The Mezzanine

[sawyl]

Following a pointer in The Age of Absurdity and an enthusiastic recommendation from doctor_squale, I finally found the time to read Nicholson Baker's exquisite first novel, The Mezzanine. The action, if that's the right word, unfolds over a single lunch hour during which the narrator goes to buy a new pair of shoelaces:

Chance found me that day having worked for a living all morning, broken a shoelace, chatted with Tina, urinated successfully in a corporate setting, washed my face, eaten half a bag of popcorn, bought a new set of shoelaces, eaten a hot dog and a cookie with some milk; and chance now found me sitting the sun with on a green bench, with a paperback on my lap.

These events are, unsurprisingly, not terribly profound except that they prompt the narrator to muse on the absurdities of everyday life. Thus he meditate at some length on the question of why shoelaces break when they do and where they do and whether the primary mode of wear is caused by knotting or by the flexions of walking, he considers to behave when a trivial conversation with a co-worker is interrupted by a phone call, and the similarities between record grooves and escalator grooves. Most of these are dreadfully funny; the extended analysis of the dynamics of the corporate lavatory, from the sudden fluency of action demonstrated by otherwise useless colleagues to the beauty of the turbulent flow of water in the sanitary porcelain — a scene which the narrator augments with a quote from Gerard Manley Hopkins! — are both achingly funny and profoundly true.

One particularly delightful moment comes midway through the attempt to purchase shoelaces, when the narrator talks about his obsession with earplugs and how they can be used to symbolise affection:

Earlier I had tried sleeping with earplugs in both ears, so that I would be sound-free as I revolved in my sleep, no matter which ear turned up, but what I found was that the pillow ear would be in pain by the early hours of the morning; so I learned how to transfer the single warm plug from ear to ear in my sleep whenever I turned. By this time L. was resigned to my wearing them; sometimes, to demonstrate special tenderness, she would get the wooden toaster tongs, take hold of an earplug with them, drop it in my ceilingward ear before I had gotten around to doing so, and tamp it in place saying, "You see? You see how much I love you?"

Touching, funny and wonderfully true. Just like the rest of the book. For all its brevity — it's only a hundred and thirty pages, and even these are expanded by massive multi-page footnotes — and its apparently narrow setting, it's a book with a lot to say about life. As Michael Foley argues, books like the The Mezzanine show how, if we only the take the trouble to consider the mundane events of our life from a new perspective, we can find whole new worlds of ideas in something as apparently trivial as a trip to buy new shoelaces in a lunchbreak.

It's hard to say quite how much I enjoyed this book. I laughed a lot. I winced whenever I recognised myself in the narrator — something that happened so regularly that I'm not starting to wonder about myself. I enjoyed the small canvas and the focus on the minutiae of everyday life. I loved the writing style, digressive footnotes and all, and the well judged and consistent tone of the narration. A quite superb piece of writing.