“Soon the baked-on atolls, softened overnight, began to give way; I pestered at the last one from the side for a while, smiling with the clenched-teeth smile of the joyful scrubber, and it was gone — no, there was still a tiny rough patch left behind to be dealt with, and then, oh sweet life, I could circle my sponge over the entire surface of the dish at the speed of the swirling water, frictionlessly, like a velodrome racer on a victory lap.”
Prose writers of sufficient talent and distinctiveness earn themselves islands on the literary map. There, off the coast of Realism, stands Carver Island, where all the men are drunks and all the conversations consist of charged non-sequiturs. A quick ferry ride from Postmodernism is David Foster Wallace Island, where idiosyncratic abbreviations abound and sunlight can only be described in terms of its angle of incidence.
They’re great honors, these islands. They’re also prisons. The glory of being unlike anyone else has a way of morphing, mid-career, into the plight of being helplessly, freakishly, inescapably like yourself. Some writers, facing this predicament, sink into despondency and unwitting self-parody (late Vonnegut). Others don fake mustaches and sneak aboard vessels bound for foreign ports (J.K. Rowling, crime writer).
What Nicholson Baker has done — and there’s hardly ever been a writer whose early brilliance seemed more potentially imprisoning — is something stranger. His singular, career-making gift, unveiled in 1988 in The Mezzanine, was for the hyper-articulate, hilariously thorough unpacking of moments and phenomena (snapped shoelaces, CVS receipts) that ordinary writers wouldn’t grant so much as a clause. He was Nabokov with a microscope, Updike with an unholy interest in vending machines. He wrote two more books in this mode, Room Temperature and U & I, and he could, having established himself as the dean of miniaturization, have gone two ways. He could have ventured into something flagrantly different, like historical epics, or he could have ridden his peculiar gift into the sunset of diminishing returns and diminishing royalties (a novel set on a single ride up a wheelchair ramp).
But what he did do was find a third way — he burned his ships and set about mapping the jungle. Rather than abandoning his own peculiarity or allowing himself to be entombed by it, he found new dimensions to it; he dug it out. Adjacent to his gift for miniaturization, it turned out, were all sorts of fertile territories — he could write about sex; he could agitate on behalf of libraries; he could even do investigatory journalism (of a particularly obsessive and desk-bound sort).
My favorite of his new modes is the one I’ve come to think of as live-writing. These are the books (A Box of Matches, The Anthologist, Traveling Sprinkler) in which Baker, the most polished and precise of writers, presents himself with the challenge of a running tape recorder. Here we get Baker in his offstage mode, groping for the right word, allowing stray memories to surface, speaking in the hoarse, relaxed tone of the showoff whose show is on hiatus.
Box of Matches begins like this: “Good morning, it’s January and it’s 4:17 a.m., and I’m going to sit here in the dark.” And for 178 generously spaced pages, he does. Each of the book’s thirty-three chapters represents a morning of Baker (or rather his stand-in, Emmett) sitting in the dark in front of his fireplace, typing whatever comes to him. Often what comes to him are descriptions of the fire (“an orangey ember-cavern that resembles a monster’s sloppy mouth, filled with half-chewed, glowing bits of fire-meat.”) Other mornings it’s worries about his pet duck, or memories of a beloved briefcase.
Something strange and delightful happens, as you gobble up these chapters. Just as in an actual pre-dawn reverie, your pulse slows, your boundaries blur, your sense of scale distorts. When, two thirds of the way through the book, Baker/Emmett comes down with the flu (“I’m going to lie down on the floor now, where it’s cool,”) it registers as a legitimate shock. Will he make it down to the fireplace tomorrow? Will he be able to stomach his customary fireside apple? If this were all the book was — a plainspoken diary imbued with the moon-through-the-windowpane reflectiveness of winter mornings — it would be enough.
But it’s more than that. Because any authentic survey of Baker’s mental landscape, however mellowly conducted, is going to turn up his original gift for microscopy. In the early books we saw the gift in its hothouse form: fertilized, pruned, obsessively watered. Here we encounter it growing wild — the original cast of mind, the germinal pleasure in description that made writing a pleasure in the first place.
Emmett comes down one morning and decides, while the coffee brews, that he might as well wash the casserole dish that’s been soaking in the sink. He squirts on the dish-soap, picks up the scrubber, and — “Soon the baked-on atolls, softened overnight, began to give way; I pestered at the last one from the side for a while, smiling with the clenched-teeth smile of the joyful scrubber, and it was gone — no, there was still a tiny rough patch left behind to be dealt with, and then, oh sweet life, I could circle my sponge over the entire surface of the dish at the speed of the swirling water, frictionlessly, like a velodrome racer on a victory lap.”
That perfect word atolls! That clenched-teeth smile! The fact that the washing of this single dish has been granted a beginning, middle and end, complete with a climactic showdown (that stubborn rough patch) and catharsis (that victory lap)!
This senses-atwitter sentence is all the more precious to me for its coming in the middle of so conspicuously casual a book. This is Prince playing not at Wembley Stadium but in your living room, noodling around on the guitar you’ve barely touched since college, wearing pajamas, his greatness all the more discernible for its clear indivisibility from daily life. This is an author, faced with island imprisonment, making like Ben Gunn, the famed maroonee of Treasure Island (“many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese”) — letting his beard grow wild, letting his pleasures be known, and finding the buried treasure.