The Anthologist: A Novel

Description

The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder -- a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought.

What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.

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Customer Reviews

You have to read the unchosen poems to understand the chosen ones.
"You can start anywhere," as narrator Paul Chowder says in this delightful little book. (He was talking about writing poetry, or mowing the lawn.) So I'll just start right here, and write a little bit about some of the things that I really liked about this novel.

Firstly, I like Paul Chowder himself. His semi-stream of consciousness monologue about poems and plums (poems that don't rhyme - like the ones Paul writes), his feelings of ambivalence about modern poetry and the poetry culture, his sadness and hurt over the loss of Roz, his live-in girlfriend for the past nine years, and his ironic, self-effacing and (what seems genuinely) honest views of himself. He's not self-absorbed, as one reviewer I read suggested; he's just alone and lonely and fumbling around, trying to plan his next move at an emotional crossroads.

He's about my age (early 50's), I guess, and a somewhat successful poet (three published collections, past winner of a Guggenheim), but nevertheless struggling financially. He can't teach to sustain himself, because teaching makes him a professional liar - telling all those young students that their attempts at poetry are worth reading is simply lying. But he has a lot to teach, and he does so charmingly from start to finish as he rehearses in his mind the themes of the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming poems he has compiled called "Only Rhyme". He starts by saying he's going to tell us everything he knows about poetry, and though I doubt that he really does accomplish that, he does tell us a lot.

He tells us of his admiration for the great rhyming poets, and about his disillusionment when his fourth-grade teacher encourages the class to write in free verse: "It doesn't have to rhyme!" He tells us that the controversy over the importance of rhyming in poetry goes back 500 years. He acknowledges that free verse has given many more people the freedom to try their hand at poetry (natural rhymers are rare) and that his own career started with that schoolteacher - his own poems don't rhyme, they're plums. He tells us his strongly held views on meter: the natural English language meter is the four-beat line, the ballad stanza, root of great poetry and pop music. He declaims against the lauded status of the (imported from French) iambic pentameter: it's not five beats to a line he insists, it's six when you include the all important end-of-line rest; the rhythm is really a three-beat count, not six beats, like a waltz; the word iamb is itself not iambic. ("The real rhythm of poetry is a strolling rhythm. Or a dancing rhythm. A gavotte, a minuet, a waltz.") As if to emphasize the importance of rhythm, Paul is always setting famous verse to his own tunes. He warns of the dangers of "enjambment", especially in its "ultra-extreme" form. And he tells us countless anecdotes and bits of gossip about the whole population of nineteenth and twentieth century poets.

I like the fact that through it all, Paul takes the reader on quite an entertaining and informative tour and reviews his thoughts on poets and poetry, on rhyme and meter, thoroughly enough to allow him at long last to spill out his anthology introduction in a whirlwind three days - but instead of the targeted forty pages, the introduction weighs in at two hundred thirty-nine (four pages short of the length of this book!). It will need some cutting, but this book doesn't - I like all two hundred and forty-three pages.

It's not clear how much of what Paul Chowder tells us reflects Baker's own views - Paul is the narrator of a novel after all. But his nostalgia for rhyming poetry (he "always secretly want[s] it to rhyme" when he comes across a new poem in a magazine, journal or anthology, "don't you?"), sensible as it seems to philistine me, is a bit too heretical: even when lamenting the unfashionableness of rhyming, he takes careful pains to acknowledge the greatness of modern poetry and many (non-rhyming) modern poets, even Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom he deplores.

Paul starts by saying that "poetry is prose in slow motion". He notes that in poetry there is no distinction between fiction and non-fiction. And he avers "poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing." True, true and true. And by these standards, this wonderful book should be thought of prose-poetry. How's this for slow motion prose:

"Another inchworm fell on my pant leg. They germinate in quantity somewhere up in the box elder. It was still for a moment, recovering from the fall, and then its head went up and it began looping, groping for something to climb onto. It looked comfortably full of metamorphosive juices - full of the short happiness of being alive."

As mentioned, it is always unclear whether the views on poetry that Paul expresses are "nonfiction" in the sense of revealing the author's own views. And the narrative is nothing if not a controlled sob over Paul's career to-date, his poetry, his future ("Poetry is a young man's job."), and his loss of Roz. Eventually, the sobs burst out as Paul delivers a master class at the "Global Word Congress" (a conclave of "masses" of poets) in Switzerland. He even ironically throws in a bit of iambic pentameter in the first line of a chapter following the one in which he presents his unorthodox disquisition on the classic meter: "A freakish mist lies over the land. [rest]"

And like a poem, this novel demands to be read a second time - which I did immediately, for a better understanding and for the pleasure.

