Nicholson Baker: C / D

This thread has some good discussion: contemporary american novelists (1985-, say) whose work you've most enjoyed

(Not to say this thread isn't worthwhile, too!)

Bert there's a Search function at the bottom of the page that allows you to search only ILX. "Nicholson Baker" turned up 38 threads where he'd been mentioned; you might want to check them out.

Sorry, that's meant to be helpful though I know it sounds condescending.

mostly classic - especially the eary stuff, but should i read "a box of matches"?

i like U&I most - it taps into the fantasy world you live in with your heroes.

And the Clinton Library just opened an exhibit downtown of Bill's Top 25 Books. Unfortunately, Vox wasn't among them.

It also contains a terrific piece of toilet humor, wherein narrator in bathroom stall emits "loud curt fart like the rap of a bongo drum" ("curt fart"!!!!) and his colleagues outside pause and then continue: "Yeah, she's a real asset to the company. . . ." I mention this because it was only while reading U&I that I became aware of Baker's obsession with the very writerly issue of perfect small descriptions, the unshowy kind that are just right in a way you barely even notice -- he's constantly dredging up remembered images from Updike and marveling over them -- and so re-reading Baker with that in mind you wind up thinking "loud curt fart!" (NB I just made a typo on "curt" that was pretty amusing.)

Also The Mezzanine is a great thing to read if you've just started working at an academic press, since the "resolution," such as it is, is . . . . well, it's so not a spoilable plot, but I still can't bring myself to mention the final turn.

Nabisco - i love your love for the Mezzanine but i think that Room Temperature is just as good and that U&I trumps them both.

Anyone read "A Book of Matches"?

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page C01

In Nicholson Baker's new novella, "Checkpoint," a man sits in a Washington hotel room with a friend and talks about assassinating President Bush.

It's a work of the imagination and no attempts on the president's life are actually made, but the novel is likely to be incendiary, as with Michael Moore's documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Flush with the headline-generating success of "My Life," by Bill Clinton, Alfred A. Knopf is planning to publish Baker's work Aug. 24, on the eve of the Republican National Convention. "Checkpoint" is 115 pages long and will sell for $18.

In the book, two men -- Ben and Jay -- meet at the fictional Adele Hotel and Suites in Washington. It is midday. They eat a bag of bagel chips and order lunch from room service. They talk into a tape recorder.

Ben: Obviously you have something on your mind.

Jay: That's true.

Ben: You could begin with that.

Jay: Okay. Uh. I'm going to -- okay. I'll just say it. Um.

Ben: What is it?

Jay: I'm going to assassinate the president.

Though it is against the law to threaten the president in real life, a work of fiction is usually protected by the First Amendment.
--
Part of the article that spittle linked to over on ILBooks

(it also read alot like the contrelpro/white noise/wire tapping/etc) i have read, all of the minituae that people forget when they write crime novels (ellroy remembers?)

A Box of Matches was a nice, quick read. Almost like an epilogue to The Mezzanine, and what I suspect is borderline autobiographical.

i think it may well be his best book. i found it strangely moving.

I almost wanted to start waking up at 4:30 to read a new chapter each morning.

Almost.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

^^ him on wikipedia. i haven't finished reading it yet, but, yknow, awesome!

That was a nice, if often overly familiar, article.

this new book looks like some kind o' somethin'.

Want

N. Baker goes to Ron Paul/Pat Buchanan land.

rly?

a novel about England in WWII. Anyone read it yet?

it's non fiction

Blowing Smoke
by Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

I read Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization in galleys, obsessively, for hours at a stretch, in the beautiful northern Italian town of Pavia. By the time I finished the book I felt something I had never felt before: fury at pacifists.

This was surely not what Baker had in mind. He dedicates Human Smoke to "American and British pacifists" who "tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening." If everything you knew about World War II came out of this book, you might well agree with Baker: "They failed, but they were right" (the galleys, but not the published book, continue: "Winston Churchill, I'm sorry to say, was wrong"). Baker builds his case against the "good war" in a 471-page collage of scraps and snippets drawn mostly from contemporary accounts--newspaper reports, letters, diaries, memoirs. You watch the war unfold all over the world, as if in real time. Here are the bullies, intent on blood and glory: Hitler, of course; Churchill, delighting in bombing German cities; Roosevelt, refusing to support a bill to admit 20,000 Jewish children as refugees while secretly laying plans to join the war despite his campaign promise to stay out. And over here is a small, valiant cast of people who rejected jingoism, hatred and violence: Clarence Pickett of the American Friends Service Committee; Jeannette Rankin, who cast the lone vote in Congress against both world wars; Muriel Lester and other aid workers, who struggled unsuccessfully against the British ban on food shipments to feed the refugees of Europe; writers and diarists like Christopher Isherwood, Mihail Sebastian and Victor Klemperer. The antiwar conviction of these humane individuals is so vivid and so passionate you start to feel that it all could have turned out differently, if only. But is that true?

