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    The Anthologist: A Novel
    The Anthologist: A Novel
    The Anthologist: A Novel
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Anthologist: A Novel

    Written by Nicholson Baker

    Narrated by Nicholson Baker

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder-a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering; his girlfriend Roz has recently left him; and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought.

    What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of the New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredible important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 22, 2010
    ISBN9781400186631
    Author

    Nicholson Baker

    Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Maine with his family.

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    Reviews for The Anthologist

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    • 4/5
      This the first book of Nicholson Baker's that I've read. I will definitely be reading his other works.I don't know where to begin with this review so I'm plunging in with how this novel about a poet and writer who is getting ready to write the introduction for an anthology of poetry he's editing. Some people might call that "getting ready" procrastination. It certainly looks, feels, tastes and smells like procrastination. As I've been working for nearly a year on my own manuscript for a novel, I assure you, this is not procrastinating. It's thinking. Mulling. Necessary.I like Nicholson's writing style. His language is funny, very easy to read and he's able to write extensively about a subject that I'm typically distanced from. He does so without intimidating or boring me. This is saying a lot because my attention span is brief and shrinking.I must say that reading this book taught me as much about poetry as any class I may have faked my way through in college. Baker intersperses the commentary of the main character's goofing around and living life and doing things around his house, anything other than sitting down and writing that introduction and those tangents into the everyday and familiar can be quite hilarious in a quiet way.If you read this book, do so with an anthology of poetry nearby. You're going to want to read some of these poems all the way through. Luckily, my husband used to work for a paperback warehouse where he could buy deeply discounted remainders and books with problems. I tell you that to explain how we came to own Immortal Poems of the English Language edited by Oscar Williams. Because, trust me, we don't sit around this house and read poetry. That might cut into our television time or our social networking on the computer time.One night while reading this novel in bed, I did read aloud some of the mentioned poetry to my husband. He was polite and indulgent. He even used his cell phone to look up some information about Emily Dickinson for me. We discussed the way poets focus on death or, at least, lack cheer. Then my husband reminded me that he likes to call this anthology Immoral Poems...... Poetry is doomed in our hands.
    • 3/5
      Probably a reader would get more out of this if s/he were more familiar with more poetry. I mean, I know the difference between Tennyson and T.S. Eliot, and I know enough to guess that the 'plum' is an allusion to William Carlos Williams' 'this is just to say.' But I'd never heard of Louise Brogan or Elizabeth Bishop before. Nonetheless, I was charmed by this homage to poets, poetry, and procrastination.

      ... Horace didn't say that. "Carpe diam" doesn't mean seize the day - it means something gentler and more sensible... pluck the day. ... pick the day, harvest the day.... Don't frreaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was."

      "This glass of water is an essay.... Dip a spoon into [it] and scoop some of it out and hold it over a hot fry pan so that a few drops fall and sizzle and quickly disappear. That's a poem.""
    • 4/5
      4 stars, 5 stars. I don't really know how good the book is and why, because it was the book I needed to read at this moment to get through my own art crisis. Damn that was some luck. It's about poetry. It's about art. It's about the small parts that make up the whole, the unseeable rules, the scut work, the importance of starting, why it's called fishing and not catching. Delightful asides (the book is almost all asides) about poets great and small and how they got it done. I also enjoyed the inner essay about rhyme. My Dad's favourite rhyme was about the amatory adventures of screwy Dick and his corkscrew prick. He ended up dead because the object of his affection had a left hand thread. It was interesting to hold this next to more exalted examples cited in the book, an amazing tool and hard-wired state of being. I saved my dad's last TV Guide for the marginalia. The white plastic chair in the first half of this book is now one of my favourite call backs. Back to the salt mines.
    • 5/5
      Already looking forward to reading this one again with a highlighter and google close by. Just let it wash over me for this first read. A crisp book about a flaccid character. Baker is a special voice.
