Customer Reviews

The Mezzanine

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The undeniable appeal of "The Mezzanine" is almost impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't read it. Try it, sometime; tell someone "It's a 150 page book about what a guy thinks about as he goes up the escalator to his office." Not exactly an easy sell.

But it's a fantastic read. This is not just "some guy" who's sharing his interior monologue, it's a guy written by Nicholson Baker. That means he's funnier than you, smarter than you, and his meandering observations are bound to be entertaining. His neuroses are interesting, his thought processes bizarre (but no more bizarre than mine or yours).

So if the "plot" of the novel is "a guy goes up an escalator and sits down in his office," what is the novel about? It's about all of the tiny little thoughts that fly through our head, day in and day out. This is significant because these "unimportant" thoughts are our *lives.* All of these idle wonderings are what make us human and what makes each person an individual.

So walk a mile in Baker's head, and know him and yourself better.

I've wondered that every Christmas for most of my life. It's a jolly song about "tidings of comfort and joy" that sounds, due to the minor key, like it should be on the Schindler's List soundtrack. How can Nicholson Baker have known? I've never been inspired to write an on-line review, despite having read many books within the past few years that I've judged to be excellent. This book, however, has affected me like none other that I can remember. It's the kind of book that you will either WORSHIP or DETEST. I don't think there can be any in between. You either get why it's pure genius, or you don't. This book is hysterical in a supremely intelligent way. One other reviewer compared it to Seinfeld. It's like Seinfeld with the intelligence factor cranked up to a thousand, and the subject matter magnified by a million. I've never read anything more fascinating and truly gripping. Baker has a way of describing things so eloquently and differently, that I often thought, "What on earth does he mean by--" just as the beautiful revealing moment occurred and I got it. For example, a sentence from p. 97: "I polished the lenses [of his glasses] with the fifth paper towel, making bribe-me, bribe-me finger motions over the two curved surfaces until they were dry." Those four words, "bribe-me, bribe-me" describe perfectly the motion that most of us undertake several times a day. Has anyone in the history of the world ever described that act in such a succint, clever way? I doubt it. Poetry. Read it immediately, but savor it.

The narrator of this novel is nuts.... but don't let that stop you from reading this wonderful book! Just be aware it might take you a little while to get comfortable with the quirky way the protatgonist has of thinking about things. After the first ten pages I was laughing out loud but after thirty pages I almost put it down because I didn't know if I could keep handling 2 page footnotes on, say, the physics of what makes shoelaces break! But I stayed with the book and I was glad I did. It is a pleasure to keep up with the narrator as his mind meanders through the minutiae of everyday life. He has a childlike curiosity about the world. Everything fascinates him! He is a lucky man because he enjoys understanding the little things in life and life presents a neverending supply of little things to think about. This is a guy who will never be bored! I also get the feeling that this is the way the mind of a really good scientist works, analytical but childlike as well. Want to know if you will like this book? Here is one sentence, expressing the narrator's admiration for the way the old-style packages of Jiffy Pop popcorn were engineered: "Jiffy Pop was the finest example of the whole aluminous genre: a package inspired by the fry pan whose handle is also the hook it hangs from in the store, with a maelstrom of swirled foil on the top that, subjected to the subversion of the exploding kernels, first by the direct collisions of discrete corns and then in a general indirect uplift of the total volume of potentiated cellulose, gradually unfurls its dome, turning slowly as it despirals itself, providing in its gradual expansion a graspable, slow-motion version of what each erumpent particle of corn is undergoing invisibly and instantaneously beneath it." Whoooh! I can see where this book would be the type of thing you either love or hate, so if the above sentence made you squirm, stay away. But if a smile emerged while you read it I think you will enjoy "The Mezzanine" as much as I did.

