Spotlight on … Nicholson Baker The Mezzanine (1986)

‘The technique of art is to make things “unfamiliar,” to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.’ — Viktor Shklovsky

‘All good art does this to a certain degree, but some art makes a fetish of it, and one of the books I would hold in that category is Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine. With all of its elaborate examinations of everyday objects like shoelaces and escalators, the book that seems to anticipate David Foster Wallace is portraying these objects in rarely seen (and perhaps not-previously seen) ways that makes them seem fresh and new.

‘The great art in Baker’s novel is the variation he pursues across his digressions. Sometimes they read almost like a riff off of Barthelme, a very postindustrial/economic account of the history of a particular aspect of an object. Other times these items become inherently personal (nostalgia is constantly invoked here, as is childhood/adulthood), other times they are simply humorous or entertaining. What unites them all is a great ability to defamiliarize those things that most of us probably have lost any ability to take any pleasure whatsoever in. And so we are lucky to have Baker’s good art to help us to liven up our world.

‘Part of the brilliance of this book is that Baker defamiliarizes those things about life that are so familiar that they go completely unnoticed; e.g., broken shoelaces, the unspoken norms of public restrooms, the form and feel of a cardboard milk carton. Whereas someone like Proust would first have to draw our attention to a detail of life that we might not have been aware of (effectively familiarizing it before defamiliarizing it), Baker has chosen those things that are part of our common consciousness. Thus, first we feel the strange deja vu that comes when were reminded of some part of life that we know intimately but have probably stopped noticing, and then, only after that has been established, Baker places this moment into an entirely new context.

‘At the same time as he defamiliarizes, Baker puts his digressions into a highly original narrative voice that sounds very authentic and is generally consistent to my ear. Baker dribbles out little bits of humanity en route to making his protagonist a likable person, someone about whom we can be persuaded to follow along for 135 meandering pages that maintain just enough semblance of plot to stake the claim that The Mezzanine is a book with a plot. More than that, though, I’d say that it’s a book about the passage of eras (and Baker calmly layers a number of them into this narrator’s life), as well as about evoking a very particular time in the history of the United States by discussing the life and death of pop cultural technology.’ — CR

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Further

Nicholson Baker Website
Nicholson Baker: The Mad Scientist of Smut
Nicholson Baker @ Twitter
‘There Has To Be Less School’: An Interview with Nicholson Baker
Consciousness on the Page: A Primer on the Novels of Nicholson Baker
NICHOLSON BAKER NAVIGATES THE BUFFET
Wrapping Sentences Around Things
Nicholson Baker: How I Write
Le sexe sans le soufre : lecture de deux romans de Nicholson Baker
Everything Is Interesting
Why is Nicholson Baker so obsessed with sex?
Nicholson Baker: Inside the author — and his alter ego
Nicholson Baker Inteview: Master or Masturbator?
Nicholson Baker on his literary career and how he came to write about sex
THE LITTLE NICHOLSON BAKERIN MY MIND
How I fell in love with Wikipedia [1], by Nicholson Baker
Can the Kindle really improve on the book?, by Nicholson Baker
Dallas Killers Club, by Nicholson Baker
Buy ‘The Mezzanine’

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Extras

Nicholson Baker. Words as Cotton Candy (An autobiography). 2015

Nicholson Baker on Bookworm [1992]

Nicholson Baker: Delighting in the Details

Nicholson Baker: “Wrapping Sentences Around Things”

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Interview
from The Paris Review

Let’s start with a very basic question. How do you write? With a pen? A pencil?

I edit with a pen, I write on a computer. I’ve always had trouble with pencils because they get dull so quickly, or they just break, and then there’s that ­awful shuddery feeling when you’re trying to write with a couple of scraps of wood poking out.

What about a mechanical pencil?