    • 3/5
      I guess you could say I like poetry. I don't live, eat and breathe it, but on a particularly self-reflecting day, I'll pick up Robert Frost and memorize one or two poems so that I can tumble them over in my head when I get bored later that week. Quirky, yes, but that is me. I'm also not really a fan of a reading an entire novel based on stream of consciousness. I can handle up to around 5,000 words of spouting off at the mouth by the author - but that's where I draw the line.You know how you're sitting in a class for the first time that semester, and realize that the professor is more than just an amazing teacher and you could listen to them lecture all day long? (Yeah, yeah not all of you are students so just go with it and pretend for a minute.) It doesn't matter the subject because you catch the enthusiasm of the teacher through the intensity of the words they say and the expressions on their face. Congratulations, Nicholson Baker, you've just created a new favorite professor.Well. Maybe. The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder, a sometimes published poet working on an introduction to an anthology. His girlfriend just broke up with him because he can't find the motivation to finish the introduction, his editor is hounding him for the same reason, and he has this fascination with rhyming even though it's a talent he doesn't possess. In fact, his anthology is called Only Rhyme. Paul also has a knack for self-injury. More importantly, he has a knack for stringing words together that make you literally laugh out loud.Actually, it's Baker that does that. He looks at poetry as a side salad, claims that death is his health insurance and makes a case for Friends as a legitimate representation of culture. And there's also discussions of rhyme, meter, how poetry works in French versus in English, a rant at Milton for screwing it all up.... I wouldn't mind reading a commentary by Baker on poetry at all.This is where that "maybe" comes in. I could honestly do without the plot and I really don't like Paul. He whines a lot about his ex. And about his dog. And his office. His only saving grace may be his honesty. He knows he's procrastinating and he knows he's a whiner. In reality, the plot is more of a frame for the commentary anyway. In an interview, Baker talks about buying Sharpies and growing a longer beard, just to put himself in the mindset to write this book. I can respect that.But again, I'd rather read his commentary about poetry and history than Paul's random thoughts on life.
    • 4/5
      This novel discussion of English poetry from Chaucer to Mary Oliver made me laugh, resolve to try reading Swinburne again, consider the mechanics of meter and rhyme and generally nod in agreement or pleasure. Good Read!
    • 5/5
      I was only about 20 pages in before I started recommending this book to everyone I know. It was on my list because I'm interested in books that play with our sense of what a novel is supposed to be and do, and this is a marvelous example of that, but so much more, too. It's also the crash course in poetry I've always wished for, and a meditation on writer's block and, more broadly, failure in general. It's charming and fun and thought-provoking and made me instantly want to write a novel just like it. By far my favorite so far of Baker's books.
    • 3/5
      A book I would recommend to anyone interested in poetry, and a book that has me thinking more and more about formalist poetry. I’ve gone back and revisited a lot of poets’ work while making my way through The Anthologist: it is part of the joy in reading a book like this. It’s a book about poetry, but the one issue I take with it is that it’s supposedly a novel: as far as plot and the narrator’s ongoing quest to write the introduction for an anthology of rhymed verse he’s collected, The Anthologist is a mess. On the other hand, it’s filled with poetic tidbits: the history of rhyme; the debates about iambic pentameter; poetic quarrels; the lives and work of many poets and their intersecting paths. It was a pleasure to read solely for these poetic meanderings, lessons in scansion and rhythm, the account of Bogan’s affair with Roethke, and how poetry is an inescapable and necessary part of our daily lives.
    • 5/5
      I read several of Nicholson Baker's books many years ago, and, to be frank, I found his stream -of-consciousness style tedious, bogged down in minutiae so that it resembled the mind-workings of the self-absorbed who feel compelled to tweet, text, e-mail and blog their every thought, every sensation.
      However, in THE ANTHOLOGIST, Nicholson Baker's style serves the story well.