There's not much narrative tension here, not much in the way of building action, climax, resolution and denouement. "Oh plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself." But as Paul packs up his collection of books (anthologies) and pines for his lost Roz (whose breasts, like poetry, "don't have to rhyme, but they do."), he draws the reader into sympathy with his situation, with his reflections on the past and present of poetry, and (for me at least) with his optimism about its rhyming future:

"And I'm sure there will be a genuine adept who strides into our midst in five or ten years. The way Frost did. Sat up in the middle of that spring pool, with the weeds and the bugs all over him. He found the water that nobody knew was there. And that will happen again. All the dry rivulets will flow. And everyone will understand that new things were possible all along."

There's a lot to like here, and it makes me want to know more of Baker's work. But before I do that, there are a lot of poets and a lot of poetry I need to catch up with.


Paul McMahon
July 2010

2010-07-24 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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A Poet's Novel
I loved this book. It spoke to basically every insecurity I have as a poet. This book is about Paul Chowder, a poet who is suffering from a manic case of writer's block. In this novel, we spend a pretty good amount of time in Chowder's head as he discusses his reasons for not writing, his failing relationship with his girlfriend, and the craft of poetry. Nicholson Baker creates an intelligent character who is flawed, sad, and at times, pretty funny. Paul Chowder is at all times interesting. I highly recommend this book, especially if you're a poet.The Anthologist: A Novel

2010-07-01 | poetkat (Marina del Rey, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Musings on poetry
It's probably never happpened before that I read a book so UNplot-driven. I found this book listed among the best of 2009 by the The New York Times, Amazon, and one other notable list that escapes me at the moment. So I checked it out of the library. I became intrigued with the voice of the narrator, Paul Chowder, so I kept reading. I think maybe this book is a bit too long, even at 240 pages. About half-way through, I began to get antsy. I started skimming through the long passages about iambic pentameter, Theodore Roethke and Sara Teasdale. Wanting to find out how things turned out with Paul's former girlfriend, Roz, I finished the book. I did learn that Ezra Pound was a fascist, at least according to Paul Chowder, which I did not know, despite being an English major in college.

2010-05-07 (renton) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Before I was finished my first read through, I went out and bought my own copy
It's the voice of The Anthologist that hooked me by page two. Here is a voice that let's the reader relax, sit down, and meander through the images Baker creates as Paul Chowder (the main character) shares his knowledge of poetry and his world view. In the first chapter, we are invited up into Chowder's writing space, the second floor of his barn. We are greeted by one of the mainstays of poetic imagery, a shaft of light. But the image does not feel trite, it feels like our own shaft of light, the one we may have been looking for, the one we are hoping to place our own white plastic chair (Chowder's chair of choice)into for comfort and inspiration. We listen as Chowder shares his secrets, his self doubts, and his fear that it's the secrets below the surface which are both true and unreachable. Buy this book if you want to meet a writer you can trust.

2010-02-28 | (Lee) (NewJersey) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Novel?
Baker's narrator is a writer with what might be called a "block," who has lost his lover, and who comes across as something more than an anti-hero because of his erudition and gentle personality, but who is without doubt someone who is less than effectual. If this is a novel (as the cover tells the reader it is), then it's one with not a lot of novelistic things going on. What is going on is some of the best poetic criticism and analysis you're likely ever to get outside an Ivy League classroom. For that, it probably deserves more stars. If you're even a little bit interested in poetry, you need to read this book.

2010-02-10 | JLC (North Carolina) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

Description

The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age.

With meticulous detective work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for preservation, even cashing in his own retirement account to save one important archive–all twenty tons of it. Written the brilliant narrative style that Nicholson Baker fans have come to expect, Double Fold is a persuasive and often devastating book that may turn out to be The Jungle of the American library system.

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Customer Reviews

Interesting but often unreasonable
Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a fiery polemic dedicated to the task of protecting what he sees as one of our nation's most important resources: our libraries' massive stockpile of seldom-used older books and newspapers. As Baker explains, the extent of our paper reserves of old newspapers and rarely read old books is dwindling, often being chopped up and "preserved" (that is, their content, rather than their form, is preserved) in either microform or a digital format.