Sure, but the leads in mechanical pencils have the problem of bending. They give and then they snap. And they don’t offer the pleasures of sharpening. That was always a big moment for me in grade school, to walk to the side of the classroom where the pencil sharpener was mounted on the wall and imagine the two-geared cylinders going around, gnashing away at the cone of wood. The pencil sharpener was probably the best thing about school back then, actually—a little chrome invention under your control. It had a ­thundering sound, a throat-clearing sound, that I especially liked—Ticonderoga is almost onomatopoetic. And of course I oversharpened and broke the point, so I got to stand there for a while making that sound, ticonderoga … oga … oga.

Then there was a while, when I was starting out as a writer, when I really needed to have a certain kind of pen. It was before the golden age of roller­ball pens and gel pens and pens with rubber grips—there’s such a bewildering array now. It had a red barrel and I can’t remember the name of the manufacturer, which troubles me. It had an unusually smooth, fine-point roller.

So you would use that.

That’s what I wrote with. And then I decided that a real writer typed his drafts. My mother had a Sears typewriter. Starting in seventh grade, I tried typing once in a while on that. I memorized the keys by taping over them with black electrician’s tape. Later, when my father dropped me off at college, he bought me this postmodern-looking, low to the ground, Italian-designed, beautifully minimalist typewriter, a black Olivetti electric, that had a deep hum. I took it to Paris with me, and I wrote a couple pieces on it that ended up being published. Once I’d been published, I thought, Okay, let’s get serious now, you’re going to have to write on a manual typewriter. So I bought a hundred-twenty-five-dollar green Olivetti manual, which was very light, and I carried that around with me in a zippered case.

When I moved to Boston, in 1983, I typed at night on my green Olivetti manual, and during the day I made a living as a word-processing operator. Somewhere along the way—I think it was 1985—I got a Kaypro, one of the first portable computers. You clamped the keyboard to the front and these little simple clips went clonk. It had two floppy drives and looked like a small, portable piece of medical equipment. It was really a lovely machine. Every so often it would make a little grinding sound, like worn brake pads. I wrote my first novel on it, The Mezzanine. I love typing, actually—the sensation of typing on a keyboard or on an old-fashioned typewriter.

How did The Mezzanine come about?

My twenties weren’t terribly productive. I wasted a lot of time. I had a mental deadline that I would finish a book by the time I turned thirty. I blew the deadline. I had a job doing technical writing, which was really consuming me. I wasn’t sleeping. So my wife and I figured out that we could live for six months, mostly with the money she had saved up. I quit the job and wrote as hard as I’ve ever written. I would get up at eight in the morning and write until seven at night.

My wife was working two days a week, so I would take care of our daughter, Alice, on those days, and she took care of Alice on the other days. When you have a child, you get a surge of ambition, or a surge of hormonal urgency, to get something done, something worthy of your new station in life. I gave myself a new deadline: Finish the novel while you’re still thirty. Do something your child might be able to read when she grows up.

My code name for the book was “Desperation.”

What was the writing process like?

It was totally absorbing, the feeling of being sunk in the midst of a big, warm, almost unmanageable pond. I could sense all these notes I had, all these observations I’d saved up to use, finally arranging themselves in relation to one other. Somewhere in chapter three, I thought, my God, it’s a genuine chapter! And then later I got to chapter eight and a few things had happened—not much had happened, but something had happened.

I retyped the whole book. I was always a believer, even with word processing, that there’s something useful about having to retrace your steps from the beginning. And you have to print it out, too—you only get so far if you work by staring at a screen, because the resolution of the paper page is much higher. Your eye actually takes in things on paper more efficiently. I can fiddle around with something on a screen for days and think I’m getting somewhere, and it won’t be right. Then I’ll print it out and take it to bed, and instantly it’s obvious what’s bad about it, and I’ll cross out, cross out, cross out.

It’s an unusual book—especially for a debut. Was it easy to find a publisher?

Publishers didn’t really get it. It was rejected a lot of times, by nine or ten publishers. They all said they thought it wasn’t a novel. They didn’t get the footnotes—nobody was doing footnotes back then.

That must have been heartbreaking.