After reading Checkpoint, I couldn't resist finding out how Nicholson Baker's books are when he isn't contemplating the death of a president. The Mezzanine demonstrates why reviewers were willing to pay so much attention to his more recent work. For 135 pages, Baker creates compelling reading from an almost plotless situation; in the most literal sense, the entire book transpires as the narrator rides an escalator from one floor to another. But in that ride he makes observations about, well, everything: drug stores, mens room etiquette, shoelaces, milk in bottles vs. milk in cartons, cigarettes being thrown from car windows, and, in an overwhelmingly ironic footnote near the end of a footnote-filled book, footnotes. In making these observations, the narrator captures the life of an office worker at the start of a career, wondering about why the company functions as it does and about the meaning of his place within the company, but also--and more importantly--about the whole host of mundane details that surround this world of work and the life for which that work provides subsistence. You'll shake your head a few pages in, yes, but soon you'll be nodding, agreeing with observations that are so familiar, so obvious, that you can't believe you've never made them until now. A bit dated by the advent of e-mail and the internet--no one sends paper memos back and forth, removing and reinserting staples in an endless loop from department to department, when they can simply CC: the involved parties--this is nevertheless a classic.

If you don't spend a lot of time contemplating your shoe laces, this book may come as somewhat of a revelation to you. A very, very minor revelation. The fact is that someone probably spent a good part of their professional life developing and testing that shoe lace, and someone else spent many hours fine-tuning it to make it as pleasing as a shoe lace can possibly be. Same goes for escalators, plastic straws, and staplers. The neat thing about a market economy is that so many people spend so much time improving such minor commodities, just so they can exchange them with each other. Nicholson Baker has written a humorous and almost touching tribute to this system. Very enjoyable (although I don't think I would have wanted it to be any longer).

We drown in information. Terabytes and petabytes of it slosh over us every day. Many decide to remain oblivious to this assault and ignore the fascinating minutiae that lurk in obscure peripheral corners. They miss a lot. Howie, the "hero" of Nicholson Baker's first novel, "The Mezzanine," provides an antidote for this myopia. Throughout the short novel, he pulls back, like onion skin, the conceptual strata of common experience to reveal the wonderous microcosms beneath. Where many of us see a plastic straw, Howie sees a spectrum of engineering discoveries, plastic-to-paper buoyancy and porosity ratios, and tiny ebbs and flows in the quality of life. He scrutinizes things at the quantum level, such as the differences between "oop" and "oops," the various ways to end a conversation with a co-worker, and the theoretical means by which a shoelace wears to breaking point. Howie thrives on micro-analysis. He floats in information as though it were a soothing amniotic fluid.

A portrait in text, "The Mezzanine" presents a first person character study of a detail fanatic. One hundred and thirty five pages relate the mental and physical events of a single lunch hour. Anything worthy of the slightest notice receives apt attention and many of the observations steer Howie into his past or into his private life. For instance, he lists his major developmental advances. These include "shoe tying," "brushing tongue as well as teeth," and "putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed." Worried about reaching his "majority," he calculates the number of new thoughts required to overtake the puerile thoughts that have collected in his brain since age six. Only when these new thoughts preponderate will he consider himself "fully developed" and able to "really understand things." Later on, he reflects on the periodicity of thoughts. How often a person thinks about a thing may reveal more about them than their professed beliefs. Howie analyzes his own thoughts and includes a chart with rows for "Subject of Thoughts" and "Number of Times Thought Occurred in Year." This does reveal a lot about Howie. In particular, the most affection he shows for his girlfriend, referred to obliquely as "L.," is by placing her name at the top of this list. Other references to her seem devoid of emotion. But the fact that he actually made such a list probably says more about Howie than the items that appear on it. Parallel to the main text, copious footnotes capture Shandean digressions that sublimate ancillary thoughts for pages on end. These often flood the main narrative, leaving a mere few lines bobbing atop the page. No branch of Howie's ruminations gets neglected.

