as he fussily excused himself to go backstage and run the jar under hot water for a minute, we all might use that lucky delay to think of the meteorological greatness stored and quality-sealed in La Mer, or, more likely, of times when we had undergone similar failures with jars of peanut butter (or jelly or spaghetti sauce) -- when we, or I at least, determined to succeed on a third attempt, pre-twisted my hands and allowed the drumstick of thumb flesh on my right hand to settle over the slight tractive fluting on the lid, while the fingers of the same hand clamped to its curvature, all of them leaning to one side, as a row of knees in a concert hall will all lean to accommodate a late-arriving ticket holder.”
September 4, 2017
Room Temperature is a short and dense and challenging read. It is Baker developing his signature style, his signature genre: the unvarnished life, not mysterious, action-packed, or romantic – not anything: just the unremarkable life, and a focus on its minutiae, in this case set in chapters composed like essays, such as the one concerning various commonplace vacuums, including the suction his baby applies to her bottle. They do logically follow one another, but each is self-contained, self-standing – the reader can imagine finding one in the pages of the New Yorker – yet part of a larger, lengthening whole. And it works – it is well crafted – but it is also unnecessarily smart and difficult, with numerous multi-page paragraphs, within which reside very long sentences, as if the writer is showing off.
This is the first book he wrote in this manner, and stands in sharp contrast to the "sex" fiction he has also penned (Vox and House of Holes, for example). It is the serious, decidedly unracy side of humanness, a slice of plainness and a window on ordinary people and the splendid ordinariness of family.
The story is simple: a man narrating thoughts and feelings pertaining to his wife, marriage, and young child, complete with faded hopes, altered paths, unexpected outcomes, historical insights – solo and not – and with intermixed insecurities and wonderments and flash backs serving as occasional foundation. All sweet and engaging and honest.
If only the author did not seem to be so bent on demonstrating that he is a Writer, this book would stand beside his great novels in this genre: a Box of Matches and the Anthologist, both superior, both excellent works of a professional come into his own. In those volumes as in this one, no detail is too tiny, and all details are twisted together forming a tale that travels around itself, calling attention to everything one speck or letter or sound or smell or note or word or feeling or punctuation mark at a time. A marvelous achievement, but only a sliver of the sublimity he had ahead of him.
Nicholson Baker is a great writer, perhaps the best this country currently has to offer. Room Temperature is a record of the formation of his distinctive style, which he has evolved to produce superb volumes. Here perhaps he was trying too hard, or hadn’t quite figured it out yet, leaving this title as an inspiration to those who set out to create something remarkable, but who will require a few tries to get perfectly right.
This is the first book he wrote in this manner, and stands in sharp contrast to the "sex" fiction he has also penned (Vox and House of Holes, for example). It is the serious, decidedly unracy side of humanness, a slice of plainness and a window on ordinary people and the splendid ordinariness of family.
The story is simple: a man narrating thoughts and feelings pertaining to his wife, marriage, and young child, complete with faded hopes, altered paths, unexpected outcomes, historical insights – solo and not – and with intermixed insecurities and wonderments and flash backs serving as occasional foundation. All sweet and engaging and honest.
If only the author did not seem to be so bent on demonstrating that he is a Writer, this book would stand beside his great novels in this genre: a Box of Matches and the Anthologist, both superior, both excellent works of a professional come into his own. In those volumes as in this one, no detail is too tiny, and all details are twisted together forming a tale that travels around itself, calling attention to everything one speck or letter or sound or smell or note or word or feeling or punctuation mark at a time. A marvelous achievement, but only a sliver of the sublimity he had ahead of him.
Nicholson Baker is a great writer, perhaps the best this country currently has to offer. Room Temperature is a record of the formation of his distinctive style, which he has evolved to produce superb volumes. Here perhaps he was trying too hard, or hadn’t quite figured it out yet, leaving this title as an inspiration to those who set out to create something remarkable, but who will require a few tries to get perfectly right.
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