      Paul Chowder, the narrator of the story, longs for the passionate, suicidal depression of the Great Poets, but his crisis is more like a low-level "funk". Paul has writer's block and cannot finish the introduction to his anthology of poetry. Roz, his long-time girlfriend, has, in exasperation, left him, and Paul is left alone with his thoughts. Paul avoids writing the introduction. He procrastinates , pursues mindless diversions, and transparently plots to win Roz back. He feels he is a failure, but in the midst of his self-reproach and self-deprecation, Paul has Great Thoughts---Great Thoughts about poetry and music and love,Great Thoughts about the creative process and how poetry makes our lives so much richer------thoughts so beautifully expressed that this is some of the finest writing about poetry I have ever read. These thoughts scintillate and take ordinary, mundane activities into the realm of the sublime.
    • 4/5
      My response to The Anthologist is a mixed one. Baker effectively replicates through his protagonist, Paul Chowder, the way the mind--or at least my mind--tends to work, fixating on one subject--poetry here--for long stretches of time, but fairly easily distracted by other, more personal, less philosophical, and more mundane things, like 'what is the meaning behind the fact that I now have three Band-aids on the same finger? there must be a meaning in this.' As a scholar and poet myself, one who tends to put off deadlines by finding infinite distractions, I recognized my own process of "head writing": letting things circulate until they seem to fall into place. Well, it's rather charming for awhile, but I'm afraid that eventually I found all this a bit affected and tedious. And I found myself arguing back against many of Paul Chowder's claims about poetry, even as I agreed with others. It's true that the character's passion for poetry--preferably rhymed poetry with four beats per line--shines through; but I also felt that his views were rather narrow. There's some real junk being published as poetry today--but also some very fine unrhymed free verse. The kind that irks me most is poetry that just plays with sound for its own sake and to show off the poet's cleverness, poetry that has no meaning behind it and creates no images to stir the imagination or the senses. And, oddly, that is the same way that Baker's prose began to affect me. By page 160, I started to skim because I just wanted to be done with it.So I'm giving The Anthologist 3.5 stars for its originality and some moments of brilliance, as well as for making me laugh a bit, but I can't recommend it more highly than that.
    • 4/5
      I disagreed with Baker's base Poetics (rhyme is not and has never been what draws me to poetry & I actually really enjoy iambic pentameter), and I often found his prose as purple as the plum on the cover--but even so I adored this book, as I adore practically everything else Baker has written. He never writes about much--tackling the subject & love of poetry is actually quote ambitious for a novelist who usually works on the scale of the beauty of staplers and the difficulty of heating up a bottle of milk for an infant--but he does it with such verve and unabashed excitement that I am always caught up in the emotion of it all. This book is actually a bit of an anomaly if I remember correctly: it's got a sort-of plot, with actual character arc and everything. Even if it hadn't I'd probably still love it. Baker has an incredible sense of joy that is so often dampened, or lost completely, in the stuffy pretentious of modern fiction. It's glorious to see this enthusiasm keyed on poetry, a subject that I actually care about. I'd reread this in a heartbeat--it really galvanized my (at the time) flagging faith in Literature.
    • 4/5
      Ever since The Mezzanine (best book ever written #32), Baker has been a personal god of mine. Marvelous minutiae meets a rambling overview from poems to Tetris to Sharpies. The Anthologist is simple and profound, silly and useful. It's a book about poetry for people who hate poetry. And all you poem-huggers will embrace this as well.BUY, BORROW or BURN?Buy.
    • 4/5
      Nicholson Baker knows how to perfectly balance facts and tidbits about a specific topic (in this book, poetry), and ruminations about ordinary life (here, the musings of a fictional poet living in New Hampshire), into his works to make them both edifying and enjoyable. The Anthologist is a great read for those who love diving into a specific topic and surfacing every once in a while to follow a linear plot. In this book, Paul Chowder, poet and anthologist, directly addresses the reader, offering insights gleaned from his years of writing poetry, while also entertaining the reader with the current state of affairs of his private life, both big (his recent break up and his inability to write an introduction to the anthology he is compiling) and small (his progress in cleaning out his barn). Overall this a solid, entertaining read.
