fiction files redux discussion

I read Vox a million years ago. I remember that there was a lot of hubbub when it first came out, people who had read it seemed to be about evenly divided (at least among my friends and acquaintances) about whether it was a work of genius or a travesty. I don't really remember much about the actual work, aside from feeling that I should be "getting" something and that it was experimental and different, and finding it laborious.

I am now reading the Mezzanine, courtesy of a fellow FF, and as I look through the reviews of his works by members of the FF, it looks like folks are still pretty much evenly divided. So I was a little surprised that no one had started a thread about this author. The only thing I could find was a mention of this article about footnotes in fiction, made by Elizabeth in the DFW group read (How Authors Write:
The technologies of composition, not new media, inspire ­innovations in literary styles and forms.) Given that this is someone our group doesn't seem to agree about, I'm hoping that maybe a few people will chime in. I'll be back after I finish reading the Mezzanine.

hi patty! thanks for starting a thread on nicholson baker! i really can't believe i never thought to do it! :)

i'm on a nicholson baker high after Traveling Sprinkler: A Novel but i have to admit that vox is still waiting on my to-read pile. i did actually pick it up at one point and i quickly put it down again. i'm curious to see where you will come up on the mezzanine spectrum.

i really enjoyed the mezzanine, and i really haven't stopped thinking about the fermata since i read it, to be honest. i just can't begin to write down why -- but i think i appreciate it in the same way i do lolita, and given nicholson baker's admiration of nabokov, i can't think he would be too disappointed at that.

here's a link down below to a paris review interview with baker. i sort of fell madly in love with him when i read what he said about the elm blight in his childhood. he's just really my kind of neurotic, smart, passionate person. he makes sense to me, and if he keeps doing what he did in the travelling sprinkler, i may die and go to literary heaven. :)

http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...

I see what you mean about the difficulty of putting down your thoughts about his writing. You've mentioned elsewhere that you like his 'voice' and I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that (it's a term I have trouble with generally, and no two people seem to mean the same thing by it). Maybe you could say a little more about that?

I think I may like his writing, but I don't think it's fiction. In the Paris Review interview, he says, essentially, that he considers it fiction because it isn't entirely true to life. For me that's a bit like when a person says "but it IS organic" about food, simply because it's carbon based. While 'fiction' obviously does have that meaning, when talking about literary works, the term fiction means something different to me.

The Mezzanine seems to be a documentary collection of the assorted mental clutter that would distract many of us from actually writing or doing other creative activities. Written before the explosion of social networking sites (where, especially in the early days, people often felt comfortable writing updates that contained the sort of digressions about minutia, like toilet paper rolls and the correct direction for installing new ones on the roller, that Baker uses as his primary material), I find it amazing that he was able to marshal these thoughts into a complete narrative, and even more amazing that he was able to find a (prominent) publisher for it.

That sounds pretty critical, I guess. He annoys me, I'll be honest, but that doesn't mean I don't like the writing. The Mezzanine gave me a lot to think about over the last couple of days, and I don't just mean the relative benefits of paper versus plastic straws. I'm sure I'll read more of his works, and I'll keep thinking about this one.

i started to reply to this yesterday and lost my comment. sigh.

it sounds like you've landed in an interesting place on the spectrum: annoyed with some small interest piqued. i certainly think he gives a lot of food for thought in a variety of ways.

about voice: i know i've talked about this before other places so i will try not to repeat my self too much. :) i read a quote by eudora welty on twitter recently where she said, "[When I read] some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too." i often distinctly hear the voice of a writer in my head as i read, and i did also when i wrote. not every writer's voice is distinct as another's, and it's not merely the fact of its existence that appeals. as i noted in my review of travelling sprinkler, certain voices really resonate with me, like nicholson baker's. others do not (c.f. all my rants about margaret atwood).
agreed that there are a couple of ways at looking at voice and the whole thing is fairly subjective -- but in essence i'm talking about a signature rhythm and personality that imbues the work of some writers. style influences it obviously but i usually clearly "hear" the voice when reading: for example, p.g. wodehouse always sounds like p.g. wodehouse, does he not? each book is not exactly the same -- though some come close -- but i can hear the arch voice when i read him.

