Plot: towards lunchtime, a male employee in a large corporate office building (the first-person narrator) discovers that the shoelace of his left shoe has snapped precisely twenty-eight hours after the right one snapped: a thought-provoking coincidence. Clutching his Penguin copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and pausing first for a pee in the men’s room, he descends the escalator to buy a bag of popcorn, a hot-dog, a cookie, a carton of milk and a new pair of shoelaces. Then he goes back up the escalator to his office, carrying his small bags. That’s it.
Yet a mass of human delight and anxiety, and indeed the very essence of the workings of the human mind, are distilled in Nicholson Baker’s sui generis 144-page chronicle of a single American office lunch-hour, a novel in which no tiny, mundane, daily habitual action is considered too small to examine and meditate on at length.
Baker’s ultra-minimalist The Mezzanine made a great impression on me when it first came out in 1988, the time when hot-air hand-dryers were starting to replace hand-towel dispensers. And the particular sentence in it that has stayed with me ever since is this: ‘Come to your senses, World!’ – the capital ‘W’ denoting that the narrator was referring not to the world, but to World Corporation Dryers. His detailed rant, unleashed by reading the text on the World Dryer – ‘this quick sanitary method dries hands more thoroughly, prevents chapping – and keeps washrooms free of towel waste’ – goes on for a page and a half. What if you need to dry your face, he fumes? ‘Out of desperation, real and true desperation that I have experienced, you resort to the toilet paper.’ But ‘as soon as you dampen it with warm water, it wilts to a semi-t
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Subscribe now or Sign inPlot: towards lunchtime, a male employee in a large corporate office building (the first-person narrator) discovers that the shoelace of his left shoe has snapped precisely twenty-eight hours after the right one snapped: a thought-provoking coincidence. Clutching his Penguin copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and pausing first for a pee in the men’s room, he descends the escalator to buy a bag of popcorn, a hot-dog, a cookie, a carton of milk and a new pair of shoelaces. Then he goes back up the escalator to his office, carrying his small bags. That’s it.
Yet a mass of human delight and anxiety, and indeed the very essence of the workings of the human mind, are distilled in Nicholson Baker’s sui generis 144-page chronicle of a single American office lunch-hour, a novel in which no tiny, mundane, daily habitual action is considered too small to examine and meditate on at length. Baker’s ultra-minimalist The Mezzanine made a great impression on me when it first came out in 1988, the time when hot-air hand-dryers were starting to replace hand-towel dispensers. And the particular sentence in it that has stayed with me ever since is this: ‘Come to your senses, World!’ – the capital ‘W’ denoting that the narrator was referring not to the world, but to World Corporation Dryers. His detailed rant, unleashed by reading the text on the World Dryer – ‘this quick sanitary method dries hands more thoroughly, prevents chapping – and keeps washrooms free of towel waste’ – goes on for a page and a half. What if you need to dry your face, he fumes? ‘Out of desperation, real and true desperation that I have experienced, you resort to the toilet paper.’ But ‘as soon as you dampen it with warm water, it wilts to a semi-transparent pûrée in your fingers’. Spot on. Also, for the last thirty-two years I’ve thought about The Mezzanine every time I’ve stood on an escalator. In his musings on the workings of daily life, Baker drew from the subconscious to the conscious our awareness that escalator bannister rails move at a very slightly different pace from escalator stairs, so one’s elbow becomes more (or less) bent by the end of the ride. The narrator works out that, in his office escalator’s case, ‘the handrail was lapped every fifty revolutions’. Reading the novel again this week, in the age of the Dyson Air Blade, I was just as charmed, although much of the office paraphernalia (stapled memos, cigarette vending-machines, rubber date stampers) has now disappeared. There’s more nostalgia today in some of the book’s pleasures. For example, the exquisitely accurate description of the workings of a Tetra Pak milk carton (called a Sealtest carton in the USA) made me miss those cartons. The narrator marvels at
the radiant idea that you tore apart one of the triangular eaves of the carton, pushing its wing flap back, using the stiffness of its own glued seam against itself, forcing the seal inside out, without ever having to touch it, into a diamond-shaped open- ing which became a real pourer, a better pourer than a circular bottle opening or a pitcher’s mouth because you could create a very fine stream of milk . . .The carton inventor’s genius fills him with ‘jealousy and satisfaction’. But, he adds, ‘it took my mother a few years before she stopped absent-mindedly trying to tear open the wrong side of the carton, despite my having lectured her on the fact that one triangle was much more heavily glued than the other’. Yes! One’s mother (or aunt or grandmother) did do exactly that, for ‘years’, in those bewildering post-milk-bottle days; and even we ourselves occasionally tried to open it at the wrong end. It’s delicious to read about these daily mechanical actions, described by this writer who combines a boyish, sciencey fascination for How Things Work with a poet’s ability to express and delight in it.