    • 4/5
      Nicholson Baker continues to be a writer I want to read. He's a bright guy with a lot of knowledge and he's able to focus his writing talents on minutiae in a way that can make it interesting to read about pocket lint. For the Anthologist, the main character is the typical Baker construct - an off-kilter individual who has a lot of knowledge, is able to focus on minutiae and has some random weird thoughts interjected. Plus, I couldn't help but learn a little here and there and refresh my mind about some poetry. Overall, another enjoyable book from Baker.
    • 4/5
      A delightful meandering through the free associations of a procrastinator, neighbor, and passionate poet, detailing the fragility and rawness of the human heart and the multi-layered genius of poetry's ability of expose it.
    • 4/5
      Like a sleepy love song laced with self-doubt, anxiety, and endless distraction, harmonized to the major poets of the last two centuries.
    • 4/5
      Paul Chowder is a down-on-his luck, occasionally-published poet with a particularly nasty case of writers block. He is unhappy with his line of work, and with how both his career and his personal life are going. He hallucinates encounters with famous poets and teaches mock classes in his barn to no one. And while you have to take some of his impassioned monologues on poetry with a grain of salt, he is also the next iconic character of American literature. As both a lover of poetry and an aspiring poet, I had looked forward to reading this book and I was not disappointed. While this was a lighter read than I had expected, what with all of the critical acclaim, in its brisk stream-of-consciousness pace it remained true to character. This is my first Baker, but if this novel is any indication, he is a master of his craft.
    • 5/5
      One of those books that seems custom-written for me. An absolute delight, and I had NO IDEA it was about poetry when I picked it up.
    • 5/5
      This book it did reach out to meWith salted humor, on bended kneeImploring grace for poetry.Liked it a lot - a couple of chapters o'er the top with the technical woo-woo, but mostly fab.We root for Roz!
    • 4/5
      I've read Nicholson Baker's essays—they're great—but never before read his fiction. It seems that this particular bit of fiction, which is entertaining all the way through, is in essence a vehicle for non-fiction: Baker has written an introduction to poetry in the shape of a novel. And it's marvelous. If, like me, you've dipped your mental toes into the uncomfortable water of poetry a few times, only to wonder if you really like water at all, this may be the book for you. Iambic pentameter? Bah, says protagonist Paul Chowder, it's been misused and overhyped. "The four-beat line"—not the five beats of pentameter—"is the soul of English poetry."Chowder is trying to write the introduction to a poetry anthology called Only Rhyme, which is ironic, because he's a poet who writes free verse (poetry without beats—meter—or rhyme). Here's what Chowder says about free verse:----Free verse is, as we know, merely a heartfelt arrangement of plummy words requesting to be read slowly. So you can break the line anywhere you want. In fact you want tobreak against anymoments of naturalpause, not withthem, to keepeveryone on their toes and off balance. So at the end of a line, you might find a word like "the" that requires another word to go along with it.---Elsewhere, Baker riffs on the mixed joys of coming across a poem in a magazine like The New Yorker:"Let's have a look at this poem. Here it is, going down. You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows that it's a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here the magician will do his thing. Here's the guy who's going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spit it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is not prose. This is the blank white playing field of Eton."You either like this kind of voice or you don't. I do. I think it's super smart, playful, and enjoyably provocative. This book is delightful because it tells me that my reaction to poetry is perfectly valid, and if I don't like some poems it's not because I'm stupid—they may very well be bad, or at least problematic enough to be justifiably disappointing to as many people as appreciate them. There is a novel in here, too, about Paul's struggle to complete his introduction and come to terms with the loss of his lover, Roz. These characters are well drawn, but they're not as interesting as the others we meet, namely Poe, Kipling, Hardy, Roethke, Bogan, Lindsay, Oliver, Swinburne... Baker drops some musical recommendations as well. There's a lot to learn, in the easiest and most enjoyable way. This is the funnest textbook you'll ever read.