Baker's position is not a nuanced one; we need to save everything. To do this, libraries need to purchase warehouses, warehouses basically without end, so that not a Sun-Times or musty tome is thrown aside. The very first sentence in the summary on the back cover reads "The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word" which shows Baker may have a basic confusion between the definition of a library and the definition of a repository, but never mind: the point is, Baker says, a library neglects its duties when it throws away disused materials.

Baker's writing style is eloquent and engaging; however, the entire book is dominated by a one-sided and hostile tone, along with his distinctly uncharitable characterization of his opponents.

I think the basic philosophical difficulty in Baker's position can be found in the chapter with the title "A Swifter Conflagration." Here, Baker fully reveals his philosophical position that all pieces of written media are valuable as individual objects. It is not merely enough that a rarely-used book's contents are preserved somewhere; merely disposing of a particular object is itself always a dereliction of duty.

Baker says:
"The truth is that all books are physical artifacts, without exception, just as all books are bowls of ideas [i.e. textual content]. They are things and utterances both. And libraries, [Baker's ally] believes, since they own, whether they like it or not, collections of physical artifacts, must aspire to the conditions of museums. All their books are treasures, in a sense..."

This is a rather overstated thesis. Some books and newspapers are valuable essentially for their own sake, rare books such as the Gutenberg Bibles, for example. However, it doesn't follow that every library must preserve every non-duplicate book or newspaper on its shelves, some of which, such as pulp novels, are almost certainly disposable once their shelf-life is over. What Baker calls for is for libraries to devote large portions of their physical holdings to items that, not virtually, but literally, do not circulate.

Clearly, there are some documents for which preserving the content, as opposed to the object, is enough. Sometimes a microform copy may be enough. But in any case, a non-print version of some kind will be enough for a large number of items, such as research and journal articles is certainly enough.

There are times in Double Fold when Baker seems to be using the sheer confidence of his vituperation to slip some questionable logic past the reader. At one point Baker complains that the Library of Congress threw out ten million dollars worth of public property. However, his criterion for this figure is replacement value. This is a somewhat meaningless, almost sneaky figure. A lot of otherwise worthless things might be rather pricey to replace. Being difficult to replace does not make something valuable in the first place.

This is not say there are not some worthwhile themes in Double Fold. Baker's complaints about microform are well taken, his call for a national repository even more so. While I may disagree that individual libraries are responsible for every physical document they've ever possessed, it would be nice for historians if they could expect to find them somewhere.

Baker also provides the reader with an entertaining and occasionally fascinating history of book "preservation," including the disastrous use of large, book-filled, black-goo spurting tanks of explosive gas, formerly owned by NASA. Another memorable anecdote involves the creation of paper from the wrappings of Egyptians mummies.

The fact that Baker's book is quite biased and sometimes infuriating should not dissuade an intelligent reader from giving it a shot; however, some practical knowledge of libraries and a questioning attitude are prescribed.

2007-06-01 (Pittsburgh, PA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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Librarians or vandals?
Well, pretty clearly vandals. Let me give another example or two of how right Baker is. I've been doing some historical research on various topics in 19th and early 20th century New Hampshire and Vermont history. Newspapers of the time are full of relevant information. Alas, actual copies of the newspapers I need no longer exist. Specifically, the Hanover (NH) Gazette, Burlignton (VT) Free Press, etc. All have been destroyed and now exist only on microfilm, much of which is simply unreadable. It would be one thing if librarians had microfilm copies of newspapers produced AND kept the originals so that those of us who needed to consult the originals could do so. But they didn't. They tossed the originals and these no longer exist. If this isn't vandalism, I don't know what is.

2007-05-13 (Chappaqua, NY United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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I See No Conspiracy
I don't doubt the author's word that there are isolated examples of libraries discarding old papers but I dont see any Orwellian conspiracy.
As a graduate student in Library Science and Information Studies, I would much rather manage e-books simply because paper is a big hassle. I also get tired of seeing trees cut down for untouched books.
Furthermore, managing information technology as opposed to baby sitting books has more appeal to employers and provides more cover for higher salaries.
Schools of Library Science/Information Studies can attract better students and more students to degree programs that provide skills as opposed to esoteric book studies.
However, there is no conspiracy against paper. To the contrary, the State University of Iowa offers graduate classes dealing purly with book studies.

2006-05-28 (Tampa, Fl. USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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An eye opener for the realists
Would suggest this be listed in the Hall of Fame.

