Review by New York Times Review
IN an interview that appeared in The Paris Review last year, Nicholson Baker was asked about the importance of realism in his work. "It becomes interesting," he observed, "to come up with words that wrap around reality's utility pole." There's something nice about that sentence. When you squint, it's actually doing what it describes. And it's deeply Bakerian (Bakeresque?) in more than one respect: in its sheer oddity, for starters (befitting a 6-foot-4 former bassoonist who cycles around in a big Quaker beard); in its blending of high ideas with a certain insouciance of tone ("interesting to come up with words that . . ."); and finally in the downright pornyness of its entendre - not even "the utility pole of reality," but "reality's utility pole" - which, coming from the author of some of our culture's most explicit literary sex, can't help calling to mind a scene in his 1992 novel "Vox," in which a character reads, "very slowly," the memorable phrase "up . . . and . . . down . . . on . . . his . . . pole." There isn't much sex in "The Way the World Works," Baker's charmingly miscellaneous new volume of essays. That's not a profound act of critical noticing, perhaps, but the absence jumps out if you know his work. Fiction, with its lowered inhibitions, seems to free that part of his mind. Apart from a single stray memory of self-abuse in someone's empty, arty house, this new collection contains only one piece with an explicitly sexual theme - "Sex and the City, Circa 1840" - and it's superb. A book review (from this newspaper), it considers the so-called flash press in mid-19th-century New York, erotic newspapers for "sporting" gentlemen, which kept a "watchful eye on all brothels and their frail inmates, . . . interviewing half-naked women in the park, excoriating sodomites" (escort reviews, they're called today). Baker lets us peek "through a tiny, smudged window" onto this world of nymphs and fancy men and their lecherous clients. But what's so moving about the essay is that, as Baker titillates us with details, he's quietly turning his review into a tribute to archival restoration itself, and beneath that, to old newspapers as objects. Baker is notably passionate on that subject - his nonfiction book "Double Fold," published a decade ago, was largely about the destruction of such papers by libraries bent on digitization at any cost, and at various times he has even been a kind of activist in that world, fighting alongside likeminded librarians against discard-happy administrators. He seems to have recognized in this review a chance to point at something concrete by way of argument - here, in newspapers like The Flash and The Whip, is precisely the kind of thing that disappears when you don't take pains to preserve it. Not just information but past lives. Little ghosts of men and women walking through the columns of type. He writes of going to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass., and (in a passage that channels Hawthorne's great triptych-essay, "Old News") approaching the "acid-free folders, stored on cool shelves with brass rollers - full of strange lost scandal." This ability of Baker's - to snatch little impressions in the chopsticks of his prose - is on good display in these essays. Several times he returned to me some sensation from childhood, a feeling I'd forgotten I remembered, like how, back when phones had rotary dials, one sometimes "hurried it back around and felt the center gear strain slightly," or how Bazooka Joe bubble gum "had a comic on an inner sheet that we read with great interest but never laughed at," or how, on a sewing machine, "the down-darting lever in the side . . . rose and fell so fast that it became two ghost levers." Among the best essays here is one Baker wrote for The Washington Post Magazine, a gently experimental thing, somewhere between a diary and a list, titled "One Summer." Every paragraph begins, "One summer. . . ." The topics range from childhood to the recent past. "One summer I got a crush on a girl who was 11. I was 11 at the time as well." "One summer my daughter learned how to read the word misunderstanding." "One summer I read an old copy of 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' with great fascination." Baker is a natural essayist, in the sense that the form hews to his habit of mind. He's a guy who'll happily, or at least helplessly, sit and think for 20 pages about, say, the Kindle (in "Kindle 2") and what it means. He procures one of the things. He reads De Quincey's "Confessions" on it. He calls its name "cute and sinister at the same time" - a nice little nested bon mot that forces you to think about burning libraries to figure out what he means. But Baker defied my expectation of a reassuringly crypto-Luddite ending by at last, after many attempts, enjoying a novel on the machine (Michael Connelly's "Lincoln Lawyer"). The matter of the text - the story itself and the sound of it in his head - emerged through the medium, as they always will, through infinite technological changes. "Poof, the Kindle disappeared," Baker writes, "just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would." There are times when Baker's relentlessly even and likable tone, his for the most part refreshing unwillingness to try too hard, lend a slightly phoned-in feeling. If I were collecting 15 years of my best nonfiction, I might be tempted to leave out the pieces that begin, "Wikipedia is just an incredible thing," or "I'm fond of Google, I have to say," or one (on the death of Steve Jobs) that ends, "You have to love him." At the very least he could have, you know, upped the level on those lines, pre-pub. But Baker's little moments of slackness (very rare, and noticeable only for that, really) seem to go hand in hand with his greatest strength, namely the confidence of his own mind, the quality that makes him, for me, a fiction writer whose work will always be of the highest interest. He has what Rousseau and, yes, De Quincey had, and what Joan Didion has, the bravery of self-exploration - the reason he's one of the only people around writing in an open, artistically serious way about sex. (Granted, this has partly to do with the psychologically dubious idea we have in America that sex doesn't represent fully mature terrain for the artist, unless it's delivered with sufficient Updike-Rothian darkness, whereas Baker's handling tends toward playfulness, as in his recent fantasy of utopian sexuality, "House of Holes.") ONE essay here seems likely to draw more comment than the others: "Why I'm a Pacifist," first published in 2011 in Harper's Magazine. This is Baker's answer to the storm of opprobrium he endured after publishing his last nonfiction volume, "Human Smoke," a book-length argument that the United States was wrong to get involved militarily in World War II, and that we, along with the other Allies, only increased the overall number of dead by refusing to support a "dignified peace" with Germany. That's a simplistic but I don't think inaccurate version. In this essay, Baker concentrates