Wonderful! Brilliant! I wanted to read this book however long ago I found out about its existence, based solely on the strength of this paraphrase, in the same way I still know I will enjoy Oblomov, when I get around to it some day (it's a novel where the main character never (or at least, not for a very long time) gets out of bed -- sign me up!).
You can imagine the warm rush of certainty and vocation that swept through me, therefore, when I saw a copy of The Mezzanine on the shelf at a bookstore the other day. It was right there -- this long fascinating idea, never before grasped in physical actuality -- and it was mine to have right then. No interminable two day wait for the Amazon package to arrive, during which time I might well become distracted by something else that suddenly and mysteriously came to seem equally urgent. No, I could actually go home with it.
Not only that, but I noticed, now that I could see the book in the flesh, that it was fairly short! Meaning I was almost certain to get through it (and I did) before the same mysterious redirection of my focus and consciousness could take place. Huzzah!
Some readers may not have been charmed so swiftly by that one sentence description above, of course. They may have regarded this idea as too avant-garde, or not nearly avant-garde enough. As a premise, after all, Baker's could be seen as just a sort of reductio of those of Joyce or Woolf. Instead of a day, let's do a minute!
And you can also rest assured that to accomplish this feat of extension (taking a minute's thought and lengthening it out to 130 pages), Baker resorts to all the obvious, tried-and-true devices in both the modernist and postmodern literary bag of tricks.
This is a novel, that is to say, of Shandyan digressions, of Proustian reminiscences (though the narrator makes a point in one scene of specifically disavowing the utility of chains of association triggered by the olfactory realm), of Dorothy Richardsonian streams of consciousness (to refer to a number of books/authors I have not exactly read, in fairness, but of whom I fancy I can claim awareness).
And then, pulling from this side of the last mid-century, the book also seems to have in it some exaggerated qualities of the French nouveau roman: the Perec-ian, the Robbe-Grillet-ian obsession with minute description and observation of apparently indifferent objects (to continue to list authors I have not exactly read yet) that is briefly parodied by the narrator of Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (to come at last to one I have!).
But before you roll your eyes at the thought that all of this sounds either terribly pretentious or trite, let me assure you the novel is exceptionally good fun. And however much its premise may borrow from novels that have gone before, its execution is wholly sui generis.
Mostly how Baker manages to fill the space of his literary experiment without exceeding the timeline of events he has allowed himself is through the aforementioned minute description of objects. But not objects as they exist in their dead inanimate state, I hasten to add, but as each of us interact with them in our daily routines. Baker makes us perceive the enormous, if unperceived, sentiments of frustration and joy with which we approach them -- the miniature dramas that unfold each day in our relations with seemingly inert matter.
More than this, his book is ultimately one of the most convincing and genuine celebrations of the pure joie de vivre I have encountered in a long time -- a portrait of how much delight and intellectual entertainment can be found simply through the careful observation and inventory of the commonplace.
Let me explain. Baker's book (the first of his career) is at once a Bible of consumer product design (the intricacies of which he has now perhaps explored more eloquently than any recognized authority in the field) and a sincere artistic effort to arrive at genuine universality -- to capture and describe the experiences that virtually every single person has had in our society, but which have perhaps never before been committed to print, being things that generally glide beneath the level of conscious awareness.
Oftentimes, Baker will momentarily seem to get over or through an actual "event" in his compressed narrative timeline by using the conventional shorthands of our language. For instance, the narrator says at one point that he "threw something out."
If we were in an ordinary sort of novel, that would be the end of it. But because we are in The Mezzanine, the narrator then goes on to explain the ideal technique for throwing out a lunch bag (it requires wedging open the gross flap of the lid's opening with the food packaging, without allowing it to swing back upon one's hand, etc.).
Similarly, there is an extended scene in which the narrator observes and admires the near-flawless efficiency of a cash register operator.
In short, this whole novel is an exercise in momentarily raising human "procedural knowledge" from the level of the unconscious to our full and fascinated awareness. Nearly all of Baker's observations about the world concern things that one already knew without realizing it, or thoughts one had vaguely had without ever seeing them articulated before in a novel. (There is a reason that later in the book, he refers to a famous line of Pope's, about how true wit consists in "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd." It is a sort of mission statement for the whole book.)
Among the nearly universal experiences that Baker suddenly and surprisingly raises to the level of consciousness (there are many others), provoking guffaws of gleeful recognition from the reader:
- The exquisite visual pleasure to be found in the patterns left by vacuum cleaners on plush carpets.