"The Mezzanine" defies summary. The figures, ideas, facts, theories, images, and metaphors zoom by at hyperspeed, sometimes to an overwhelming degree. Collectively they turn the brain into a bloated sac teeming with an incomprehensible degree of data. Somehow this intellectual miasma becomes a highly engaging read. As if listening to someone ramble on about every detail that occurs to them moment by moment could be entertaining. Somehow it is and the effect remains spellbinding and illuminating throughout. The highly readable, verging on gimmicky, prose and the often hilarious imagery move the book along at a surprising pace. Regardless, at times the text lumbers down and sags under its own weight, but these moments don't come often enough to detract from the book as a whole. And though it lacks a plot, the book nonetheless suggests new ways of seeing and experiencing everyday life. Either that or the reader will thank their lucky stars that they didn't turn out like Howie. He does at times seem rather cold and emotionless, as though ideas and facts have replaced the very blood in his veins. What does L. think of him? One can only imagine after Howie relates the earplug story that ends with L. pleading "See how much I love you?" Even that doesn't seem to move him. Some questions remain: does Howie's life, though bursting with information and fascinating trivia, have any meaning? Is this a concrete-sequential horror story about someone stuck in the sterile world of facts? Or does Howie represent the modern enlightened individual basking in technology and ideas? The reader of course must decide, but one thing seems certain: "The Mezzanine" provides enough food for thought to survive multiple readings.

Fortunately I didn't give up reading this-novel? before I grasped its true point. This let me enjoy its uniqueness. Surely not a novel. But no, not even "creative non-fiction." Instead, a study in Baker's own unique vision.. I'll label it "The Aesthetics of the Everyday Technological." The, ah, novel is prose-poetry. A hymn to the crafted artfulness of mundane objects, processes, experiences...

The plot is minimal. He ascends an escalator one day at work. Big deal. But the plot is only the line on which he strings his beads of close observations of the "usual." It's androgynous; he marries assertive technical description of objects and processes, with sensuous flowing aesthetic experience of them.

So herein he gives us enlarged glimpses of soda straws; ice cube trays; perforations; paper vs. hot-air hand-drying in lavatories; paper vs. plastic coin rolls; and more. Oh, and a footnote about footnotes.

Plus he can give us a salvo of juicy examples to illustrate experiences. (1) Disruptions of the expected: as in missing a top step, pulling out a Band-Aid thread, drawing a piece of tape, trying to staple a thick memo. (2) "How beautiful graded surfaces are as a class:" as in not only the escalator grooves, but also "the grooves on the underside of the blue whale that must render some hydrodynamic or thermal advantage; the grooves left by a rake in loose soil or by a harrow in a field; the single groove that a skater's blade makes in the ice; the grooves in socks that allow them to stretch, and in corduroy, down which you can run your ballpoint pen; the grooves of records." (3) The "renewing of newness"-as in "whether it was the appearance of another identical Pez tablet at the neck of the plastic Pez elevator... or the sight of one parachutist after another standing for a second in the door of an airplane before he jumped... or the rolling-into-position of a pinball after the previous one had escaped your flippers... or one sticky disc of sliced banana displaced from its spot on the knife over the cereal bowl by its successor... or the uprising of yet another step of the escalator... "

So Baker revels in the aesthetics of the technical. But is all this decoration, art? Worse, is it even mature pleasure? Baker says that this renewing of newness "was for me then, and is still, one of the greatest sources of happiness that the man-made world can offer."

But isn't this delight in the diurnal, sort of minor, even decadent? Isn't it even what's called "camp"? (In the sense of giving more attention to the less important than is warranted?) During a deep study of coffee mugs, including corny old-fashioned ones, Baker denies this. He says he theoretically disapproves of camp, but then camp "has long been superseded and in the limbo of its demotions can be glibly disparaged."