2005-08-18 (Toronto) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Hilarious and ridiculous
...to even think of blaming libraries. Maybe if high powered political figures on library boards across America didn't feel the need to make their served institutions "All Things to All People" and got back to core values, and if the American public could turn off American Idol and reality TV long enough to end the Reign of the Retard, there would be the support for libraries needed to house all the items ever published anywhere, and every Podunktown can have it's own Library of Congress. Guess you've truly made it when you've sold enough books you can bite a hand that feeds you, Mr. Baker.

However that does not detract from the quality of his writing, stellar as usual.

2004-07-02 | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 1

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Mezzanine

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780802144904
• Persuade: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Nerve, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and work to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

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Customer Reviews

A bravura performance for the first half of the ride . . .
. . . but after that it becomes bumpy and herky-jerky and threatens to stall out altogether, so that I was glad when I finally made it to the mezzanine and the end of the book.

THE MEZZANINE has no plot. Instead, the first person narrator, Howie, notices and meditates on all sorts of commonplace minutia of the life of an office-worker, circa 1985. His account is centered around an escalator ride in the lobby of an office building up to the mezzanine, where he works for a large company. This particular escalator ride took place as Howie returned to the office from his lunch break, during which, among other things, he bought new shoelaces to replace the pair whose second lace broke during the morning (the first lace having broken only two days earlier, the coincidence triggering all sorts of detailed and convoluted theories about shoe lace wear and tear).

Howie is something of a doofus. Even as an adult, he occasionally entertains himself by trying to retie his shoes "without seeming rushed" as he rides up an escalator; he regularly brushes his tongue as well as his teeth; while standing at the urinal in a men's room, he often is so cowed by others standing next to him that he can't release his stream; and he is addicted to earplugs, wearing them most of the day and night, even when sleeping with his girlfriend.

Many of his observations and ruminations involve changes in the "technology" and design of everyday objects and apparatus - for example, straws (paper vs. plastic), interior lighting (incandescent vs. fluorescent), paper towel dispensers vs. hot-air blowers, door knobs, and vending machines. His other principal subjects are minor social conventions (such as the "two ideal ways to wind up a light conversation with a co-worker") and the microscopic deconstruction of everyday actions (such as tying shoelaces).

In truth, THE MEZZANINE is much more interesting than the above probably makes it sound. Also it frequently is funny, at times quite funny. Nicholson Baker is uncommonly percipient, he has a very fertile and creative mind, and he writes well. And there are footnotes! Lots of footnotes, some quite lengthy, including one extended footnote on footnotes. (Baker once said in an interview that THE MEZZANINE "was an attempt to stop time by expanding the length of the paragraph by using the footnote as a kind of fermata.")

This is the fourth of Baker's books that I have read, but it was his first published novel. For perhaps the first half of the book, I was entranced. It was a bravura performance, and I was gravitating towards the opinion that Baker's first published work surely had to be (like the first album of some singer/songwriters) his very best. But my enthusiasm did not last for the entire escalator ride. The conceit begins to wear; Baker begins to indulge himself in showing off; he occasionally becomes catty and irksome; and he also has his overly gross moments (for example, imaginary urination in the faces of men standing near him at men's room urinals and real-life boyhood urination into sanitary napkins swiped from his mother's closet). The novel is novel and accomplished (especially for a first novel), but it also is moderately flawed.

2010-04-26 (Santa Fe, NM) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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details
If your into details of your surroundings and things that happen around you, this book is for you. Laughing out loud, alot! Excellent.

2010-02-10 (Wisconsin) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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A torturous failure in experimental fiction
It's really painful for me to read the fawning praise by other Amazon reviewers lionizing this book for its originality. The entire work could serve as a cliché for artistic pretentiousness at its worst, an exercise in trivial and transparently post-modern intellectual narcissism. Often when you hear an artist's work described as `experimental', it's code for `original but not very good.' This book effectively epitomizes the notion of experimentalism gone awry. Since there is basically no story, we are left with the writing - unremarkable at best - and the ideas, which basically catalogue frivolous lines of thought in which the narrator marvels at the breaking of his shoelaces two days apart, the evolution from milk delivery to cartons, the pleasures of refilling a stapler, and other nonsense. In effect, the author thought it would be clever to hit the reader over the head for 150 pages with life's absurdity. How could this be entertaining? I wondered too and made the mistake of finding out.

I read another reviewer, doubtless agitated by some reference to the book's vapidity, declare that people focus too much on the big questions, when it is really the minutiae that make the difference in our quality of life. I disagree. The reason people differentiate between minutiae and the important is precisely because one is far more relevant to our existence than the other. Maybe there is some nihilistic wisdom in cultivating a jubilant reaction to menial tasks and minor feats of engineering, giving exaggerated meaning and joy to people whose lives are otherwise ordinary and mediocre in every facet, but it's boring as hell to read about.

