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eremy Noel-Todd on Nicholson Baker, The Everlasting Story of Nory

How Alice Grew Up

Nicholson Baker’s fifth novel, The Everlasting Story of Nory, was not, as its 9-year-old heroine might say, the world’s most raging success. I picked it up as a pocket hardback in a clearance sale. A week later, I returned and bought the remaining stock at a pound apiece, to distribute to friends and family.

The book itself explains why I did this. In Chapter 39, ‘Reading Tintin to Her Babies’, Eleanor ‘Nory’ Winslow ponders the difficulties of communicating a literary enthusiasm:

Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give a person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?

Thankfully, magazines now exist that are dedicated to overcoming this problem. Rereading my last remaining copy of Nory for this piece, however, I wished I had gone to the wholesalers and taken a boxful, because there are few books that ask so much for the proof of being given.

For me, The Everlasting Story of Nory is a profound exploration of the origins of civilization through the mind of a child. But that could, admittedly, be somebody else’s idea of a boring book. And so could this, from the dust-jacket:

A nine-year-old American girl . . . is spending a term at an English school. She thinks about teeth, tells herself stories, defends a classmate, has nightmares about cows, and generally does her best to make sense of life’s particulars as she encounters them.

Like the boys in Nory’s class who emit ‘low gurgles and snickers’ when she has to read her story about a girl who makes friends with a dog, not to

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Nicholson Baker’s fifth novel, The Everlasting Story of Nory, was not, as its 9-year-old heroine might say, the world’s most raging success. I picked it up as a pocket hardback in a clearance sale. A week later, I returned and bought the remaining stock at a pound apiece, to distribute to friends and family.

The book itself explains why I did this. In Chapter 39, ‘Reading Tintin to Her Babies’, Eleanor ‘Nory’ Winslow ponders the difficulties of communicating a literary enthusiasm:

Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give a person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?

Thankfully, magazines now exist that are dedicated to overcoming this problem. Rereading my last remaining copy of Nory for this piece, however, I wished I had gone to the wholesalers and taken a boxful, because there are few books that ask so much for the proof of being given. For me, The Everlasting Story of Nory is a profound exploration of the origins of civilization through the mind of a child. But that could, admittedly, be somebody else’s idea of a boring book. And so could this, from the dust-jacket:

A nine-year-old American girl . . . is spending a term at an English school. She thinks about teeth, tells herself stories, defends a classmate, has nightmares about cows, and generally does her best to make sense of life’s particulars as she encounters them.