But hold it. Later on, he notes that when you quit a job, things reverse. Big crises recede ("the problems you were paid to solve collapse"), and instead, you remember the small surfaces. The nod of the security guard, the escalator ride, the things on your desk, the features of the corporate bathroom, "all miraculously expand: and in this way what was central and what was incidental end up exactly reversed." Sounds campy to me in its topsy-turvy re-valuation.

But perhaps the incidental becomes not just reversed, but also revered. This is surely the book's final charm for me. Perhaps it is perhaps Baker's unique achievement, subversive but satisfying. Tables are turned; away from ponderous plot or principles. Let's enjoy the techne and the aesthetics of surfaces. I can disclose that I read this book at a recent time of stress and weariness. It was then just the thing for me. I found it good fare, "comfort food with a gourmet sauce." So, Baker's inspecting vision honors objects and processes, honors existence.

What's so phenomenal about Baker's debut is the combination of his outside awareness (allowing him to witness his nearly subliminal every day thoughts), and the infinitely fine detail with which he is able to describe them in writing. The result is a terrifically engrossing exploration of life's smallest and most self-intimate moments: the breaking of a shoelace (why one and not the other?), the drifting float of a plastic straw in a can of soda (why do plastic and paper straws act differently?), and so on.

Baker not only observes these every day thoughts running through his head, but provides fully fleshed musings on the pathways they ride through one's brain. It's an amazing technical feat that provides page after page of laughs and knowing nods. This isn't just a book of fiction with footnotes, it's a book of fiction with footnotes that essentially supplant the mainline text. In doing so, they make conscious some of the ideas that we usually consider only in the privacy of our own heads.

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (Vintage, 1988)
availability: in print, available through the usual suspects

Nicholson Baker's first novel gives us a day-- okay, half a day-- in the life of an ordinary office worker. It's pretty close to being the typical eighties novel. It's not really about anything. No one makes great personality changes anywhere in the novel. There's only one other character, aside from a few minor ones, sales clerks and the like. The book opens with the main character walking into the lobby of his office building, and ends with him stepping off the escalator onto his office's floor about a minute later. So what is it that differentiates this particular eighties novel from the hundreds of others, and what makes this one better?

The devil, of course, is in the details. While Baker seems as fond of brand names as the rest of his Ellis-McInerney-Janowitz-etc. cronies, they take a backseat to the generic, everyday revelations of life, and

it's amazing that Baker has managed to come up with so much of this stuff that most people never think about. The history of shoelaces. The development of footnotes from the middle ages. The archaeology of the drugstore. Whether you should drink your milk while chewing the chocolate chip cookie, or after swallowing it. This is less a novel than it is a compendium of silly, trivial facts and opinions, and if you gain pleasure from wandering through trivia websites and the like, this book

is going to be a short, easy pleasure trip through things that no one else has thought to write about. If you demand plot, theme, and action, though, this is probably not a book for you. I found it wonderful. *** 1/2

Many-a-times cliches are just what we want to hear. For in love, war, and banal & mundane but not always/often inconsequential small talk banter, a well turned cliche can be just the right phrase, whereas some highly evolved, original quasi-obscure Samuel Johnson or Oscar Wilde'esque proverb is more likely to furrow eyebrows and possibly evoke scorn. 'The Mezzanine' is Baker's first, a brief gimmick novel as the NYT Book Review puts it; captures the essence of everyday corporate life with stylistic flair.{Footnote: they consider 'Ulysses' the ultimate gimmick novel. Also: One of his other novels, 'Vox' became famous because Monica Lewinsky gave a copy to Bill Clinton. She received 'Leaves of Grass' by Walt Whitman in return.}

The narrator, Howie, leads a tour of his world through the course of an afternoon. Through his eyes the trivial has seldom been so interesting and captivating. His piercing skills of observation are to be admired, testament to Baker himself. Howie playfully combines tidbits of wisdom and wit, the sums of which build and grow so by the conclusion of Chapter Fifteen it is difficult not to be subtly impressed. Baker teaches the reader to think like he does.