More on Baker
Random House’s publicists have been busy over at the New York Times. In the wake of Michiko Kakutani’s blunted drubbing, the newspaper has published an altogether more enthusiastic review by Walter Kirn along with the first chapter of the novel itself.
‘A Box of Matches’: A Miniaturist’s Novel of Details
By WALTER KIRNEver since his early novel ”The Mezzanine” (1988), the story of one man’s journey up an escalator, Baker has made an astonishing specialty of showing just how much is going on in life, and in our heads, when it seems that nothing is. It’s quite a stunt – the fictional equivalent of what magicians call close-up work – and, as with any good card trick, to see it once is to want to see it again immediately. ”A Box of Matches” indulges this wish repeatedly and could probably get by on that alone, but Baker is up to something bigger here. His tight-focus set pieces, though astonishing, are really a calculated misdirection; with his hidden hand he’s writing about love, the energy beam that, diffracted through the brain and the convex lenses of the eyes, creates the rainbow of objects called the world.
‘A Box of Matches’
By NICHOLSON BAKERGood morning, it’s January and it’s 4:17 a.m., and I’m going to sit here in the dark. I’m in the living room in my blue bathrobe, with an armchair pulled up to the fireplace. There isn’t much in the way of open flame at the moment because the underlayer of balled-up newspaper and paper-towel tubes has burned down and the wood hasn’t fully caught yet. So what I’m looking at is an orangey ember-cavern that resembles a monster’s sloppy mouth, filled with half-chewed, glowing bits of fire-meat. When it’s very dark like this you lose your sense of scale. Sometimes I think I’m steering a space-plane into a gigantic fissure in a dark and remote planet.
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Posted to Books • 2003.02.02 (Sun) • 21:09
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