Not really. I knew it was a book that was a little bit different from what was going on at the time—I had De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in mind as I wrote, because of the way it swirls around and revels in its digressions. A piece of my book had already appeared in The New Yorker. I figured that at some point someone would publish it. Once it came out in hardcover, a paperback editor at Vintage, Marty Asher, read it and liked it. He brought it out as a Vintage Contemporary, and that was tremendously exciting. I felt like I had been accepted into some strange club. Bright Lights, Big City was a Vintage Contemporary at that same time, and A Fan’s Notes and The Sportswriter.

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Book

Nicolson Baker The Mezzanine
Grove Press

‘In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive first novel, Nicholson Baker uses a one-story escalator ride as the occasion for a dazzling reappraisal of everyday objects and rituals. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one’s shoes, The Mezzanine at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. Nicholson Baker’s accounts of the ordinary become extraordinary through his sharp storytelling and his unconventional, conversational style. At first glance, The Mezzanine appears to be a book about nothing. In reality, it is a brilliant celebration of things, simultaneously demonstrating the value of reflection and the importance of everyday human human experiences.’ — Grove Press

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Excerpt

At almost one o’clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top. The escalators rose toward the mezzanine, where my office was. They were the free-standing kind: a pair of integral signs swooping upward between the two floors they served without struts or piers to bear any intermediate weight. On sunny days like this one, a temporary, steeper escalator of daylight, formed by intersections of the lobby’s towering volumes of marble and glass, met the real escalators just above their middle point, spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels, and adding long glossy highlights to each of the black rubber handrails which wavered slightly as the handrails slid on their tracks, like the radians of black luster that ride the undulating outer edge of an LP.

When I drew close to the up escalator, I involuntarily transferred my paperback and CVS bag to my left hand, so that I could take the handrail with my right, according to habit. The bag made a little paper-rattling sound, and when I looked down at it, I discovered that I was unable for a second to remember what was inside, my recollection snagged on the stapled receipt. But of course that was one of the principal reasons you needed little bags, I thought: they kept your purchases private, while signaling to the world that you led a busy, rich life, full of pressing errands run. Earlier that lunch hour, I had visited a Papa Gino’s, a chain I rarely ate at, to buy a half-pint of milk to go along with a cookie I had bought unexpectedly from a failing franchise, attracted by the notion of spending a few minutes in the plaza in front of my building eating a dessert I should have outgrown and reading my paperback. I paid for the carton of milk, and then the girl (her name tag said “Donna”) hesitated, sensing that some component of the transaction was missing: she said, “Do you want a straw?” I hesitated in turn-did I? My interest in straws for drinking anything besides milkshakes had fallen off some years before, probably peaking out the year that all the major straw vendors switched from paper to plastic straws, and we entered that uncomfortable era of the floating straw;1 although I did still like plastic elbow straws, whose pleated necks resisted bending in a way that was very similar to the tiny seizeups your finger joints will undergo if you hold them in the same position for a while.

So when Donna asked if I would like a straw to accompany my half-pint of milk, I smiled at her and said, “No thanks. But maybe I’d like a little bag.” She said, “Oh! Sorry,” and hurriedly reached under the counter for it, touchingly flustered, thinking she had goofed. She was quite new; you could tell by the way she opened the bag: three anemone splayings of her fingers inside it, the slowest way. I thanked her and left, and then I began to wonder: Why had I requested a bag to hold a simple half-pint of milk? It wasn’t simply out of some abstract need for propriety, a wish to shield the nature of my purchase from the public eye-although this was often a powerful motive, and not to be ridiculed. Small mom and pop shopkeepers, who understood these things, instinctively shrouded whatever solo item you bought-a box of pasta shells, a quart of milk, a pan of Jiffy Pop, a loaf of bread-in a bag: food meant to be eaten indoors, they felt, should be seen only indoors. But even after ringing up things like cigarettes or ice cream bars, obviously meant for ambulatory consumption, they often prompted, “Little bag?” “Small bag?” “Little bag for that?” Bagging evidently was used to mark the exact point at which title to the ice cream bar passed to the buyer. When I was in high school I used to unsettle these proprietors, as they automatically reached for a bag for my quart of milk, by raising a palm and saying officiously, “I don’t need a bag, thanks.” I would leave holding the quart coolly in one hand, as if it were a big reference book I had to consult so often that it bored me.