- The deep fear of having untied shoelaces on an escalator, due to childhood warnings about being pulled down by one's feet into the hideous maw and inner mechanism of the machine.
- The fact that plastic straws float in soda cans, thereby seeming to negate the purpose of a straw, which is to eliminate the need for the use of hands in drinking. (Baker/his narrator eventually decides this must have been due to the change in the product design of the lids of soda cups, which held plastic straws in place, countering their tendency to float, which then led straw manufacturers to make all straws plastic, since floating was no longer an issue, which then meant that plastic straws now had such a dominant share of the market that it only ecame economically feasible for straw manufacturers to sell plastic straws, not paper ones, leaving soda can drinkers out of luck in the straw department. Which seems the most plausible theory I've ever heard proposed to solve this conundrum, and incidentally illustrates once again the fact that markets are not fully responsive.
- The awkwardness of trying to figure out where to place one's signature on an office birthday or get-well card.
- How disturbing it is to contemplate the amount of money that one's company or organization must expend on one's own salary, business cards, travel costs, etc., and the wonder that they can afford it, and the vague feeling that simply by allowing this thought to enter one's brain, one may be jeopardizing the whole magic of the system, and will bring it down around one's head. (This is all the more pressing an anxiety, I maintain, for those of us who work in the nonprofit sector, though Baker's main character is in corporate life.)
- Seeing those weird raised disks in the middle of escalators (yes, what the hell are those??)
In case this wasn't already obvious, nothing really happens in Baker's book. The narrator (we briefly learn his name is "Howie" in one interchange, but otherwise the name never comes up again, and he seems to have a number of biographical features in common with his creator -- including a childhood in Rochester) has a father and a mother, some coworkers, and a girlfriend dubbed "L." But with all of them he seems to enjoy a wholly positive and uncomplicated relationship. Nothing in the way of serious interpersonal conflict emerges in the novel's entire run (apart from a remembered incident of jabbing his best friend in the neck at five years' age for hogging access to a Crayola box).
Rather, to the extent that there is conflict in the novel, it arises from humans' interactions with the objects we have designed to improve and simplify our lives. To the extent that there is a plot or "problem" that approaches "resolution" in the novel, it is the fact that Howie breaks a shoelace early in the book. He then realizes that he broke the shoelace on the other foot only the day before (this has totally happened to me as well, and maybe to any reader). This leads him to ponder the mystery of why the two laces would have snapped at nearly the same time. He considers a handful of theories but cannot choose between them.
At last, we learn from his future self, recording the events of the escalator ride and the lunch hour that preceded it, that he will eventually find a series of journal articles in the library that touch upon the question (we learn from Baker the technical name for the precise field of knowledge that the shoelace problem concerns: tribology), and he concludes that it no longer need concern him -- the forces of scientific advance are already at work to deliver an answer.
But even this dénouement, such as it is, is confined to a footnote. (The use of this pseudo-scholarly apparatus is one of the novel's eye-rolling postmodern gimmicks, as well as one of its decided charms.)
There are, however, themes of this book -- beyond an intricate (and intrinsically fascinating), often recondite wrestling with the problems of manufacturing. These themes help to sustain one's interest a bit, although I swear, I'd be willing to read Nicholson Baker going for 130 pages straight on shoelaces alone, whether there was any larger claim about life, death, and love being made or not.
One apparent theme of the book is highly appropriate to a recent event in my own life: namely, that of turning 29. I hadn't picked up Baker's novel with any definite foreknowledge that it would have anything to say about that particular time of life, but I since did some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic and discovered that this was the age at which he wrote its first sections (apparently published in 1986, even if the full novel didn't come out until 1988).
The book is highly redolent of my experience of this particular phase of life, and I suspect of many others'. It is a time when one is just barely ensconced enough in the first stages of a career that one's life anxieties suddenly shift from obsessively circling around the problem of how to get a job to the problem of how to leave one's current job in order to pursue one's "dreams," or one's "true potential."
Howie, our narrator, notes at one point, while seeking an article in an MIT product manufacturing research journal about shoelace abrasions, that it prompted him to want to want to quit his current company for a moment, start over from the bottom, and train to become an expert in materials science. I had had exactly the same fleeting desire, reading the sentence before this.
Howie -- whose obsessions become clear to us through following his brain activity minutely over the course of a lunch hour -- is terrified both that he is getting too old, and that he is still too young. This is very much the trouble with life at 29.
Howie is convinced on the one hand that his brain cells are dying -- both from the natural aging process and from the occasional ingestion of mild doses of alcohol. I have this exact same obsession (though the potential killers of grey matter I dread are more often things like insufficient ventilation and circulation of oxygen indoors, and other terrors that never seem to alarm anyone else).
