Kakutani on Baker’s A Box of Matches (and why she’s wrong)
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Michiko Kakutani goes to town on Nicholson Baker’s new novel, A Box of Matches.
How to Scratch an Itch, in Painstaking Detail
by Michiko Kakutani, NYTimesRemember that American Express commercial a few years back in which Jerry Seinfeld demonstrated his “perfect pump” technique by making the self-serve pump stop exactly on the dollar? Well, Nicholson Baker tries to recycle that same gas station bit in his spindly new novel. Not only is the book highly derivative — of Mr. Seinfeld’s routines, of Andy Rooney’s crotchety “60 Minutes” monologues and Mr. Baker’s own earlier novels — but it also feels like a particularly disposable artifact from a pre-9/11 world that willfully [sic] celebrated the trivial and minute, what Mr. Baker once called the “little snibbets of the day.”
I read the book last week and enjoyed it, although certainly not in the way I thought I would and I don’t think it had anything to do with my being unfamiliar with Seinfeld or Rooney. Readers expecting a reprise of the earlier novels will be disappointed, although I think there may be a stronger and more significant connection between Room Temperature and The Mezzanine than there seems.
Kakutani writes:
The wit that percolated through “The Mezzanine” – a novel that revolved around the tiny events that take place during a man’s lunch hour – is nowhere to be found in these pages, and the author’s perusal of the small moments in Emmett’s life feels mechanical and contrived. […] These details never add up to a compelling portrait of an individual; instead they seem like random attributes, arbitrarily selected by Mr. Baker and perfunctorily glued together.
“Mechanical and contrived” is not entirely unfair; the book does lack the audacity and high-velocity wit of the earlier books, but the reason lies, it occurs to me, precisely in the details being “arbitrarily selected” and “perfunctorily glued together” because this is what we do everyday. Baker is entertaining and insightful because he identifies and celebrates the little nodes of life over which any reasonably alert and intelligent mind regularly trips. The pleasure we get is that of recognition.
The problem is that Baker occupied his territory so completely as to preclude the possibility of any other claims being made to it. Suddenly here was some dorky guy who absolutely owned the quotidian, in the way that Pynchon owns screwball paranoia, DeLillo owns the “waves and radiation” of our lives and Saunders owns agrammatical dialogue. Who didn’t know that writing on Rubbermaid spatulas and fridge door seals in ball-point pen is one of the great pleasures of life before Baker wrote about it? Yet now the insight, mined from the collective ore, belongs ineluctably to him.
Now Baker’s a smart man – too smart (I would like to think) to be tossing off half-cocked novels of the sort Kakutani seems to think he’s written, and my reading of his novel began to give me the feeling that this annexation of private insight had started bugging him. We’re happy to cede Pynchon his territory because it’s not a place that most of us would like to live, even though we’re enthralled and grateful for the tour. DeLillo’s insights are things we can take with us into life, but Baker’s are things taken from us – although we’re charmed by the wit and grace of the thief as he picks our pockets, the effort he goes through to keep us entertained so that we will pretend not to notice. As I read A Box of Matches, waiting for … something (not something to happen: things don’t ‘happen’ as such in Baker), I began to see in its willed dullness, its abnegation of verbal pyrotechnics, a startling act of generosity. Precisely by means of the “arbitrarily selected” and “perfunctorily glued together” details, Baker returns to us, via Emmett, everything he’s taken before. Emmett’s ordinariness re-humanises a way of looking at the world that Baker’s genius had sort of declared off-limits.
Even the structure of the book – the narrator gets up early every day and each chapter begins with the words “Good morning” – echoes the daily grind in which most of us find ourselves. It’s not a bad conceit for a novel (a little thin, I suppose) but what it means here is that Baker’s act of humility is to be carried out on our terms.
Of course, going into the book I wanted a re-run of The Mezzanine or Room Temperature, and who wouldn’t? They’re both books I’ll be returning to for the rest of my life. But so is this one, I think. It’s a little retro-rocket of a book that’s been fired to nudge the joy of the everyday back into an orbit with us at the centre rather than allowing it to escape into outer space.
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Posted to Books • 2003.01.27 (Mon) • 00:22
Comments
Posted by Mary Beth 2003.01.27, 01:29
I gave this book to my dad for his birthday after reading about it here and leafing through it in the store. It struck me as a very personal telling and I’m looking forward to being next in line to read it.
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