Ironies In The Fire. Originally published in The Bookpress, May 2003. A Box of Matches Nicholson Baker Random House, 178 pages $19.95 While talking with a librarian recently at a dinner party, I happened to mention Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, a book about the preservation—or lack thereof—of books and newspapers in libraries. The book had created something of a stir in library circles when it was published a couple of years ago, so I thought my comment might elicit some kind of reaction. I wasn’t disappointed. A demure cough, an eye-roll. “Oh, him,” said my librarian friend. That was pretty much the end of our conversation. Indeed, everyone seems to have a strong reaction to Nicholson Baker. The sexually explicit, and very funny, novels Vox and The Fermata threw plenty of people into a tizzy, including Stephen King, who (rather gratuitously, I think) dismissed Vox, in the introduction to one of his story collections, as a “fingernail-paring.” This same book returned to seamy prominence in the dark summer of 1998 when a copy was revealed to have passed between The President and The Intern. And Baker’s new book, A Box of Matches, has provoked two diametrically opposed outbursts from the same newspaper: Michiko Kakutani’s ritual disembowelment in the daily New York Times, and Walter Kirn’s ecstatic volley in its book review. On the surface, all this passion seems awfully unlikely—both in print and in person, Baker is mild-mannered. Even his most impassioned piece of nonfiction, Double Fold, approaches the reader first with a tentative tap on the shoulder, and then a deferent bow, before it begins its ardent, and effective, harangue. But this politeness on the page is deceptive. Baker is a radical writer, a throwback in manner but a rebel in approach. His books lack plots, or any kind of traditional character development. They are stridently erudite, but never pretentious. They are self-absorbed, but never claustrophobic. Like all excellent books, they are completely idiosyncratic, following an internal logic rather than one imposed by tradition. A Baker book wanders, stumbles, circles back, consults its map as it scratches its head—and then, as if by divine intervention, manages to actually get somewhere. Baker has a problem, though: his first book was perfect. The Mezzanine is a small masterpiece of observation and cogitation, a footnote-riddled study of consciousness that inserts an entire universe of perception into a twenty-second escalator ride. It is brief but infinitely large, clutching the entire world into its skinny arms. Its subject, however, is not that world, but the main character’s—and, in this case, the author’s—understanding of it. A bitter irony, then, that this is exactly the problem. The Mezzanine revealed Baker’s mind in its entirety, but that mind is the only one Baker has got, and he has continued to use it to write more books. Much in the way those naked pictures of Madonna—in particular, the one where she’s eating a slice of pizza at the side of the road—ruined her allure, The Mezzanine has made it difficult for Baker to reinvent himself. “More of the same,” a few critics have moaned. There is something to this argument. It is possible to read Room Temperature as The Mezzanine with a baby, or Vox as The Mezzanine with a libido. But this seems to me a stingy point of view, both with regard to Baker and to oneself, as a reader. Surely, The Mezzanine is an original novel, but I prefer to think of Baker as an original writer, one whose particular awareness of the world imprints itself more powerfully on his works than might be the case with most writers. Indeed, I’ve read everything he’s written, and still think he’s pretty terrific. A Box of Matches is described by Random House, on the book’s flap, as “reminiscent of the early novels that established [Baker’s] reputation,” thus plunging it right into the very more-of-the-same quagmire that has dogged its author for twenty years. Certainly, this is how Michiko Kakutani chose to read it. The book is about a man named Emmett, who rises each morning before the sun to light a fire, pick lint out of his navel, and ruminate. He thinks about his wife, their children, and their pet duck. Also urine, suicide, coffee mugs, ants, bank statements and shampoo. He records his momentary physical states: “Now my coccyx hurts,” “An itch just made a guest appearance on my cheek,” “I have a very stuffed nose now.” There are a lot of descriptions of fire, and I like these more than anything else in the book. Here’s the beginning of chapter 20: Good morning, it’s 4:39 a.m. and I just watched a cocktail napkin burn. After its period of flaming was past, there was a long time during which tiny yellow taxicabs did hairpin turns around the mountain passes, tunneling deeper and deeper into the ashen blackness. To my astonishment, Kakutani singled out this very passage to illustrate Baker’s ineptness. Her point is clear—why describe a burning napkin, and if you must, why reach so far for the metaphor?