In its length and bagginess, Human Smoke feels different from Baker's novels, which are obsessive claustrophobic miniatures, but really his method is the same: Baker forces you to share his tunnel vision by rigidly excluding what doesn't fit and by giving everything he includes more or less equal weight. Thus, Hitler is an anti-Semite, and so is Roosevelt--one would go on to exterminate 6 million Jews, and the other thought there were too many Jews at Harvard. If you are naïve enough to believe that the United States went to war to save the Jews, Human Smoke will disabuse you. But the reader who is surprised to learn that neither Roosevelt nor Churchill did a thing to prevent the Holocaust is unlikely to know enough to question Baker's slanted version of other events.

For example, Baker insinuates that Roosevelt intentionally frightened Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor by putting the Navy there and by sending bombers to Chiang Kai-shek. In his version, China is the aggressor--never mind that Japan had occupied Manchuria since 1931 and savagely invaded China in 1937. Similarly, Baker cites numerous anecdotes to demonstrate the lack of anti-Semitic fervor among ordinary Germans throughout the 1930s. Fine, but that important point is then made to suggest a general lack of enthusiasm for Nazism and its dreams of German supremacy; you'd think the only Germans who adored Hitler were hard-core party thugs. In fact, Hitler was extremely popular throughout the period covered by Baker and remained so as long as the war was going well. Few Germans were interested in the passive resistance Gandhi urged on them (he gave the same advice to the Jews--stay and die). The Gestapo would have been happy to murder any who tried it, as it did other enemies of the state.

Baker's cut-and-paste method suggests without stating outright, much less making a coherent argument. Thus, he never exactly says that lives would have been spared had Churchill made a separate peace and Roosevelt stayed out of the war. But that is the implication. He allows the reader to imagine that the Nazis were serious about settling the Jews in Madagascar and came up with the Final Solution only when war made that plan impossible--so the Allies were, in a way, responsible for Auschwitz. He doesn't mention that Madagascar was supposed to be a slow-motion death camp ruled by the SS, nor does he note the Nazis' plans to murder and enslave millions of Slavs once the Jews had been disposed of. It is not so clear, in other words, that fewer people would have died had Britain and the United States let Germany take over Europe. Moreover, why trust Hitler to abide by a nonaggression treaty? The Hitler-Stalin pact didn't keep him from attacking the Soviet Union.

Baker says he relied on newspapers and other contemporaneous accounts because of their immediacy and freshness, the sense of the present as offering a range of possible outcomes. Fair enough, but you wouldn't necessarily go to them for perspective or truth, as anyone who has ever read about themselves in the paper knows all too well. The present seems open-ended not just because those living in it don't know what's going to happen next but also because they don't know much about what's really going on at that very moment. It wasn't obvious to the good kind Rufus Jones that it was futile for him and his group of Quakers to beg Nazis to let them relieve the suffering of refugees and Jews--"We noted a softening effect on their faces," he wrote later of the unspeakable gangsters who read their request. But that doesn't mean there was ever a chance that he might have succeeded. It just means he didn't grasp what he was up against. Say what you will about Churchill and Roosevelt, at least they got that right.

this guy is awful

There's a "what-if" novel by Christopher Priest, The Separation, that is kind of coming from the same place. In the novel there's a peace settlement with Hitler, and there's even a Jewish state in Madagascar.

I have only read The Fermata and that ages ago. I might check this out once the semester is over and I can start to think about reading books for fun again.

haha @ nation review -- i can't speak on the baker book, but she doesn't mention... the eastern front. it would not have been germany running western europe but the ussr in this alternative scenario.

I like Nicholson Baker a lot, but I go to him for wry ruminations on the history of straws and shoelaces, and I'm not sure I trust him to write a convincing history of WWII.

it doesn't sound like a straight-up history to me.

it would not have been germany running western europe but the ussr in this alternative scenario.

^^^true

it doesn't sound like a straight-up history to me.

Exactly, which is why I was still confused about the genre even after reading the NYT book review.

in checkpoint he was already moving towards a fanciful, almost sentimental pacifism... i dont "trust" him as a historian but i'd love to read him on ww2

and really i havent read the book but pointing out that churchill was an imperialist dick or that firebombing millions of civilians was pretty awful as a principle is hardly pat buchanan territory

shh! don't tell Victor Davis Hanson or Jonah Goldberg!

mezzanine, size of thoughts are great

not so sure about his more formalistic novels

but also i think sex is DIRTY, so...

pointing out that churchill was an imperialist dick or that firebombing millions of civilians was pretty awful as a principle is hardly pat buchanan territory

That's been pointed out by many who do not take the further step to argue that the US should not have entered the war. Buchanan and Baker come at it from different angles but reach the same place.

from all i've read it seems more like baker wished the war had not happened, rather than the US sitting it out while -- being plausible -- germany, and then the rest of europe got hardsonned by russia after 1943. roosevelt could have given a fuck about japan's treatment of china -- i'm not saying the war with japan was "wrong", but the nation review gets it a bit skewed.

part of why buchanan's "argument" is stupid is that the loss of markets would have been a catastrophe for the US had the totalitarian states won.

seriously dudes he isnt going I AM SERIOUS POLITICAL PUNDIT like buchanan - i approach bakers idealist wishful thinking about ww2 the same way i do about him imagining that he's friends with the guy who invented jiffy pop

http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/no-smoke-fire-o.html

I started Human Smoke two days ago and am 250 pages into it, and very much into it.

