Nicholson Baker’s Great Simplicity

from Propeller

There’s just something about Nicholson Baker. And since this is a book review, I would be willing to bet you want to know what that is. You’re sitting there wondering to yourself, What’s this ‘something’ that’s so great? First, I suppose it’s probably that his work goes into great and lovely and resounding detail about everyday existence, and because of that, there’s something for everyone in his books. I go around preaching his name to anyone I know who likes to read, even to people who just like to read a little bit, which is really saying something. Here’s this author who can appeal to both voracious readers and vehement nonreaders at the same time. How can that be?

Here’s the thing: I guess I can’t actually recommend The Anthologist to everybody. If I was looking for a Nicholson Baker book to recommend across the board, to everyone I know, it would be A Box of Matches. That’s the one. It really is. But I’ll tell you what, if you like yourself some really great writing, and you’re into poetry even just nominally, The Anthologist will blow your wig right off. Clear into last week. You’ll have to go searching for that wig, because it will have been taken off your head by a deft draft of surprise when you weren’t even expecting it to be windy. You didn’t even know you wore a wig, did you?

Though I’d really, really like to, therefore, I cannot in good consciousness recommend The Anthologist in a wide sweeping arc—like those seed-sowers of yesteryear who stood in fields open-handed—but it has nothing to do with how great or not great the book is, because The Anthologist is truly magnificent. Simply stunning, in so many subtle ways. For example, when the narrator, Mr. Paul Chowder, a poet who has been hired to write an introduction to an anthology that he cannot bring himself to write, dashes off, “And we all love the busy ferment, and we all know it’s nonsense,” it’s just heartstoppingly beautiful and true.

The reason I can’t recommend it to everyone, then, has more to do with the fact that not everybody is ready and willing to climb into a book that’s ostensibly about a poet thinking about poetry. But I wish they were, because then they’d get this line, too: “So poetry and alcohol are what the responsible doctor should prescribe, and maybe letter writing, as well.” How amazing is that? Baker’s protagonist argues that without depression, without angst, we would have no art, no poetry, and no music. None of it. Medication, and our country’s tendency to overindulge in it as a means of ‘coping,’ has gone off and killed greatness.

Anyway, because Paul Chowder can’t do what he’s hired to do, he finds himself unable to pull his life fully together, and thereby loses many of the only things that are going well. This causes him, instead of writing the introduction that he should be writing, to sit alone and think about his girlfriend, who left him for not writing the introduction, and about her lying next to him in bed at night. “What if sometime Roz let me hold her breasts again,” Paul wonders. “Wouldn’t that be incredible? Those soft familiar palm-loads of vulnerability and I get to hold them. That’s simply insane. Inconceivable.”

The faint humor innate to Baker’s work is tender and endearing and can even choke you up. As you walk out of the back of The Anthologist, you won’t necessarily be laughing, though. Just smiling, happy to be alive in a world in which a writer as grand as Baker still roams around and offers up his thoughts, like simple, juicy, delicious little plums, on a chilled plate, for us to eat.

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