—but I disagree with it. A good description justifies itself, and this one is exactly right, as much of a stretch as it may be. Indeed, a lot of this book is exactly right. Baker’s descriptions are wonderfully inventive and precise; most importantly, they never shy from corniness, drawing from an aesthetically broad collection of sources, lowly and elevated, prim and disgusting. There is a lot of light in A Box of Matches, some of it mundane (“the white spreadsheet of moonlight on the floor”), some of it spectacular (a rising sun “narrowing first and then oozing out as if from a puncture in the seam of the horizon”), much of it refracted through the prism of Emmett’s unabashed nerdiness (the stars as “private needle-holes of exactitude in the stygian diorama”). It is this prism—the warped pane of Emmett’s personality—that must drive the novel, since nothing really happens, and nobody really changes, and no other characters actually appear in real time. They are all asleep, even the duck. But Emmett is plenty. He is bright, content, yet melancholy. It’s not just the suicide fantasies—Emmett’s mind is always turning toward death, the death of pets, of family members. He thinks about his grandmother’s broken back, and his grandfather, author of medical textbooks on fungal disease and autopsies. Emmett himself is an editor of medical textbooks, and is surrounded by the possibility of death; he is always mourning the passing of things: buildings, his mother’s rug, getting to wash his son’s hair. He rescues a spider from the fireplace. A routine household chore leads to a contemplation of “the ungraspableness of history.” This sentimentality lends itself well to his thoughts about the duck—her comfort, the coldness of her feet, the point of her existence. He identifies quite powerfully with this duck. To wit: Last night I was lying in bed when I heard a terribly sad sound, as of a cat in distress or an infant keening in the cold: long, slow, heart-rending cries. I half rose and held my breath and listened intently—was it the duck?—but the sound had stopped… And then, as I resumed breathing, I realized that I was hearing a whistling coming from some minor obstruction in my own nose as I breathed. It is of course irresistible to equate Emmett with Nicholson Baker. The book feels precisely as though Baker came down the stairs of his house every morning before sunrise to light a fire and write a chapter, and stopped when he ran out of matches. At one point Emmett is reading a book on web design. When I’d finished reading I looked up Nicholsonbaker.com and discovered a brand-new, obviously homespun homepage; the hit counter had barely reached 300. But that is fine by me, and we can assume that it’s fine by Baker as well. He is a writer who has made a career out of personal observations, and now, at the midpoint of that career, he is sitting back and calmly taking stock, with a book about a guy who’s sitting back and calmly taking stock. That calm is the book’s strength—only in moments of such calm can we see clearly—but is also its weakness. Part of what made The Mezzanine great is its air of desperation—the overwhelming sense that its author had been waiting all his life for the right moment to get it all down on paper. My other favorite Baker book, U and I, is similarly lively—it is a sweaty-palmed memoir about the author’s obsession with John Updike, and stands as Baker’s riskiest and most revealing work. This desperation is not to be found in A Box of Matches, but so what? A lifetime of desperation is not what this writer needs. In The Mezzanine, in U and I and Double Fold, Baker tapped his anxieties, and he will do it again. This book is different, though, and it ought to be. It is quiet and observant, the product of an agile and unusual mind in a moment of repose. It steals into one’s consciousness as sleep does, inviting the logic of dreams. Think, if you will, of Nicholson Baker as a duck—a pet duck that represents your own vitality, your own mortality. You hope that his feet are warm, that his drinking water won’t freeze in the cold, that there are insects enough in the woodpile to keep him fed. Read this book and be assured: your duck is alive and well. His faculties are all intact, his wings are in fine shape, and his metaphors are as corny as the feed in his bowl, just the way you like them. c2005 by J. Robert Lennon.