Something essential to this book is that, like Checkpoint, it feels like it was written as a way to get through our current war with Iraq, and that its unspoken subtext is its parallels with other wars: the manipulation of evidence to incite action, the financial interests of companies, the dehumanization of the enemy, the rationales for violence. Part of what he's doing in this book is holding up dozens of models of resistence and nonviolent protest and successful action in the face of war and violence.

Not being a WWII buff, I've learned a whole lot. (Every paragraph in the book has at least one, if not several, citations.)

I like Nicholson Baker a lot, but I go to him for wry ruminations on the history of straws and shoelaces, and I'm not sure I trust him to write a convincing history of WWII.
― jaymc, Wednesday, April 9, 2008 4:17 PM (1 year ago)

Baker's approach here is very similar to his other books, even if the structure of this one is very different. What's essential here is describing single, isolated, and sometimes miniature actions by specific people and specific days that basically, either in their success or failure, changed the course of history.

Baker tries the Kindle

(He hates it, of course)

he hated reading newspapers on it--seemed like he came around to reading books on it at the end.

Sadly unfamiliar with his novels. I got a copy of this a little while ago, and is a terrific record of graphic art and (yellow) journalism which wouldn't have came to the fore again if it wasn't for his efforts in saving the New York World archive from being broken up and destroyed.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61PcOTvCY7L._SS500_.jpg

Just read and finished The Anthologist this week, thoroughly enjoyed it.

yes it's terrific, isn't it? very funny indeed for the first 100 pages or so - it stops getting funny around there but it's supposed to.

Probably the most enjoyable book I read last year.

Apparently Neil Gaiman wrote a screenplay of The Fermata that he wants Robert Zemeckis to direct?

That's the only one I haven't read.

What else is Baker up to these days? I think the last thing he published was the video game piece in the New Yorker last year.

Apparently Neil Gaiman wrote a screenplay of The Fermata that he wants Robert Zemeckis to direct?

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WHAT???

YES

WHAT?

That's . . . ridiculous in many ways?

I know Zemeckis convinced FedEx to appear in Castaway, but I don't think UPS is going to go for this one.

lol

he had an essay in harper's last month (may), why i'm a pacifist, which i only dinted but which was a kinda polemic on wwII

He wrote/assembled a whole book which was kind of polemical about WWII!

Hard to imagine anyone less suited to adapting Baker than Gaiman.

was it zemeckis who had that crazy apartment in london with a model of the pope under the stairs?

Roland Emmerich

does the world really need another time-stopping or "invisible man" themed movie?

if it's a licentious sex farce involving mr. robert zemeckis, then dear god, YES </jackie harvey>

lol

thanks xxp

god zemeckis is a fucking hack

oh hang on so's gaiman. perfect marriage.

so how much does noodle vague pay you to post here, robert/neil? IF THOSE ARE YOUR REAL GHOST-POSTING MESSAGEBOARD PERSONAS

Hmmm...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/11/house-holes-nicholson-baker-review?CMP=twt_iph

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/nicholson-bakers-dirty-mind.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=nicholson%20baker&st=cse

I've read everything of his except for the sexy novels. Am I missing out?

mostly sort of put off by his whole monty python absurdist sex way of looking at sex and fantasy. like, jokey names for things that have perfectly good names. i guess the fermata would have a long crazy slowmotion rape vibe if it wasn't for that jokiness that's sort of half piers anthony and half old british seaside postcard with a naked lady or whatever. put off, i guess, but i still enjoy and think it's spectacularly well written and i just don't find it... you know

i don't like piers anthony because i like hard formal pulp fantasy and i don't get nicholson baker's sex books because sex is nothing to joke about and i'm beating off to amateur digital video on xvideos

"Back up towards me, I need to feel those balls when I come, I need a heaping handful of hot hairy balls!" runs a typical line.

I once got Baker at a reading to sign my girlfriend's copy of the Fermata.

When I gave it to her as a surprise, she made a sour face and went "yeeeeeeeeesh, he touched this book?"

lol

yeah, i skimmed through the fermata and vox. feel like he is an amazing writer; the mezzanine is one of my all-time favorite novels

but i feel about him the same way i felt listening to howard stern when i was in middle school-- like, you are already so natively funny and gifted-- why do you re-inforce this compulsion to force upon your audience your lame sex fantasies? granted, baker does it in his updikean way, piles on the charm and his talent for putting the right words together just so, but nonetheless it gets tedious at times imo