Nicholson Baker
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Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is a contemporary American novelist, whose writings focus on minute inspection of the narrator's stream of thought. His unconventional novels deal with topics like voyeurism and planned assassination, but generally de-emphasize traditional aspects of plot. Baker's enthusiasts appreciate his ability to candidly explore the human psyche, while critics feel that his writing wastes time on trivia (Stephen King has notoriously compared Baker's work with fingernail clippings).
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[edit] Life
Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in Rochester, New York. He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received his B.A. from Haverford College. He lives today with his wife and two children in South Berwick, Maine. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001.
Apart from writing novels, Baker has been a fervent critic of what he perceives as librarians' destruction of paper-based media. He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library sending thousands of books to a landfill, the elimination of card catalogs, and the destruction of old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm. In 1997 Baker received the San Francisco-based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of his efforts.
In 1999, he established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository to rescue old newspapers from destruction by librarians. He published a book in 2001 based on his researches in this area, Double Fold, in which he accuses certain librarians of lying about the decay of materials and having an obsession for technological fads, at the expense of both the public and historical preservation.
[edit] A selection of Nicholson Baker's books
- The Mezzanine: A Novel (1988) is Baker's first book. It presents the thoughts and memories of a young male office worker as he ascends an escalator up to the mezzanine of the office building where he works. The novel created the genre for which Baker is best known and is perhaps its boldest representative. It abounds in long footnotes, including a vivid paean to long footnotes.
- Room Temperature: A Novel (1990) continues in the same spirit as The Mezzanine, though this time the action spans a few minutes at home (in Quincy, Massachusetts). Mike is feeding his baby daughter, "the Bug", as her head rests in the crook of his arm. He blows in the direction of a mobile; twenty seconds and two dozen pages later he is surprised to see the mobile move. Mike's thoughts wander as he contemplates, for example, the possibility of admitting to one's wife that one has been picking one's nose (body functions are discussed extensively, perhaps prompted by the baby's presence) or the juxtaposition of Debussy and Skippy peanut butter jars in a symphonic poem. The novel was reviewed warmly but with no great enthusiasm, as an enjoyable but slightly demure domestic follow-up to The Mezzanine. Mike may be expressing Baker's approach to writing when he thinks "...that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected;"
- U and I: A True Story (1991) is a non-fiction study of how a reader engages with the work of an author: partly an appreciation of John Updike, and partly a kind of self-exploration. Rather than a traditional literary analysis, Baker begins the book by stating that he will read no more Updike than he already has up to that point. All of the Updike quotes used are presented as coming from memory alone.
- Vox: A Novel (1992) covers an episode of phone sex between two young single people. The book created a mild sensation when it was reported that Monica Lewinsky gave a copy to Bill Clinton. The sex scenes in the novel, though quite vivid, nevertheless share the basic approach that Baker has taken since The Mezzanine: in this case, he explores his two characters' accumulated thoughts and memories as they relate to sex. For some readers, Baker's obsession with detail detracted from a hoped-for pornographic effect. Others, in reading the imaginative sex stories that the two protagonists make up for one another, have perceived a budding romantic affection: the last act they perform before hanging up is to exchange phone numbers.
- The Fermata (1994) is perhaps the most controversial of Baker's novels. To quote the dust jacket of one edition: "Arno Strine likes to stop time and take women's clothes off. He is hard at work on his autobiography, The Fermata. It proves in the telling to be a very provocative, funny, and altogether morally confused piece of work."
- The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998) was inspired by Baker's daughter Alice, "the informant", to whom he also dedicates the book. In this book, Baker tries to see the world through the eyes of a curious nine-year-old American girl attending school in England.
- A Box of Matches: A Novel (2003) is in many ways a continuation of Room Temperature, similarly mining the narrator's store of reflections and memories, many of them domestic. The narrator is now middle-aged and has a family. He rises each morning at about 5:30, lights a fire in the fireplace, and ponders. The work is admired, although some have found it rather less exuberant than its predecessor.
- Checkpoint (2004) is composed of dialogue between two old high school friends, Jay and Ben, who discuss Jay's plans to assassinate President George W. Bush. Jay is an unbalanced day laborer who, in the depths of anger and desperation at Bush's actions and his inability to do anything to stop them, has traveled to Washington, D.C. to kill the president. He considers many far-fetched means of killing, such as using depleted uranium boulders, flying radio-controlled CD saws, homing bullets marinated with the President's picture, and hypnotized Manchurian scorpions. Ben has met Jay in a Washington, D.C. hotel room, unaware that his friend is planning to commit "a major, major, major crime." Over the course of the novella Ben discusses what drove Jay to plot an assassination. Baker explores a sense of desperation felt widely at present, as well as the extremes of frustration that a person can be driven to. Reviewers have pointed out that the book is mild and the planned violence so cartoonish that it is not threatening.
[edit] Publication data
[edit] Novels
- The Mezzanine: A Novel (1988, Weidenfeld & Nicolson; ISBN 1-55584-258-5 / 1990, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-72576-8)
- Room Temperature: A Novel (1990, Grove Weidenfeld; ISBN 0-8021-1224-2 / 1990, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-73440-6 / 1990, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014212-6 / 1991, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014021-2)
- Vox: A Novel (1992, Random House; ISBN 0-394-58995-5 / 1992, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-74211-5 / 1992, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014057-3)
- The Fermata (1994, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-75933-6)
- The Everlasting Story of Nory: A Novel (1998, Random House; ISBN 0-679-43933-1 / 1998, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-73440-6)
- A Box of Matches: A Novel (2003, Random House; ISBN 0-375-50287-4 / 2003, Chatto & Windus; ISBN 0-7011-7402-1)
- Checkpoint (2004, Random House; ISBN 1-4000-4400-6)
[edit] Non-fiction
- U and I: A True Story (1991, Random House; ISBN 0-394-58994-7 / 1991 Penguin/Granta; ISBN 0-14-014226-6 (hard) / 1992, Penguin/Granta; ISBN 0-14-014040-9 (paper) /1995, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-73575-5 / 1998, Granta; ISBN 1-86207-097-0)
- The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996, Random House, ISBN 0-679-43932-3 / 1996, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-77624-9 (paper) / 1996, Chatto & Windus; ISBN 0-7011-6301-1 (hard) / 1997, Vintage; ISBN 0-09-957971-5 (paper)
- Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001, Random House; ISBN 0-375-50444-3 / 2001, Vintage; ISBN 0-375-72621-7 / 2002, Vintage; ISBN 0-09-942903-9)
- With Margaret Brentano (his wife). The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898 - 1911) (2005, Bulfinch; ISBN 0-8212-6193-2)
[edit] Secondary literature
- Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Nicholson Baker. University of South Carolina Press, 1999. ISBN 1-57003-303-X
- Star, Alexander. "The Paper Pusher." The New Republic. May 28, 2001. 38-41.
- Cox, Richard J.
- The Great Newspaper Caper: Backlash in the Digital Age
- Vandals in the Stacks? A Response to Nicholas Baker's Assault on Libraries. Greenwood Press, 2002. ISBN 0-313-32344-5