He has reached an admirable conclusion, however -- the die-off of neurons is actually a good thing, he now believes, because it forces you to commit to being who you are, and to doing what you are good at. "[T]he rest" of one's futile ambitions, he notes, "no longer seems so pressing or distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach."
This is all much the same fear and attempted resolution to it that I've been harping on endlessly in my posts of the past year: particularly this one. Why do I have to commit to only one field of achievement?, the late-twenty-something asks. Why can't I do everything? Why is the complete universe of possible futures gradually being enclosed and abridged?
Because you are human! Because you are mortal!
Even as one confronts the reality of aging and mortality that makes for this quarter-life crisis, however - the first of many that will come -- one is alarmed as well by one's own persistent childishness.
Another obsessive thought that cycles through Howie's brain concerns the extent to which his primary associations -- including with the material objects around him and his own daily routines, which bulk so large in the book's subject matter -- still mostly derive from his childhood. Many of his reflections on a given topic begin with the phrase, "When I was little..." He notices this, and it leads him to a series of attempts to calculate the amount of time he will have to live through before the cumulative total of adult memories and mental associations in his head will outnumber those of his childhood.
Of course, you and I know, dear reader, that it doesn't quite work that way. The rate at which one accumulates equally potent and resonant memories or associations is not consistent throughout one's life. It starts to slow down. The things that strike us as important and worth remembering come at somewhat less frequent intervals, and ordinary objects and experiences no longer impress us in the same profound way. Our capacity for learning new things, likewise -- and for much the same reason -- becomes more restricted.
We remember in this regard a line from an essay by John Updike (of whom Baker, incidentally, is a noted literary fanboy, having penned a book on the subject). The senior writer says: "Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first twenty years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant" (from the short article, "The Writer in Winter").
This is the feeling Wordsworth gave voice to in his famous lines about the gradual dimming of the imagination and spirit over the course of human maturation in his ode on the "Intimations of Immortality." It is also perhaps what drives the feeling -- so commonly attested in adult life -- that time is curiously speeding up as one gets older. It's a sensation that May Sinclair depicts with chilling accuracy in her short novel The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, counting off the years as they pass, sending her lonely heroine rocketing through what she describes as "empty, flying time."
While such morbid thoughts pass through all our minds, however -- and Howie's -- they are not the dominant tone of Baker's book. Rather, the novel ultimately provides a powerful counterpoint to the feeling of futility about human life. Howie's response to his anxieties as a young man approaching the end of his twenties is in part to accept his own limitations ("I was a man," he observes, "but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be"), but this is not all.
In the curious two-step motion of all developments of personality, at the same time that one begins to realize, in one's late twenties, that one is not still capable of doing anything and everything -- so too, one begins to perceive that there is no external limit or check on one's ability to follow one's own interests and ideas where'er they wilt. There is a constraint upon oneself -- but it is nothing more than the fact that one only wants to will oneself to do so many things. One is limited to doing what one wants to do, which is not so tragic a state after all.
Baker's book is, if nothing else, a celebration of pursuing one's interests, however fine-grained. It is a meditation on the sheer pleasure of thinking and cataloguing the world around oneself. For this reason, the narrator explicitly rejects the counsels of despair offered by many of the great philosophers.
When -- in a brief moment during his lunch hour -- he manages to catch fifteen minutes of time to read (and this struggle to find time to read I almost never see acknowledged in any other novels, which present us with an endless parade of "well-read" individuals without ever depicting them in the act of becoming well-read, as I've complained about before, so I greatly appreciate it seeing here in Baker's work) -- Howie turns to an early page in Marcus Aurelius. The Roman Stoic and Emperor says something dark and brooding about the hopeless and futile nature of all mortal existence.
"Wrong, wrong, wrong!" thinks Howie in response. "Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue!-- but harmless, even agreeably sobering, to a man sitting on a green bench on a herringbone-patterned brick plaza[...]"
Of all the books ever written out there that have tried to say something uplifting and encouraging about the human situation, I find Baker's to be one of the most successful -- if one of the most eccentric -- in actually portraying a happy mind at work. This -- the joyous pursuit of thought, using every inch of material at hand -- is perhaps one plausible version of what is meant by contentment and human flourishing.
I'm reminded of a conclusion I reached in a short non-poem, a few months ago, and which I wrote before I ever could have known how perfectly Baker's novel would advance the same principle:
There’s so much time to fill up
In the course of a human life
You might as well be interested
In everything
No comments:
Post a Comment