Like the boys in Nory’s class who emit ‘low gurgles and snickers’ when she has to read her story about a girl who makes friends with a dog, not to mention the English teacher who bans the word ‘nice’ (even though it is ‘a very, very important word for kids’), the book’s reviewers were not impressed. ‘A thin, highly predictable narrative about a schoolgirl’s banal – and uneventful – life’ (New York Times); ‘a dull book’ (Guardian); ‘readers who are not relatives will wish [Baker] had edited and focused the book more stringently’ (Daily Telegraph). This last faintest praise alludes to the story behind the book’s dedication: ‘To my dear daughter Alice, the informant’. Spending a family year abroad in the cathedral town of Ely, the American Baker would collect his daughter from school every day, ‘interview’ her about her experiences, and work them up into fiction. Which sounds, of course, like the most tender self-indulgence. The impulse to share, as a parent, is irresistible, but the endless story of little Johnny is best kept for a select audience. Baker’s account of Nory’s development in an interview seems artless: ‘I didn’t know how the book would end up because I didn’t know how her experience in this English school would end up.’ But the artfulness of the book begins, in miniature, with the title. Like a number of the novel’s epithets, ‘everlasting’ turns out to be more accurate than its conventional synonym (‘never-ending’). This is not a fairy-tale of eternal childhood. Growing up is at the heart of Nory’s story, which ends with a loose tooth and ‘a salty taste of blood in her mouth’. Yet her narrative is concerned with the ‘everlasting’ in that it depicts the deep continuities between child and adult mind, including the irrepressible desire ‘to be continued’, as Nory says at the end of her own stories. The word ‘everlasting’, she notes, recalls ‘the kind of things you say in Cathedral’, which is also the place where she learns about the never-ending story she knows, by a slip of the ear, as the ‘crucifiction’. Baker’s critics tended to regard the book more as a sort of Everlasting Gobstopper, the endlessly sweet sweet invented by Willy Wonka in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The novel’s gentle blending of third-person narration with Nory’s own thoughts resulted in a ‘veneer of cutesiness’ that made it ‘almost unreadable’. Never judge a book by its veneer, though. As in Dahl, only more so, the salty taste of the uncute cuts constantly through Baker’s storytime style, with an irony too subtle for actual children. The conceit of a book about a little girl who tells herself stories ‘the grown-up way, the way she loved to talk’ inevitably recalls the great Daisy Ashford, and her Young Visiters (see SF no.28). And Daisy and Nory are, indeed, of an age. But where Ashford wrote in precocious imitation of adult romances, Nory’s unfinished epics are fantasies of self-reflection. ‘The Story of the Deadly Rain’, for example, follows its ‘eight or nine years old’ heroine, Mariana, on one of her regular trips to the Sahara Desert. She soon finds herself having to rescue another little girl, ‘about the age of four’, from an unexplained onslaught of boiling raindrops. ‘Her face started bubbling it was so hot. Her sweat turned red with blood . . . Mariana spoke softly to the girl. “Do not cry dear, do not cry, it takes blood from your precious body”.’ These are the true melodramatic imaginings of childhood, prompted by the previous chapter’s waking experience of school fire drill and drama class (‘they were learning to die in various ways’). Through stories, Nory finds a way of transforming her small, unconnected observations into grand, meaningful chains. To quote Henry James, the ventriloquist of another naïvely perceptive little girl in What Maisie Knew, ‘art makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process’. There is no substitute for art in Nory because it is everywhere. The little girl who wants to be a dentist or a pop-up-book maker, who has a plan to curate ‘a museum of fake food from all different lands’, and who uses stories to avoid bad dreams and to deepen friendships, is an instinctive improver of the world. I hesitate to say that she embodies Baker’s theory of fiction, because that makes her sound like the heroine of a boring book again. But there is undoubtedly a nod towards this in the self-portrait of Nory’s father, whose contribution to the world is ‘writing books that help people go to sleep’. Nory is a bedside book in the best sense: it comforts and amuses, and translates the world with dream-like lucidity. Another of the book’s fortuitous malapropisms is Nory’s friend who reads ‘totally emerged in the page’. Like Alice entering Wonderland, immersion in a story becomes emergence in another world. When Nory has a nightmare that recalls Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole – she becomes a white rabbit who burrows into an ancient corpse in the cathedral grounds – she wakes up, reads a book and regains imaginative control:

Ah, yes, she saw her mistake . . . the dead monk was not really dead – it was just sleeping deeply, wearing a frightening mask . . . the black tongue was made of papier-mâché and had a little spring that made it pop out.

It is Nory’s interest in the workings of everything, cute or disgusting, that makes her an artist in waiting. She is equally fascinated by the idea of a doll’s egg with rubber insides that will ‘goosh out’ when cracked and the blood that would ‘coosh out’ from a pig’s bladder used by an Elizabethan actor. (Her scene-stealing younger brother, ‘Littleguy’, whose head is filled with the technical vocabulary of trains – a doughnut with icing is ‘mixed-traffic’ – also shows promise.) By adopting this naturally attentive view of the world, Baker writes about his year in England in a way that corrects all the abstraction of adult life, for which the book has little time (‘Nory’s father had to go in to London . . . to look something up’). Every other page in my copy has a pencil-marked moment of pleasure. My favourite chapter follows Nory’s thoughts in Ely Cathedral’s Lady Chapel, its skeletal windows and walls ‘broken up very tiresomely’ by the Reformation and Civil War. Performing her own restoration, she arrives at one of the book’s many associations of art with the care of parenting:

Right now the Lady Chapel definitely had problems, in Nory’s opinion. It smelled very coldly of stone. Probably that was because the stone powder was always falling, since there were so many places that the stone was broken open, and over the years it kept falling from them, like pollen . . . Long ago it would have been a much, much more Mary-Mother-of-Goddish sort of building when the stained glass was there, because the colours would be red and blue and you might feel you were in a humongous stone kangaroo pouch.

I hope that gives you a glint.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 35 © Jeremy Noel-Todd 2012


About the contributor

Jeremy Noel-Tod teaches English Literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Occasionally, he has to go in to Cambridge to look something up.

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