his defense (some would say restatement) on the idea that we may have hastened the Holocaust by joining the fight, or worsened it, or even helped to bring it about. There's an entry in Goebbels's diary in which he paraphrases a speech Hitler gave in December 1941, just after America's entry into the war: "The world war is here," Hitler supposedly said. "The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence." Baker quotes one historian's theory that when we chose to engage, Jews living under the Germans "lost their potential value as hostages." Some of Baker's critics have claimed to find his argument historically vapid. They drive right past the fact that he was thinking along completely different lines, reading history not as a pragmatist but as a moralist, and asserting as he did so that this is a legitimate way to read history. He moves forward from the position that it's wrong to kill people, to take life, and that wars are first and foremost large, organized killings of human beings, to be avoided whenever it's in our power to do so. Thus far we don't fault him. But the logic of Baker's claim that we acted against those principles in responding with force to Hitler's prior aggression, that we succeeded only in increasing the planet's suffering, depends too much on an attempt to predict the thoughts of a Hitler - the behavior of a psychopath, in other words. Perhaps it's true that Hitler unleashed the Final Solution, in its full horror, only out of desperation, but perhaps it's the case that he would have done it later, and that he would have gone even further, once he'd entrenched his power, and that he would have killed people we don't even know he had an interest in killing. To say that we have more than a guess at which of those hypotheticals is right amounts to sheer hubris. And when you are writing about the attempted massacre of an entire people, survivors of which are still living, more intellectual caution is in order. "War never works," Baker might say (and writes here). And he's right - war brings suffering; to say that it "works" is glib to the point of obscenity. But we lack the variables to play the alternative-history game. We don't get to find out how the world would look otherwise, if some dictator or madman had been left alone instead. (All the more reason not to go to war, Baker might reply.) Whatever its merits, the essay is far from the most stimulating in this book. I acknowledge Baker's sincere attempt to bring his reading of history into line with his ethical views, while respectfully preferring him on Defoe (revealed as a "truth-teller" for perhaps the first time since that famous liar was born), or on mowing the lawn (which turns out to be like thinking), or on playing hyper-violent video games with his son: "We were very considerate of each other in the beginning," he writes. "My son could have shot me many times, but he didn't. . . . We carried on this peculiar chivalry for 15 minutes." Then they started killing each other. Baker is a guy who'll happily, or helplessly, sit and think for 20 pages about, say, the Kindle and what it means. John Jeremiah Sullivan is the author of the essay collection "Pulphead."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 11, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Baker is a writer of unbridled imagination, rampant curiosity, and zealous advocacy. These traits inspire his frequently controversial novels (e.g., House of Holes, 2011) and his freshly conceived and avidly observed essays. As the title of his new collection suggests, Baker wants to know how things are done, but he is also investigating why we do what we do and who we are or wish we were. In original, keen, and entertaining essays either pithy or delving from the last 15 years, Baker remembers rotary phones and the time-and-temperature number and describes a job sweeping up coins in a fountain. He shares his fascination with the wing language on airplanes; profiles Daniel Defoe and David Remnick; chronicles his immersions in video games, Wikipedia, and e-books; and argues cogently and ardently in defense of library collections and pacifism. Each essay is a lamp; gathered together, they are solar in their radiance. Baker's reasoning is sophisticated, his analogies dazzling, his passion for clarity invigorating, his prose sterling, and his mission to preserve the past and illuminate both facts and feelings is profound.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Whether it's his two-page reflection on why he likes the telephone, or his heady tome on why he is a pacifist, novelist and essayist Baker (Double Fold, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) is a delight to read. In this diverse collection of essays, spanning 15 years, Baker offers gorgeous prose and poses important questions about our era of digital readership. As he notes in his essay on the Kindle 2, there is a distinction between a writer's work and its presentation in book form. Many essays staunchly defend the reading of print books and newspapers, including "Narrow Ruled," in which he shares how he reads closely-"when I come across something I really like in a book, I put a little dot in the margin." A proud defender of libraries and newspapers, Baker acknowledges the perception of him as "a weirdo cultist, a ringleader" for books. While his musings on video games and the neighborhood trash dump are memorable, the collection's real value lies in its essays on reading. Baker practices what he preaches by collecting his own work, so that somewhere, people will be turning paper pages. Though it would have been wonderful if the collection included a new, unpublished essay, readers of this book will still find themselves agreeing with him: books are still worth getting. Agent: Melanie Jackson. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Baker is known for his expostulation against the demise of the card catalog, his repatriation of thousands of American newspapers deaccessioned by the British Library (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper), and for the priapic prose of his porn-for-thinkers novels, e.g., House of Holes. This second collection of his essays, after The Size of Thoughts (1996), is a tapestry of Baker's personal, emotional, and intellectual life. He recalls incidents of childhood and adolescence, and his first encounter with the woman he eventually married in Venice. His watery jaunt to the church later informs an essay on the history and craftsmanship of the gondola. Baker interviews David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, confesses to Wikipedia addiction, matches wits with rogue editors, purchases a Kindle 2, affirms his passion for libraries and newspapers, and expounds his commitment to pacifism. VERDICT Baker's voice is that of a convivially erudite conversationalist seeking comfort in the predictable in a high-tech, ever-changing world. Anyone who delights in reading will be heartened.-Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal, Canada (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
