Thursday, March 13, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: The examined life

By John Ziebell

Like earthquake activity, literary criticism moves through cycles, and those cycles seem somewhat tectonic in nature--a little friction always starts something. But it's been quiet lately, and just when you figure some things are stable--like, maybe, the definition of the word "novel"-- Nicholson Baker is back, once again, with the kind of book that only Nicholson Baker could get away with writing.

The alleged protagonist of A Box of Matches is Emmett, an erudite and insightful first-person voice. Emmett is a textbook editor who lives in a rambling old house with his wife, Claire, their two kids, a cat and a duck that inhabits the doghouse in the back yard. From what we get via his initial ramblings, Emmett seems like a reasonably normal white-collar type who has developed a sudden and ill-explained habit of starting his mornings by stoking a predawn fire in the living room hearth.

"What you do first thing can influence your whole day," our narrator opines. "If the first thing you do is stump to the computer in your pajamas to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you're going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning. So don't do it. If you read the paper first thing, you're going to be full of puns and grievances--put that off."

What Emmett likes to do is urinate, make coffee, then start a fire--all in the dark. "Good morning," each chapter of the book begins, "it's 4:04 a.m." Or 4:19, or 5:44...whenever Emmett sits before the fireplace, coffee and matches in hand, to share his thoughts. Although the book touts itself as a novel, it does seem more like collected musings than a work of fiction, rich in opinion and thin on plot. The narrative has a lot of resonance, but no real storyline. Nor does Baker provide traditional characters; in terms of image and attributes, the pet duck is developed far more carefully than either of Emmett's children. This doesn't mean the duck is cherished more than the kids are, but it certainly doesn't seem to be cherished any less.

Baker has abandoned--or perhaps foresworn, in this instance--the fascination with sex that informed The Mezzanine, The Fermata and particularly Vox. But he is still a detail freak ("miniaturist" was one appellation embraced by critics) whose characters need obsessions to feed on, and one of Emmett's seems to be bathrooms. We get more information than we need on bodily functions and restrooms themselves, down through hotel/motel amenities to the methodology Emmett has developed for rinsing off the soap in his shower. Rain room accouterments take on totemic value; at one point Emmett offers a clinical description of his toilet plunger that segues into this fairly elegant account of its application to clear a clogged bathtub drain:

"After one blast, to which I gave the full might of my arms, a supernova of black fragments came up, God, and then more with a second plunge, and I knew that without chemicals, without rooting snakes, with only strength and cunning, I had made that water move. I held still for a second to listen: yes, a purling of the water curling away into the pipes. Later there was even a brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm."

Okay, so while we might look askance at somebody so obviously invested in plumbing and all that goes into it, Baker does earn props for making the bathroom fun. The same goes for his meditations on dishwashing, child rearing, how ducks eat, the proper trimming of beards and the tools of Emmett's morning ritual--a fireplace, a collection of combustibles and some wooden matches.

The book may not walk and talk like a standard novel, but that doesn't mean the prose is slight. It's funny and it's readable, but infinitely grounded in the human. Emmett's son appears only in vignettes that push the envelope of precious; we know he loves Claire by the way he remembers her wisdom teeth, their college days or how she turned a book's pages with her tongue while nursing their child. Sentimental? Sure, but we let him get away with it. After all, what's a little sentiment from a guy who has already confessed the disposition of his belly button lint?