2008-06-09 (Ottawa) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 1

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Seinfeld on Crack
Imagine describing 3 minutes of minutaie for an entire book. That's Mezzanine. One of my favorites though. A real brain screw.

2008-04-17 (Trumbull, CT) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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Unreadable
I enjoyed baker's previous books, VOX and Fermata, but found this book to be completely unreadable and boring.

2008-04-06 | meilichios (Houston, Texas United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Vox

Description

Baker has written a novel that remaps the territory of sex--solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. Written in the form of a phone conversation between two strangers, Vox is an erotic classic that places the author in the first rank of America's major writers. Reading tour.

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Customer Reviews

Wetter than Whitewater
If you've read the Starr Report, the voluminous document which recounts, along with his other alleged misdeeds, President Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, then you probably have heard of "Vox." Mr. Starr summarily refers to it as "a novel about phone sex by Nicholson Baker that, according to Ms. Lewinsky, she gave the President in March 1997." (Clinton, treating Lewinsky as he would a visiting head of state, gave her a special edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." In a thank you note to "Mr. P.," Lewinsky writes, "Whitman is so rich that one must read him like one tastes a fine wine or good cigar - take it in, roll it in your mouth, and savor it!") Flouting the subpoenas of two grand juries, Clinton failed to produce his copy of "Vox," although the Report cites it in a list of books in his private study. Could it be that the book was just so dear to him that he couldn't bear to part with it? Clinton was a Rhode's scholar, after all, and "Vox" is something of a classic (although, as a classic of the erotica subgenre, it has enticements and charms other than its literary merit). As for Ms. Lewinsky, she proves as lubricious yet literate in her choice of presents as she does in her assessment of Whitman. "Lubricious yet literate" might aptly apply to "Vox," as well, but before conflating the giver and gift, read this novel, savor it, and enjoy its sex, guilt-free.

When a writer, particularly a male one, writes about sex, he runs at least two risks: 1) Should he write the scene ham-handedly he may remind his reader of a little boy grinding together the erogenous zones of his sister's Barbie dolls, or 2) should he write the scene perhaps too vividly he may turn the reader off with an impression of shady, prurient voyeurism. Mr. Baker adroitly avoids both pitfalls by strictly limiting the narrator's intrusion to the reportage of dialogue between two paying customers on a phone-sex hotline. ("`What are you wearing?' he asked. She said, `I'm wearing a white shirt with little stars, green and black stars, on it, and pants, and socks the color of the green stars, and a pair of black sneakers I got for nine dollars.'") Since we are prying with our ears and not our eyes, we learn no more about them (and what they are doing) than they consent to share with each other. That is not to say that they don't share quite a bit. They do, everything from their pet names for the opposite sex's anatomy (Jim calls breasts "frans.") and the random mental images that crop up when they come (such as, in Abby's case, the great seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) to their most vivid fantasies and experiences. While even a modern erotica urtext like Pauline Réage's "The Story of O" can be boring, "Vox" never is, probably because its protagonists are subtly yet strongly drawn, and the stories that they tell are quirkily playful, dramatically taut and deliciously sexy. Above all else, Jim and Abby are so inherently likable that I exalted in their good fortune and practically rooted them on towards orgasm:

"This is a miracle," he said.

"It's just a telephone conversation."

"It's a telephone conversation I want to have. I love the telephone."

If I were a love-doctor, I would recommend that you take a cue from Bill and Monica, read "Vox," and learn to love the telephone, too.

[...]

2010-07-02 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Baker Borrows from Roth
Basically an experimental novel told entirely in dialogue, between a man and a woman speaking exclusively on the phone through a sex chat line service. A borrowed narrative concept from Philip Roth's "Deception," the book succeeds at what it's trying to accomplish (which is essentially to titillate the reader and give them the impression that they're on the other end of the party line, just listening in and imagining what is going on in the privacy of these two people's homes, one on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast). There are no physical descriptions of the characters or their surroundings, so all of that is supplied strictly from the dialogue, which isn't necessarily "the truth" as each or both of them could possibly be "unreliable narrators" -- even though the author doesn't tip his hand in either direction on that. I barrelled through it in a couple of hours, not leaving the book with anything new or learned, but still enjoying the sojourn into these people's evening conversation.

