{"id":6018,"date":"2015-06-05T09:37:14","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T09:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6018"},"modified":"2015-06-05T09:37:14","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T09:37:14","slug":"reverence-for-the-everyday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6018","title":{"rendered":"Reverence for the everyday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nicholson_baker\"<\/a>The Mezzanine<\/em> is one of my favorite novels, which is why\u00a0I like to think of Nicholson Baker as\u00a0a\u00a0Rochester homeboy. The entire novel took place on an escalator that once existed downtown here. From the intro to an\u00a0interview with Baker in The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Few other authors would notice, as Baker did in The Mezzanine<\/em>, that late-twentieth-century American men trying to pass through a door at the same time always say \u201coop\u201d to each other instead of \u201coops.” After some twenty-five years of writing, Baker\u2019s reputation is as unusual as his work. He has been praised, widely and enthusiastically, for his style, humor, originality, and empathy. (As Martin Amis once put it, \u201cThroughout his corpus there is barely an ordinary sentence or an ungenerous thought.\u201d) At the same time, some critics have very publicly loathed a handful of his books, most vociferously Vox<\/em>(\u201ctedious\u201d), The Fermata<\/em> (\u201crepellent\u201d), Checkpoint<\/em> (\u201cscummy\u201d), and Human Smoke<\/em>(\u201cchildish\u201d). Many of Baker\u2019s talents are self-consciously small: meticulously inventive phrasemaking, a masterfully intimate tone, and a superhuman gift for observation. He has a Dutch-painterly reverence for everyday rituals and objects\u2014a belief that they will start to glow with significance if we only pay close enough attention.<\/em> This has left Baker open to the charge that the work itself is trivial, quaint\u2014a bubble of old-fashioned belletrism floating through a harsh \u00admodern world. (Leon Wieseltier, writing in The New York Times<\/em>, once called Baker\u2019s novels \u201ccreepy hermeneutical toys.\u201d)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s disguised by Baker\u2019s cheerful tone, however, is his passionately sustained conviction that we should honor the details of our lives rather than getting carried away by projections and abstractions.<\/em> In this quest, Baker has seemed continually willing to risk puzzling his fans and inflaming critics; he has shown an indifference to publishing fashions that few authors could have sustained. One index of this independence is that, although Baker has been published for his entire career in magazines such as The New Yorker<\/em> and The Atlantic<\/em>, he has never held a staff position. \u201cI felt I had to be someone who would leap in from outside,\u201d he told me, \u201cand do some nutty thing and then run away cackling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baker is fifty-four years old, but you can still see the teenager in him: he is self-consciously tall and shy, and his face turned red, often, when we talked about his books. He lives in a rambling eighteenth-century house on the border of Maine and New Hampshire. We spoke there for several hours, first in the kitchen and then in the living room, next to the fireplace in front of which he wrote A Box of Matches<\/em>. Later, Baker drove me to a restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where, as we entered, a man exiting at the same time very distinctly said, \u201cOop!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mezzanine is one of my favorite novels, which is why\u00a0I like to think of Nicholson Baker as\u00a0a\u00a0Rochester homeboy. The entire novel took place on an escalator that once existed downtown here. From the intro to an\u00a0interview with Baker in The Paris Review: Few other authors would notice, as Baker did in The Mezzanine, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nReverence for the everyday - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6018\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reverence for the everyday - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Mezzanine is one of my favorite novels, which is why\u00a0I like to think of Nicholson Baker as\u00a0a\u00a0Rochester homeboy. 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