    • 1/5
      Very sorry I made the effort and finished this. A book of semi-interesting musings and explanations of poetry, but not a coherant novel.
    • 5/5
      A delight. I read this when it came out a couple years ago, and it recalled the melding of the humorous and the literary I experienced in reading Vikram Seth's Golden Gate and its fore-runner Pushkin. Poetry is a pretty serious subject in modern America--to its own detriment, and to the fracture of the Chaucerian-Shakespearean-Molierian-Byronic tradition. I cannot recall another novel that dares to take as its subject a literary professional who talks prosody in his sleep. Nicholson Baker's amusing take on the Po Biz makes this a keeper--though at the moment mine is loaned out, has been for months.
    • 5/5
      The narrator of this book is by turns funny, vulnerable, frustrating, charming, haughty, brilliant, and pathetic. In other words, he may be the most lovable, authentic character ever to appear in American literature. This book continues to jangle around in your head for weeks after reading it, much the way a particularly catchy metered stanza might.
    • 4/5
      Too much poetry, too didactic, and not enough story for my taste, but nonetheless it has encouraged me to look for more of Baker’s work. It’s about a man who thinks he’s a failure, but he finds in the end that he’s not. Well, not completely, anyway. That’s way too optimistic for me! A little romantic as well.That's not good.What is good is the personality of the main character. I liked him, and Baker is good at revealing what the person is like.
    • 2/5
      A slight effort. Nothing he does will make me like The Mezzanine any less but this was negligible. There is almost no story here. Nor did I believe it for a second; it seemed bolted on as if Baker couldn't decide whether to write an essay or not. His musings on poetry - namely that the iambic pentameter is not the basis of the English line that in actuality its four beats and a silent rest - was fascinating and I could have used more on that. In the meantime there was a lot of gossip about poets and not all of it was uninteresting.
    • 5/5
      The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker is a novel. Narrated by Paul Chowder, who is having a hard time writing an introduction to an anthology of poetry. It’s quirky and funny. Here are a couple gems from this book:“Anthology knowledge isn’t real knowledge. You have to read the unchosen poems to understand the chosen ones.” (page 54, The Anthologist)About a childhood teacher:“This, children, is a kind of poetry that makes perfect, thrilling sense in Japanese, and makes no sense whatsoever in English. That’s what she should have told us. This form is completely out of step with the English language. And the person who foisted it on us — that person was a demon. Even at the time I knew it wasn’t right. Seven syllables, eleven syllables, five syllables? Come on. How does English poetry actually work? It doesn’t work that way. I don’t actually know Japanese, but haiku in Japanese had all kinds of interesting salt-glaze impurities going on that are stripped away in translation.”Not only did The Anthologist manage to make me laugh often, I also found the character of Paul’s musings on poets and poetry, and his life in general, to be insightful. Funny and insightful both at the same time is a rare combination, so I highly recommend this novel whether you are an old pro at poetry or a newbie appreciator.