Why had I intentionally snubbed their convention, when I had loved bags since I was very little and had learned how to refold the large thick ones from the supermarket by pulling the creases taut and then tapping along the infolding center of each side until the bag began to hunch forward on itself, as if wounded, until it lay flat again? I might have defended my snub at the time by saying something about unnecessary waste, landfills, etc. But the real reason was that by then I had become a steady consumer of magazines featuring color shots of naked women, which I bought for the most part not at the mom-and-pop stores but at the newer and more anonymous convenience stores, distributing my purchases among several in the area. And at these stores, the guy at the register would sometimes cruelly, mock-innocently warp the “Little bag?” convention by asking, “You need a bag for that?”-forcing me either to concede this need with a nod, or to be tough and say no and roll up the unbagged nude magazine and clamp it in my bicycle rack so that only the giveaway cigarette ad on the back cover showed-“Carlton Is Lowest.”

Hence the fact that I often said no to a bag for a quart of milk at the mom-and-pop store during that period was a way of demonstrating to anyone who might have been following my movement that at least at that moment, exiting that store, I had nothing to hide; that I did make typical, vice-free family purchases from time to time. And now I was asking for a little bag for my half-pint of milk from Donna in order, finally, to clean away the bewilderment I had caused those moms and pops, to submit happily to the convention, even to pass it on to someone who had not yet quite learned it at Papa Gino’s.

But there was a simpler, less anthropological reason I had specifically asked Donna for the bag, a reason I hadn’t quite isolated in that first moment of analysis on the sidewalk afterward, but which I now perceived, walking toward the escalator to the mezzanine and looking at the stapled CVS bag I had just transferred from one hand to the other. It seemed that I always liked to have one hand free when I was walking, even when I had several things to carry: I liked to be able to slap my hand fondly down on top of a green mailmen-only mailbox, or bounce my fist lightly against the steel support for the traffic lights, both because the pleasure of touching these cold, dusty surfaces with the springy muscle on the side of my palm was intrinsically good, and because I liked other people to see me as a guy in a tie yet carefree and casual enough to be doing what kids do when they drag a stick over the black uprights of a cast-iron fence. I especially liked doing one thing: I liked walking past a parking meter so close that it seemed as if my hand would slam into it, and at the last minute lifting my arm out just enough so that the meter passed underneath my armpit. All of these actions depended on a free hand; and at Papa Gino’s I already was holding the Penguin paperback, the CVS bag, and the cookie bag. It might have been possible to hold the blocky shape of the half-pint of milk against the paperback, and the tops of the slim cookie bag and the CVS bag against the other side of the paperback, in order to keep one hand free, but my fingers would have had to maintain this awkward grasp, building cell walls in earnest, for several blocks until I got to my building. A bag for the milk allowed for a more graceful solution: I could scroll the tops of the cookie bag, the CVS bag, and the milk bag as one into my curled fingers, as if I were taking a small child on a walk. (A straw poking out of the top of the milk bag would have interfered with this scrolling-lucky I had refused it!) Then I could slide the paperback into the space between the scroll of bag paper and my palm. And this is what I had in fact done. At first the Papa Gino’s bag was stiff, but very soon my walking softened the paper a little, although I never got it to the state of utter silence and flannel softness that a bag will attain when you carry it around all day, its handheld curl so finely wrinkled and formed to your fingers by the time you get home that you hesitate to unroll it.