If you've already read this and liked it, I'd suggest picking up Roth's "Deception," which is similar in form and tone, but richer in character and circumstance.

2010-01-24 | book-y (Los Angeles) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Phone Sex for the Literary Inclined
I read this title in a matter of hours, not only because of the simplistic writing technique, but because I could barely find it in myself to put it down. Written without chapter breaking points, the book is a novella-length dialogue between two lonely strangers who call a dating hotline. There are a few "he said" "she said" moments, but very few and far between, with everything gathered through their conversation alone. Though in the wrong hands this technique could drive away readers, Baker uses it to captivate and draw the reader into the conversation. To say that the text doesn't excite, in more ways than one, would be a disservice to the author as up to the very last page, when the two strangers reach a culmination in their dialogue and meander into the awkward downtime that follows, I wanted little more than to read the book over.

Keep in mind, however, that this book isn't for everyone: the dialogue-only technique can be strangling for some readers, and in no way should this be considered "light reading" for anyone younger than their teenage years. Of course, when teenagers do read this, I wouldn't be surprised if the urge to explore beyond the normal reaches of their room reaches a breaking crescendo.

[...]

2008-12-01 (Bridgeport, CT USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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The Joy of Anonymous Indecency...
This is a naughty little book with a scalding reputation. Many know that Monica Lewinsky gave a copy of the salacious "Vox" to then President Bill Clinton. A very quick read reveals the implications behind such an offering. It's about as direct and unambiguous as a gift gets. In the nuclear political fallout, author Nicholson Baker catapulted into the mainstream. The hubbub around "Vox" arguably solidified his literary career.

Put as bluntly as possible, this book deals with the anonymous and faceless pleasures that many find in phone sex. Though new and ridiculously interactive technology has since surfaced that makes a mere conversation seem tame in comparison, "Vox" nonetheless maintains some of its shock value some sixteen years later. One reason is that the written word perfectly captures the purely syntactical eroticism of a dirty telephone conversation. No faces. No direct physical interaction between parties. All words and imagination to stimulation. Nothing else.

The conversation that ensues within remains nameless to the end. Plus, the paradoxical human condition tends to allow more intimacy in anonymous situations. People can shamelessly reveal themselves to those they will likely never meet. In "Vox," a west coast man and an east coast woman do just that. Their explicit and intimate conversation belies the stark impersonal nature of their medium of choice: "2VOX," a phone bank advertised in adult magazines. They filter out the overstimulated rabble and enter a "private" phone line. They never address the concern that someone may be listening in. In any case, the reader, in full voyeur mode, does listen in to every word and guttural noise. Some might feel guilty after finishing this book, complete with its literary and, um, "other" forms of climax.

"Vox" remains a fun, if somewhat superficial, read. Baker's penchant for capturing conversation shines at full prominence here. The stories and fantasies shared range from the hilarious to the outright pornographic. The woman fantasizes about being stuck in a hole in the wall surrounded by strapping painters. Of course they paint. The man tells his tale about convincing Emily, a woman with seductively long arms, to his apartment to watch a dubbed European "blue movie." They ask each other what they're doing, how they're dressed, about their deepest secrets, and most significant conquests. The woman once used olive oil and a shower head in creative ways. She shares this ditty with the man, who brings the entire conversation to a satisfying conclusion by utilizing his "Mmmm-Detector." The question arises whether they will talk again, and the book ends with Baker's signature "unresolved resolution."

Evaluating this book remains problematic. Of course it's a titillating page-turner. It's dang fun. But does it rise above literary smut? At the very least, it represents highly creative, intriguing, well-written and engaging smut. At best, it explores the vastness of human sexuality interfacing with anonymous technology. Though the characters seem to reveal their deepest secrets, they remain strangely unknown in the conduits of telecommunications. That they nonetheless manage to have a meaningful and satisfying encounter despite distance and intangibility, remains one of the book's most poignant tensions. Some may be put off by the explicitness of certain passages. Many would doubtless give "Vox" an "X" rating. But many will find the exploration a liberating and enticing read, regardless of how one rates its literary qualities. Baker further explored these themes in a later book, the even dirtier "Fermata." Though a little tamer, "Vox," given the political controversy that surrounded it and subsequent attention it received, will stand as Baker's breakout novel.

