Books by author: Nicholson Baker

A Box of Matches is a return-to-form for Baker. Like his first two novels, The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, it is a novel of minutia, filled to the brim with obsessive detail steeped in keen observation.

As with the previous books, there is no plot per se. This, however, is not a liability, but rather a strength of Baker's writing. He makes the reader more aware of sensation and place, and that is a worthwhile accomplishment. Although A Box of Matches doesn't really hold up to The Mezzanine, it is at least as good as Baker's other books. Recommended.

Nicholson Baker's latest novel is one of his least successful. The subject matter is highly controversial (the novel is about a guy telling his friend about his plan to assassinate President Bush), and it seems that controversy may be the whole point of the undertaking. The novel consists entirely of dialogue between Jay and Ben, wherein Jay explains his plans (involving remote control flying saws and "homing" bullets), and Ben tries to talk him out of it. During the course of the conversation, Baker points out some of the evils committed by Bush and his administration, but there isn't any kind of coherent political diatribe here — it's assumed that the reader already knows the details.

Baker's great strength as a writer is his ability to focus his descriptive powers on the daily minutia that normal people never notice, but he does very little of that in this slim volume. He's not very good at writing believable dialogue, and this effort isn't as good as what he achieved in Vox. I'm all for controversy, and I'd sure like to see Bush out of the White House, but I expected a lot more from the author of one of my all-time favorite books (The Mezzanine). Bottom line: Baker is a good writer, but this may be his least successful novel to date.

This was a pretty huge disappointment for me. The novel is told in the voice of a nine-year-old girl, and the character development is too subtle; on the surface, pretty much nothing happens during the entire novel. At the moment, I'm of the opinion that Baker's novels have been on a steady downward slide since the excellent The Mezzanine.

Of the three books written by Baker that I've read, The Fermata is the least satisfying. It seems to be an attempt by Baker to achieve a form of literary pornography, and it has been my experience that if a piece of pornography doesn't stroke one's particular fetish, it will seem distasteful. The two segments of "amateur" porn written by the novel's protagonist are particularly juvenile, perhaps even less clever or interesting than the material in alt.sex.stories. While the novel's "big idea" (a person who has the ability to "pause" the universe) is excellent, and the result is perhaps realistic (the person uses his ability to undress and fondle women), it is ultimately the domain of a good short story rather than a novel.

This is by far my least favorite Nicholson Baker book. It is indeed raunchy, but it has a horrific flavor to it (the first "episode" includes a dismembered forearm feeling up a girl), and if there was anything of value to be found in the overall structure, I missed it.

Marvin Minsky recommended this book, suggesting that it contains wonderful insight into the workings of the mind. It was Baker's first novel, and it received excellent reviews. I enjoyed the microscopic detail used throughout the book, and I found the extensive footnotes to be a clever device for mimicking human thought processes, though I was occasionally bogged down by them. The Mezzanine is one of the best books I've read this year.

I didn't enjoy this quite as much as I enjoyed The Mezzanine, but it was still an enjoyable read. Baker is gifted with an ability to zero in on very interesting minutia, and this novel is full of it. Forget about plot —- this book is all about description and introspection.

As with any collection of essays, some of these are much better than others. Nearly all of the essays in this collection are excellent (even "The History of Punctuation" manages to be not entirely boring). I burst out laughing several times while reading "Leading with the Grumper", which is something of a review of a slang dictionary. However, the two longer essays, "Discards" and "Lumber", are weaker than the rest, and "Lumber" is an excrutiatingly boring, pedantic mess (after 100 pages, I couldn't bear to read the remaining 40 or so). Of course, your mileage may vary.

"Literary erotica."

"Phone sex transcripts."

I'm not sure how to describe this. The dialogue is good, but somewhat unhuman. No one houses such keen observations in such well-constructed oral verbiage. Vox was more enjoyable than The Fermata, but pales, I think, in comparison with The Mezzanine and Room Temperature.