It was only just now, near the base of the escalator, as I watched my left hand automatically take hold of the paperback and the CVS bag together, that I consolidated the tiny understanding I had almost had fifteen minutes before. Then it had not been tagged as knowledge to be held for later retrieval, and I would have forgotten it completely had it not been for the sight of the CVS bag, similar enough to the milk-carton bag to trigger vibratiuncles of comparison. Under microscopy, even insignificant perceptions like this one are almost always revealed to be more incremental than you later are tempted to present them as being. It would have been less cumbersome, in the account I am giving here of a specific lunch hour several years ago, to have pretended that the bag thought had come to me complete and “all at once” at the foot of the up escalator, but the truth was that it was only the latest in a fairly long sequence of partially forgotten, inarticulable experiences, finally now reaching a point that I paid attention to it for the first time.

In the stapled CVS bag was a pair of new shoelaces.

**

My left shoelace had snapped just before lunch. At some earlier point in the morning, my left shoe had become untied, and as I had sat at my desk working on a memo, my foot had sensed its potential freedom and slipped out of the sauna of black cordovan to soothe itself with rhythmic movements over an area of wall-to-wall carpeting under my desk, which, unlike the tamped-down areas of public traffic, was still almost as soft and fibrous as it had been when first installed. Only under the desks and in the little-used conference rooms was the pile still plush enough to hold the beautiful Ms and Vs the night crew left as strokes of their vacuum cleaners’ wands made swaths of dustless tufting lean in directions that alternately absorbed and reflected the light. The nearly universal carpeting of offices must have come about in my lifetime, judging from black-and-white movies and Hopper paintings: since the pervasion of carpeting, all you hear when people walk by are their own noises-the flap of their raincoats, the jingle of their change, the squeak of their shoes, the efficient little sniffs they make to signal to us and to themselves that they are busy and walking somewhere for a very good reason, as well as the almost sonic whoosh of receptionists’ staggering and misguided perfumes, and the covert chokings and showings of tongues and placing of braceleted hands to windpipes that more tastefully scented secretaries exchange in their wake. One or two individuals in every office (Dave in mine), who have special pounding styles of walking, may still manage to get their footfalls heard; but in general now we all glide at work: a major improvement, as anyone knows who has visited those areas of offices that are still for various reasons linoleum-squared-cafeterias, mailrooms, computer rooms. Linoleum was bearable back when incandescent light was there to counteract it with a softening glow, but the combination of fluorescence and linoleum, which must have been widespread for several years as the two trends overlapped, is not good.

As I had worked, then, my foot had, without any sanction from my conscious will, slipped from the untied shoe and sought out the texture of the carpeting; although now, as I reconstruct the moment, I realize that a more specialized desire was at work as well: when you slide a socked foot over a carpeted surface, the fibers of sock and carpet mesh and lock, so that though you think you are enjoying the texture of the carpeting, you are really enjoying the slippage of the inner surface of the sock against the underside of your foot, something you normally get to experience only in the morning when you first pull the sock on.

At a few minutes before twelve, I stopped working, threw out my earplugs and, more carefully, the remainder of my morning coffee-placing it upright within the converging spinnakers of the trash can liner on the base of the receptacle itself. I stapled a copy of a memo someone had cc:’d me on to a copy of an earlier memo I had written on the same subject, and wrote at the top to my manager, in my best casual scrawl, “Abe-should I keep hammering on these people or drop it?” I put the stapled papers in one of my Eldon trays, not sure whether I would forward them to Abelardo or not. Then I slipped my shoe back on by flipping it on its side, hooking it with my foot, and shaking it into place. I accomplished all this by foot-feel; and when I crouched forward, over the papers on my desk, to reach the untied shoelace, I experienced a faint surge of pride in being able to tie a shoe without looking at it. At that moment, Dave, Sue, and Steve, on their way to lunch, waved as they passed by my office. Right in the middle of tying a shoe as I was, I couldn’t wave nonchalantly back, so I called out a startled, overhearty “Have a good one, guys!” They disappeared; I pulled the left shoelace tight, and bingo, it broke.