2008-11-11 | ewomack (MN USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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a complicated mind
This is a quick little read-just over 40,000 words-about a man and a woman having phone sex. I've always borne the prejudice that nothing could be less interesting than phone sex, particularly somebody else's phone sex. And yet, here we have two people who stray from the topic at hand (so to speak)and from behind the cloak of anonymity, let fly some marvelously revealing fragments of everyday life.
Baker has the man say at one point 'an orgasm in a complicated mind is always more interesting than one in a simple mind'. Aside from the acknowledgment that orgasms happen in the mind, this is a wonderful moment. It's one of the many points in this little book when two people take quiet note of each other's humanity. Read this alongside Philip Roth's Deception-a book that's structurally identical and worlds away in spirit.

Lynn Hoffman, author of the novel bang BANG

2008-07-03 (Philadelphia) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Room Temperature

Description

In his second novel, Baker turns a young father's feeding-time reverie into a catalog of the minutiae of domestic love.

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Nicholson Baker writes in 360-degree Sensurround--his descriptions of the seemingly banal awakening the most jaded of senses into recognition, admiration, and amusement. In Room Temperature, his self-deprecating, endlessly curious narrator is at home giving his baby girl a bottle and allowing his mind to wander. Uppermost in his thoughts are his wife and daughter, but there is also that obsession with commas and some concern with tiny taboos like nose-picking and stealing change from his parents. Truth-telling is the operative mode; at one point he tries to get his wife to explain a doodle by quoting a review of early Yeats: "Always true is always new." Room Temperature is a rare novel of domestic pleasure and stability, with a twist. "Was there ever a limit between us? Would disgust ever outweigh love?" Baker's alter ego asks, and seems determined to find out.

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Customer Reviews

Not what I thought it would be.
I do like this author's style, but despite finishing the book I felt it might have been handled differently, the subject matter. He does have keen insights into human nature, but not all of us can relate to them.

2009-12-01 | Shel (Carlsbad, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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The Breath
Room Temperature is certainly about a father and his child, but there is so much more. In typical Baker style, he examines minutia with elucidating commentary. This, in itself, is worth reading the novel; however, the quality that makes it transcend happens to be his ability to unite the entire book with its central theme: Breath. From the comma, to the mobile in his child's room, to tuba lessons, breath pervades - breath as its metaphor to remember to cherish every moment.

I have never seen a novel so effortlessly and imperceptibly weave a central idea throughout a book. Read this novel for both it compelling insight but also for the extraordinary literary technique.

2003-04-11 | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Sophomore Jinx
A major disappointment after The Mezzanine. Baker goes to the well once too often by trying to recreate that excellent book here. That first book seemed to avoid crossing over into pretentiousness by giving us a self-deprecating narrator and by simply pouring on the wit and intelligent observations and forcing you to laugh. Here, pretentiousness and self-indulgence abound. The subject matter is just far too personal to connect with the reader and, simply, it seems that Nick didn't try as hard the second time around. If you enjoyed the pretentious and turgid essay "Lumber," then this might be for you, but if you were drawn to this book after reading more engaging Baker fare such as U and I, The Mezzanine or Vox, stay away.

2000-05-08 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 2

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praise for attention to details in "whatever" world
I have read all of Mr.Bakers books, and with the exception of "The Everlasting Story..." (which indeed did seem to be everlasting) have read them with delight. Although he's often compared to Updike, I think he surpasses him due to his wit and his more creative sense of the strangeness of life. In "Room Temperature" we find the antidote, along with his other novels, to a modern world obsessed with speed, impersonal technology and the summational catchphrase "whatever". How wonderful it is to see an author bend his mind and spirit to the details of life with so much talent and fervor. And how wonderful to see that his books, plotless and demanding of full attention as they are, sell so well. It gives me hope for our civilization; it really does. On a sidenote - I am tired of critics and readers thinking he is cheapening his prose by writing on sexual topics. Sex is one of the most universal and fascinating and character-revealing subjects around; a great writer can make anything cerebral and holy, and a writer needs to go where his passions lie. Besides, do we really want every novel to be about rubber bands and bathroom hot air dryers?

1999-11-11 | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 4

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Tender, engrossing
Probably the most undeservedly overlooked of Nicholson Baker's novels, Room Temperature is a delightful, heartwarming tome.

Any attempt at synopsis would only serve to make the book sound dreadfully boring. After all, during the entire 116 pages the narrator is feeding his small child. No car chases or steamy love scenes. Just a father feeding his baby.

Rather than relying on typical, often stale plot devices, Baker relies on his considerable talent at description to maintain the reader's interest, and he succeeds in a big way. Room Temperature is touching in a way that none of his other books are. The father-child bond is explored in such breathtaking detail that one finds the book impossible to put down, despite the lack of a discernable plot.