    • 5/5
      My husband has been teaching two sections of poetry this semester, and he marvels at how wary his students are of the stuff. Even after they understand the technical underpinnings – form, meter, rhyme, metaphor – many of them still don’t take to it, don’t delight in the striking language that can ravish the soul.Me, all I need to do is think, “I shall rise now and go, and go to Innisfree,” from Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and I feel myself grow calm, my muscles go limp (“And I shall have peace there, for peace comes dropping slow”). Or I recall “Come slowly, Eden,” the Emily Dickinson poem my husband sent me by email after our first meeting, by which I knew that he and I were going to have a future. Poetry surrounds and sustains and informs us, makes us happy, makes us think.I want to give The Anthologist to all of my husband’s students and tell them: “This, this is why you should love poetry. Paul Chowder will tell you exactly why it’s so wonderful, and you’ll finally understand.” The novel, narrated by Chowder, is an extended love letter to poetry. Chowder is a poet of some minor repute himself, and he has just finished putting together an anthology called “Just Rhyme.” All he needs to do to finish it and get the royalties rolling in is write an introduction. But Chowder has a case of writer’s block that just won’t give. As a result, we’re treated to his ruminations on poetry, a sort of talking rough draft as he carefully avoids doing any serious writing. “Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I’m going to try to tell you everything I know,” he begins."Well, not everything I know, because a lot of what I know, you know. But everything I know about poetry. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are going to come tumbling out before you. I’m going to divulge them. What a juicy word that is, 'divulge.' Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat."And everything does come tumbling out, in ways funny and profound, silly and sensible, thoughtful and thoughtless. How else to explain a passage like this:"My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I’m a study in failure. Obviously I’m up in the barn again – which sounds like a country song, except for the word 'obviously.' I wonder how often the word 'obviously' has been used in a country song. Probably not much, but I don’t know because I hardly listen to country, although some of the folk music I like has a strong country tincture. Check out Slaid Cleaves, who lives in Texas now but grew up right near where I live."Yes, it does seem like Chowder is a failure, but it’s apparent that we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator. It doesn’t make sense that he’s a failure when he’s able to not work at anything – he isn’t a professor/poet, has only taught a bit and hated it, and he doesn’t seem to have inherited money, so one is almost forced to conclude that he has made enough from his writing to sustain himself. The occasional job of manual labor can’t possibly be enough to sustain him. Roz, the woman he loves and who lived with him for eight years until she couldn’t deal with his writer’s block any longer, doesn’t seem to have supported him. And he’s been asked to be a featured guest at a seminar in Switzerland, so he must be a poet of some repute. Just who is this guy?We never really find out – but we do find out a lot about poetry. Meter is Chowder’s particular bête noir. He believes that most poems rely upon a “rest” to fill out their meter, so that poetry that seems to have three beats usually has four. He doesn’t think much of iambic pentameter, either, Shakespeare or no Shakespeare. He’ll often spell out the meter, with little numbers in circles about lines of poetry to give us the beat, until we seem to be able to hear that rest, too.He’s also big on rhyme, as you might expect from an anthologist who has just completed assembling a volume called Only Rhyme. He isn’t exactly opposed to free verse, and believes some fine poems have been written in free verse, but really, “I always secretly want it to rhyme. Don’t you, some of you?” He believes that a poem that doesn’t rhyme shouldn’t even be called a poem:"It’s a plum, not a poem. That’s what I call a poem that doesn’t rhyme – it’s a plum. We who write and publish our nonrhyming plums aren’t poets, we’re plummets. Or plummers. And some plums can be very good – better than anything else you might happen to read ever, anywhere. James Wright’s poem about lying on his hammock on Duffy’s farm is a plum, and it’s genius. So is Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, 'The Fish,' of course. 'I caught a tremendous fish' – genius."A paragraph like that makes you want to run for your own anthologies, doesn’t it? I pulled my copy of Bishop’s poems from the shelf because I hadn’t read “The Fish” before. Chowder’s right about it; it truly is wonderful. You haven’t really looked a fish in the eye until you’ve read this poem, and you certainly haven’t understood how much we share with our piscine prey.Chowder walks us through his days of thinking about poetry, and I started to understand what he was doing, because it’s familiar to me from my own writing. He’s writing his introduction to his anthology in his head, working it out, figuring out what he wants to say, sorting out what matters and what doesn’t. This is a vision of how a poet and scholar works. It’s brilliant. And it’s peculiar. I loved it for both characteristics.The temptation to quote passage after passage is strong, but I will resist and simply tell you that you must read this book. Whether you like poetry or not, you really should read this book. Rarely have I seen an author take such joy in words and how they are arranged on the page, and it is definitely contagious. Baker is always doing something new and strange; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. This time, it most definitely does.
