The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Box of Matches, by Nicholson Baker
reviewed by D. Quentin Miller

Nicholson Baker. A Box of Matches. Random House, 2003. 178 pp. $19.95.

To say that no one writes like Nicholson Baker is at once a compliment and a simple fact. Whether he is writing about sex, libraries, or corporate bathrooms, Baker’s works are characterized by humor, precision of language, and an acute perception of the ordinary world’s little details. The narrator of A Box of Matches, a medical-textbook editor named Emmett, constructs his world for us in typical Bakeresque fashion by observing his surroundings and indulging in imaginative fantasies. Emmett is an admirable, gentle soul who wants to protect those around him, including his two children, his wife, and his pet duck. Because he allows himself a moment of contemplation at the start of each day, he has an unusual appreciation for small things of beauty, like an airplane’s contrail lit by moonlight or the “brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm” of a bathtub drain he plunges. The scope of this book is at once tiny and immense. The vehicle for the novel is the tradition of lighting a fire each morning while the world sleeps. Baker seems determined to restore a sense of wonder to ordinary things while he restores the diarylike aspect to fiction. The more we enter Emmett’s private world, the more it has the ability to amuse us or disturb us or both at the same time, as when he describes the “suicide fantasies” he employs to help him fall asleep. These private thoughts are every bit as entertaining as his minute observations of the world around him, and as they accumulate, they form a clear, coherent picture of a character, if not a life. Traditional narrative elements like plot or dramatic action are not to be found here. What we do find is a narrator who is real, who describes the world with uncanny precision, and who amuses us. When Emmett finishes his box of matches, the reader is sorry to see him go.