The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Understanding Nicholson Baker by Arthur Salzman
Irving Malin

Arthur Salzman. Understanding Nicholson Baker. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1999. 209 pp. No price given.

Nicholson Baker, one of our most puzzling writers, seems to do without plot or character. He devotes his energy to the mysteries of language and consciousness. He will, for example, spend pages analyzing the functional beauty of objects, spending so much time on them that they are transformed into ritualistic havens of meaning. Saltzman writes: “Baker defamiliarizes the landscape by being so in-depth about his inventories; by providing such relentlessly exploded views.” Perhaps, as I once suggested in a review of his essay collection, The Size of Thoughts, he is a “religious” writer, hoping, like Henry James, to see the obscure radiance of words as worlds (or vice versa).
A clue to Baker’s concern with “enlarging” small thoughts about the material which surround us—books, shoelaces, toys—is the fact that the hero of “The Mezzanine” carries a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. From the battered copy, the hero reads: “Observe in short how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes.” Saltzman, in his analysis of the story, sees Baker’s skills at work and explains that it “is nothing if not a campaign against the maladies of transcience and triviality.”
Although I may have incompletely analyzed Saltzman’s book—the first one to examine Baker’s strangeness and beauty—I must say that it is wonderful criticism. It offers close investigation—not arcane theory—and poetic readings. The last sentence serves as an excellent example: “By demanding an erotics of attentiveness, [Baker] does as much as any contemporary writer to keep things on the record.” Thus Baker and Saltzman mirror each other; the reflection is dazzling. [Irving Malin]