Customer Reviews

The Everlasting Story of Nory: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Fans of Nicholson Baker will probably be disappointed to find that this book containss aboslutely nothing about sex! The Everlasting Story of Nory is more akin to Madeline than The Feramata, because it is a story about dreaming, wisdom and creativity in the world of 9 year old kids.

The Everlasting Story of Nory is a refreshing reminder of how important it is to stay creative, young, and open minded. Baker documents the life of Eleanor (Nory) Winslow, a nine year old American girl who is spending a semester at an English school.

Like most 9 year olds, Nory dreams of things that most adults are too jaded to consider-- like creating a museum of plastic sushi, or being a pop-up book engineer.

As adults we may take ourselves too seriously, or trivialize the lives of children-- but Baker runs time in reverse and brings the adult reader back to fourth grade, to a land of run-on sentences and malapropisms, where the lives of insects and adventures of stuffed ! animals are more significant than politics or money or other phenomena that adults hold so close to their hearts.

If there is a darker theme beneath this story, I haven't been able to find it. Rather, Nory is about the distinct flavor of happiness that disappears when we become teenagers and adults. Warning: this book may compell you to act like a 9 year old.

For those who remember the charm of Nicholson Baker's first two fictional novels The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Everlasting Story of Nory brings back that innocent rambling charm. Told thru the eyes of his 9 year old daughter Mr. Baker takes us thru the amazing imaginary and real world of pre-teen life. In his rambling style he brought back many funny memories of the quirks of the social mannerisms of children. For those who were partially turned off by the sexually explicit Fermata and Vox, this is pure G rated fun. Also, don't forget to check out his recent book of essays "Lumber", which is a fun read until the last lumbering chapter!

Nicholson Baker's literary abilities are praised all over the place - I'd like to praise his obvious parenting abilities. This book shows that he both remembers his own childhood and is paying intense, loving attention to his children. We get a great book - his kids get a great dad.

This book is insightful, brilliant, etc - it's also USEFUL if you have school age children in your life. When they can't talk yet, we know they're not rational; but it's so easy to forget that children look like they have a lot more figured out than they sometimes do. Hang out in the inside of Nory's mind for awhile, and remember how confusing and scary and wonderful and BIG the world was when you were small.

The book also presents a textbook example of parents allowing a child's good sense to guide her in a moral dilemma. Again, of course the literary value of the book is more important, but how fabulous to read a book with such a flawlessly moral tone as well.

Very unlike other works from this author (i.e. The Fermata and Vox), this story wonderfully reveals what goes on inside a nine year-old girl's head. I enjoyed the imagination, thoughtful perspectives, and overall light-heartedness. I also liked, many times, the last paragraph or sentence of a chapter, which had nothing to do with the incident in the chapter, just a summarizing thought that could have stood on its own. The one thing that bothered me about this book is that it is written in third person, but in a young girl's narrative voice. It made me wonder if the book was originally written in first person (Nory) and redone. I don't know what the point is in having a young girl's voice tell the story if it isn't Nory's own.

How rare it is to find a novel that is simultaneously so sweet and so brilliant. It was also a reminder of the ways in which children are confronted with moral choices and challenges to their character in contexts and situations that most of us dismiss as insignificant ... or simply have forgotten. I found myself cheering for Nory more than once. I think a lot of people may not know how to take this episodic narrative written by an adult yet from a child's point of view -- that's because there never has been anything like it before.

Nicholson once again demonstrates his masterful use of the English language in making the mundane fascinating. Fans of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature will not be disappointed.

The major let-down of The Everlasting Story Of Nory is that it never quite coalesces into the novel that it wants to be. Where Baker's previous novels have succeeded in being both meandering streams of consciousness as well as complete stories, TESON falls short of the mark. TESON reads more like a collection of short stories than a novel. (The Martian Chronicles come immediately to mind. The stories are certainly closely linked, but by no means comprise a novel.)

Despite that failing, however, The Everlasting Story Of Nory remains a delightful read.

Baker manages to perfectly encapsulate the mind of a nine year old in all its semi-logical, semi-nonsensical glory. Nory feels like a living, breathing child, as do her classmates and younger brother. A beautiful book.

There is not word in English to describe the opposite of a crime, but if there were, it would surely define this novel. It is quite frankly a pro-life, pro-honesty, pro-love, pro-decency, and a pro-preadolescent female (or male) book.

One is rarely taken by an author inside the head of another human being in as gentle, thorough, and exquisite a way as it happens here. Nory is very real -- too real to contribute much excitement to the action of the book (the book has very little action, therefore). The excitement comes from our being able to permeate this incompletely formed mind, to perceive the world through her immature cognitive mechanisms, and to peer upon a world we recognize but which is fundamentally different from our own. It is a magical trasposition that Baker performs between us and Nory. One should turn to this book when life is especially mean, or humdrum.

If you're someone who subscribes to the idea that the journey itself is the destination, then you'll likely feel an affinity for The Everlasting Story of Nory, a good-natured but sadly empty tale of a young American girl and her family, who reside in modern-day England. Nory is a bright soul, witty, curious, lively, even wise, and yet in this nearly plot-less novel by Nicholson Baker, a writer who places more value on the worth of each ordinary moment than anyone I've ever read, the brave attempt to set an audience down into the life of one young girl fails for exactly that same absence of any concrete plot. Like some other novels I could name, Nory could almost---and note I do say "almost"---have its chapters shuffled into a random order, re-assembled, and then read without it making much difference to the content of the story. The experience of entering this book is like being set aimlessly adrift on some great river, and then being informed that there is no destination ahead, just look at whatever happens to be there on the banks as you pass by. Nory is endearing and her titular story sometimes is as well, but at book's end I was bored and no longer enchanted and couldn't decide if I'd been cheated (even ripped off) or whether I should pity Baker for missing his chance to create what might've been one of the best inside treks into childhood ever written. In the end doing The Everlasting Story of Nory was like being presented with a bit of bubble gum to be chewed on and discarded, with the exercise of chomping on it being the entirety of the reward offered.

In a post script, lest anyone label me a Baker-hater, let me point anyone with a regard for history toward his excellent new release, Human Smoke, a work in which Baker's intellect and scholarship shine.

Here's a challenge: write a book for adults about a 9-year old girl of medium intelligence who is happy, well-adjusted, and very creative, and make it interesting. This book is full of anecdotes in the stream-of-consciousness style of Nory, whose main problems are handling bad dreams, adjusting as an American child in an English school, missing her old best friends, and trying to figure out how to stop the bullying of one unfortunately scapegoated classmate. Baker tells Nory's stories as she tells them to herself, with the anachronisms that a creative young child would put in. It makes one wonder how life would have been different if we'd had better parenting.