Nicholson Baker is not for everyone. His quirky prose and lack of traditional plot lines are sure to put off many readers, but fans of Updike are sure to find a great read in Room Temperature

1997-10-29 | andrew2 (Cincinnati, OH USA) | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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The Fermata

Description

Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish "X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay" (Seattle Times). "Sparkling."--San Francisco Chronicle.

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The Fermata is the most risky of Nicholson Baker's emotional histories. His narrator, Arno Strine, is a 35-year-old office temp who is writing his autobiography. "It's harder than I thought!" he admits. His "Fold-powers" are easier; he can stop the world and use it as his own pleasure ground. Arno uses this gift not for evil or material gain (he would feel guilty about stealing), though he does undress a good number of women and momentarily place them in compromising positions--always, in his view, with respect and love. Anyone who can stop time and refer in self-delight to his "chronanisms" can't be all bad! Like Baker's other books, The Fermata gains little from synopsis. The pleasure is literally in the text. What's memorable is less the sex and the sex toys (including the "Monasticon," in the shape of a monk holding a vibrating manuscript) than Arno's wistful recollections of intimacy: the noise, for instance, of his ex-girlfriend's nail clipper, "which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong."

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Customer Reviews

Wading through graphic sludge
Nicholson Baker immediately grabbed me with his "character can stop time" premise. Really immediate. Like Page One immediate. There aren't a lot of authors that can pull that off, so my hopes for "The Fermata" were high. My interest level remained high as he explored the premise in extreme detail. We all know what men would do with such a power, but how would things like light, sound, electricity, and photography be affected? Baker gives us these fun little details, but he quickly settles in to the book's real focus: hard core erotica. Because I hadn't read any reviews beforehand, it was not exactly what I was expecting.

The first half of the book is a mix of time-control curiosities and sexual titillation. The second half of the book abandons most of the science fiction element and keeps only the erotica. Main character Arno Strine fancies himself an amateur erotic author. Fine. This aspect of the book fills in character details and provides motivations. My objections come from (I'm not exaggerating here) _entire_chapters_ devoted to Arno's amateur porn. The book's premise becomes completely inverted...it's only purpose is to provide author Nicholson Baker with a respectable literary cloak for publishing porn.

The story line becomes so outlandish towards the end, the character dialogue and interactions so ridiculous, that I thought perhaps it would end by revealing that the narrator was simply delusional. If that's what the reader was meant to infer, Baker certainly made no effort to make it easy for them.

Baker's a good author in terms of style. He creates a very credible voice for his protagonist, but what he does with that voice was just too over the top for me. Given his talent and unique treatment of the whole time travel/control fantasy, this book could have been so much more. That's why it's ultimately so dissatisfying.

2010-06-04 | GS23 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Erotic delight
Hidden in this wonderful book are some of the best erotic scenes Ive ever read and I both read and write erotica. Great book. Great pacing and plot.

2009-03-22 | Movie Nut (Knoxville USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Excellent!
Everything was smooth and perfect! Condition is excellent, just like new, but about 99% off a regular price! Couldn't have asked for anything better! Shipping was very expedient! I would recommend the seller to everyone!

2009-01-24 | bargain shopper (Chatham, NY USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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One of my all time faves
Combine part juvenile eroticism with a near genius style of narrative and insight into human nature and you have The Fermata. This is one I have re-read many times and each time another concept seems to leap out at me. If the mature themes of "Vox" or "The Fermata" are a put off, try "The Mezzanine" or "U and I". In every book, Baker's ability to create tangential meanderings through many everyday situations that we often pay too little attention to and as a result never gain the the threads of connection that runs though our thoughts and deeds never ceases to leave me awestruck and left to ponder a million thoughts all at once.

2008-12-26 | Puckle (Denver CO United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A Great Idea Wasted, Forget About It
The other 1-star reviewers are right: this book is a HUGE disappointment. I got both so bored and disgusted, I couldn't even finish it. The idea of being able to stop time is wonderful and exciting, but this author does absolutely nothing with it but masturbate. On top of it, it's very sexist, even though he tries to argue that he really isn't all that bad. He is. What a sick mind! The protagonist and author show zero respect for women and try to make you believe that everyone would act exactly as he does. This world would be a lousy place if he were right. I really loved The Mezzanine, though, what a pity.

2008-12-03 (USA/Germany) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 1

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