    • 5/5
      I want to read Paul Chowder all the time, from the most mundane antics to his musings on poetry and rhyme there wasn't a moment in this book I wasn't entirely engrossed in his menial day-to-day activities. Perhaps this reflects as much on my own neurosis as anything else but either way I highly recommend this one.
    • 1/5
      This is a combination novel and friendly teacherly essay on poetry. One comment on the book as a novel, another on the book as an essay, and a third on the two together.1. As a novel: Nicholson Baker is not a major novelist. His sense of the offhand, the corny, the careless and carefree, the vernacular, and the informal, is too easily satisfied, and it amounts to too much of his sense of what contemporary writing can be. He is too easily convinced that home-town, unornamented, straightforward, honest description is the best way to write a novel. Or to put it the other way around: it is easy to see the kinds of writing he doesn't like -- they would include consciously developed styles and manners of all sorts -- but not easy to see why he is so content writing what he takes to be their opposite. I imagine he might justify it to himself as a development of the American novel after Updike, somewhat in the line of Ellis or DeLillo: a minimalist, anti-modernist, firmly North American, styleless style or mannerless manner. But it is weak, unable to account for its persistent low-level fear of writing.2. As an essay on poetry: it's good, but not on topic. The narrator, a poet, is working on an anthology of rhymed verse, and in the course of the book he tells us many times how important and interesting rhyme is. None of the reviewers of the book seems to have noticed that he doesn't actually say more than a sentence or two about rhyme itself. The entire essay on poetry is about meter. On that subject, it's fun, clear, and entertaining, and I'd recommend it if it were published by itself, without the interlarded novel. And it's unfortunate that the poetry essay is all about North American poets, with the usual sprinkling of Victorian predecessors in a predictable canon (Swinburne instead of Browning, shout-outs to contemporaries like Graham who might read his book, etc.). And the review in the New York Times is absolutely right about Baker's lack of connection with the real poetry world, even in North America: Baker scarcely mentions publications other than "The New Yorker," and he imagines a poetry conference in Switzerland where the room is abuzz at the appearance of Paul Muldoon. That social isolation is of a piece with Baker's advocacy of rhyme and regular meter. If he were a student, I'd shut him in a room with some books of Celan's until he saw that meter can be broken in fascinating ways -- that poetry doesn't need to be either regular or simply "free" -- and that a poet's voice, like a novelist's, can involve more than just the assiduous mimicry of daily informal speech. I wonder if Baker thinks his loyalty to regular meter and rhyme (which he fails to separate) are a sign that he is not only contemporary and postmodern, but also a deep traditionalist: if so, that puts him very firmly in the NPR - PRI - Lake Wobegon set. This is just the kind of novel that makes Horace Engdahl right.3. As a composite essay and novel: it doesn't work. When the essayist is in the room, he talks to us, asking us to try out the sound of lines, and even to sing along. But when the novelist is speaking, it's an ordinary first-person narrative. We are asked not to notice when we, the readers, are suddenly urged to disappear for a few minutes so the novel can resume. And we're asked not to be surprised when the character in the novel we're reading abruptly turns to us and asks us a question. It's not that this couldn't work: it's that Baker doesn't notice it as a problem. I think that's of a piece with his studied insouciance about voice: just say what you mean, don't gussy it up, and you're a novelist.
    • 2/5
      This is a gorgeous piece of writing. Baker knows his way around an artfully turned phrase, and the treatise on meter in poetry embedded in the work gave me a new appreciation for verse I didn't even realize I was looking for. However, as a novel, I simply felt like an author spinning his wheels. What started as a charming portrait of the author in the midst of writer's block quickly turned into an arduous slog of navel-gazing. I found lots to admire here, but not nearly as much to enjoy.