your point about his work not being fiction? well, in that interview they talk a lot about the book i haven't read about him feeding his baby and that sounds a lot like this it may be the most non-fictional of the lot, even if he "fictionalized" aspects to it. i don't want to have the whole james frey debate again, certainly. i will reiterate as i did in my review of the travelling sprinkler that he, nicholson baker seemed very present to me, even though i was cognizant of the fact he was telling a story about paul chowder even though he was obviously filling paul with aspects of himself, there was still fiction there, at least for me. ben pointed out in his review of travelling sprinkler that he thinks baker has become more like brautigan as those works were poetic too, and yet very autobiographical, fictionalized to some degree but perhaps not a huge one. in any case, i'm not sure it particularly matters to me.

you rightly note that the mezzanine is chock full of digressions about minutiae, but as also you point out, he wrote it and published it pre-seinfeld, and pre-sharing of all our little details with the world via the internet. he tapped into a place that some people really like to go (i am one of these people -- you'll see if you look at my review of the mezzanine that i couldn't resist looking up everything about straws while i was reading about it because he noticed it and made it interesting to me. with this latest book, he also does that -- i've never had an interest in knowing about debussy before he fixated on him in my "hearing". so in some ways i look at these as flights of fancy. but at the same time, it has something that the others before didn't. i really hope you choose to read the travelling sprinkler when it comes out -- i suspect you might like it more or decide you were done with him forever. :)

interesting article on algebra in the latest harpers?

Matt wrote: "interesting article on algebra in the latest harpers?"

i don't buy harpers but i bet the article is at least food for thought. he's aces at that. did you read it?

Folks, there is a new Nicholson Baker. Sequel to The Anthologist. But a review made me want to read The Anthologist. That said, it also sounded from the review that there are more than enough sentences worth reading.

Robert wrote: "Folks, there is a new Nicholson Baker. Sequel to The Anthologist. But a review made me want to read The Anthologist. That said, it also sounded from the review that there are more than enough sente..."

hey robert: i have read the anthologist and the follow-up, the recently released travelling sprinkler (had the ARC and have given it away) and i would be very curious as to what you thought of the anthologist. for my money, though, travelling sprinkler is the better book, and my favourite of his to date. i can't recommend it enough. :)

Greetings, Fiction Files! I haven't jumped in here for quite some time, but it is nice to read still familiar names and to know this is still going.

Regarding Nicholson Baker, I was fortunate enough to study with him while I was a student at EGS during one of my summers in Switzerland. At his public lecture (for all students, not just his classes), he read a chapter from his book of essays, The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, "Reading Aloud," which is about his experience reading a chapter from The Mezzanine aloud at a book festival. He then proceeded to read us that very same chapter from The Mezzanine. It was hilarious.

His main focus at the time, however, was the search and preservation of old newspapers, as told in his non-fiction Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. His presentation was passionate and melancholy and dynamic and heartwarming all at once--he cares desperately about this, and the demonstration of this care caused many of us to care as well.

I'm also a big fan of his non-fiction work Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. It is composed of very short sections or chapters, utilizing mostly cables, reports, journal entries, and speech fragments (some of which were long classified) to tell the story of what occurred between the end of WWI through the beginnings of WWII in an attempt to examine the WHY of it all, of the atrocities on both sides.

This book upset a fair number of people who accused him of everything from anti-American sentiment to full on anti-Semitism simply for shining some light on many sides of the conflict, its multifaceted nature, the inhuman choices made by all involved. It's a fascinating, heartbreaking, and historically valuable.

On a personal level, he is a great guy. It turned out he used to live in Berkeley and shop at the used bookstore where I worked until it went out of business, and he knew my former boss and his daughter, who is my best friend. He was very interested in all of our thoughts and ideas, and I recall a particular morning having breakfast in the garden when I somehow started telling him about this acid trip I had where I thought I was eating crystal balls, and then we started writing dirty poems together.

So I'm a big Baker fan, but I'm also a wee bit biased.