The Mezzanine was a work of genius in a way but, casting your mind back to the experience of reading it, didn't you actually begin tiring of it almost as soon as you saw what was going on, as soon as you saw how it was done? Did you really crawl along every line of those page-and-a-half footnotes on shoe laces and straws? It's all very well skimming bits of The Pickwick Papers but Baker's prose was either unskimmable or it was nothing.
Talk about a one-trick pony]īaker's trick, the one announced with exhilarating and exhaustive brevity in his first novel, is the detail thing, the microscopic investigation of the everyday. For a start we should make that 'talent' singular. It's not just that The Fermata is such a shameless waste of Baker's distinctive talents it wastes them in such a way as to make us revise our initial assessment of those talents. 'Ten years from now,' he said, 'People are going to feel really embarrassed about the way they made so much of that guy.' A wildly optimistic forecast, it turns out. IN 1991, just after U and I came out, I was talking about Nicholson Baker with a friend of mine who now lives in America.
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