The curve of incredulousness and resignation I rode out at that moment was a kind caused in life by a certain class of events, disruptions of physical routines, such as:

(a) reaching a top step but thinking there is another step there, and stamping down on the landing;

(b) pulling on the red thread that is supposed to butterfly a Band-Aid and having it wrest free from the wrapper without tearing it;

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, sir. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Nice that Strand picked up ‘Zama’. It still doesn’t have a distributor in France, which seems quite strange, but the sales agency says it will. How was the Hong Sang-soo? Yes, in the last year or two, Huppert seems to have finally become a marketable name of sorts in the States. Thanks for the link to the short film! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I got the pdf, thank you. I’ve only had time to glance at it, but it looks great. No, as expected, and I’m sorry, I can’t write a foreward. I’m just too overwhelmed between work on the TV series, the imminent 10 days traveling days/events, dealing with the ‘PGL’ roll-out, the new film script, and what’s likely to be full-time continuing work on the TV script into the summer. The YnY book deserves a thoughtful, thought-out foreward, and I’m incapable, I apologise. Of course I’ll write a blurb if you want. ** JM, Hi. Hm, I’ll hunt around see if there’s anything concrete on the McElroy pub time. ** Wolf, Uh, lets see … have I already done Wow-lf! (?) Okay, gotcha, yeah, about Amazon. Unfortunately, here in the big P, ordering the kind of small press books I like through local bookshops isn’t so easy, but luckily Amazon doesn’t carry most of them anyway. Oh, McNally Jackson — link — is a good NYC bookshop in upper east Soho, and Lynne just did an event there, so they should definitely have her book. Ha, actually I don’t have enough money in the bank right now to pay my rent, so I won’t be able to splurge. The first installment is not in any way, shape, or form a windfall amount. Grr. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yeah, exactly. His confession is really one of the most amazing and powerful ‘monologues’ I know. Listening to it literally inspired my whole novel. God, I wish my back were improving at a much higher speed than it is. I’m regretting that I didn’t see a chiropractor, but I’ll just have to hope it survives the flight. Luckily, I got an aisle seat so I can get up walk up and down the aisles a lot. It so sucks to be powerless re: an internet connection, especially these days when there should no excuse. I’m so sorry. I guess you’ll just get used to its weird, unpleasant rhythms, or I hope so. Yes, the contract signing is very shortly. It should be smooth other than the part where I’ll need by necessity to be a demanding jerk and say I need my payment transferred today because, as I told Wolf, I won’t be able to pay my rent on the 1st without it. Eek. And then a final meeting on the TV script which should be finished and ready to submit tomorrow, although it’s just the beginning as I’m sure we’re going to need to keep working on it to get it into an ARTE-pleasing form for weeks and months to come. Nice day you had. Mine was quiet, a bit physically painful (back), but okay. It’s really beautiful here today. The most insanely clear blue sky, and the clouds look VR. I hope your day was excellent. Was it? ** Jamie, Hi, Jamie! Oh, no, you’re feeling bad. Man, fuck God, the fates, biology itself and the horses they rode in on. Do whatever it takes to get your body pristine again. If I were there, I would knock gently on your door with a large bowl of hot split pea soup in my mittens. It’s the cure for everything, don’t you know. Thank you ever so much again for the exquisite construction yesterday. I’m still swooning. Skyrocketing love, Dennis ** Misanthrope, G-thang! Sinus infections are underrated monsters of maladies, and I’m so sorry. Okay, very nice turnaround. If I believed in angels, I would believe LPS has one. Well, he does: you. Awww. ** Bill, Hi, B. It should go okay. The proceedings. But even right now, a couple of hours before the proceedings, there are still messes and battles going on. But they should. I need a plane book. Maybe the Johnson. That’s a book that might even not be impossible to find in the English bookstores hereabouts. Good day to you, pal. ** Okay. I realised I had never done a Nicholson Baker post, so I decided to do one just to see what happens. I picked ‘Mezzanine’ because it and ‘Room Temperature’ are my favourites of his novels. That’s the whole story right there. See you tomorrow.