As well as marvelling at how things work, Baker can be deeply pained by flawed inventions, such as the new plastic straw.
I stared in disbelief the first time a straw rose up from my can of soda and hung out over the table, barely arrested by burrs in the underside of the metal opening . . . How could the straw engineers have made so elementary a mistake, designing a straw that weighed less than the sugar water in which it was intended to stand?For such a short book, The Mezzanine is actually a very slow read. This is because of the footnotes. A tiny ‘1’ above a word such as ‘straw’ or ‘doorknob’ forces you to dart your eyes downwards in mid-sentence to a long (but definitely necessary, you feel, if this book is going to do full justice to a man’s actual thoughts in his lunch-hour) digression on straws or doorknobs, in a much smaller font. The doorknob footnote mentions how the narrator’s father used to hang his ties over the glass-faceted doorknob at home, and how ‘once in a while a tie would ripple to the floor, having been gradually cranked into disequilibrium by many turnings’. I think our minds do go off on these long footnotey tangents in the mid-sentence of our thoughts. This tangent model seems a more accurate depiction of how the mind works than the Joycean stream-of-consciousness model. We disappear down the rabbit holes of our own mental digressions. Sometimes the footnotes go on for three-quarters of a page, or more; the longest one, about gramophone styluses, goes on for four pages of eye-achingly tiny text, with only four lines of ‘real’ text at the top of each page, so they look like pages from the Arden Hamlet. When you’ve finished reading this vast digression (not one of my favourites, as the details didn’t resonate with me, and not all of them do), you then have to flick back to the tiny ‘1’ in the middle of a now long-forgotten sentence – reminding me of flicking back to a da capo in Bach.
Baker is good on the atmosphere and daily realities of office life. He’s close to the bone when he mentions the ‘efficient little sniffs’ his colleagues make when they walk past his desk ‘to signal to us and to themselves that they are busy and walking somewhere for a very good reason’. I definitely make those ‘efficient little sniffs’ in my house, when virtuously lugging the washing basket past rooms in which other members of the family are sitting. His appreciation of the man whose job it is to polish the escalator rails has an Edward Hopper-ish charm. The cleaner simply stands at the bottom of the moving bannister, holding his cloth against it. ‘This guy probably knew every landmark of that rubber handrail’, including ‘the fusion scar where the two ends had been spliced together to close the loop’. (I’ll look for that ‘scar’ the next time I’m on an escalator.) The narrator takes care, when he steps on, to grasp the handrail the man hasn’t been polishing. ‘It would have been odd to grasp the handrail he had been polishing – like walking on a newly mopped floor: it would have heightened the always nearby sense of futility of building maintenance.’ This novel is awash with small but important human truths like that. Sitting on a bench (at last) after the 28-page pre-lunch men’s-room session which covers everything from contagious bathroom tune- whistling to his difficulty in peeing in a communal space, the narrator admits he’s not even enjoying the Marcus Aurelius. He purchased the book because he’d happened to like the sample sentence on p.168 that he’d read in the shop. But he had liked it ‘better than anything I came across in later consecutive reading’. How often have we done that – bought a book on the strength of a sample sentence read in a bookshop, which turns out to be the only good sentence? Often. The problem with reading, he remarks, is that ‘you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop the day before’. Good point – and the same with knitting, I find.
Very bizarrely, the narrator informs us that this lunch-hour, the one in which his second shoelace broke, in fact happened to him years ago, when he was 23, and he’s now in his mid-thirties. What’s that all about? It might be pure wit on Baker’s part: building up our hopes that something important is going to happen in this lunch- hour singled out for recollection, only to leave us with the bathos of the main event being the broken shoelace. But perhaps Baker is also showing us that every random hour of our lives deserves to be put under the microscope and be paid full homage. One of the longest footnotes, towards the end of the book, is actually about footnotes. The narrator explains why he likes them – but only if they’re written by the author, and not by some scholar who tediously footnotes and explains every single tricky word of a poem. ‘Digression is sometimes the only way to be thorough,’ he surmises; and footnotes ‘offer reassurances that the pursuit of truth doesn’t have clear outer boundaries’. They are ‘the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library’. His tangents are not always the same as mine; I haven’t spent years of my life meditating on the workings of escalators or shoelaces; but in revealing his own private mental digressions Baker’s narrator encourages us to admit to our own. We might all have similar habits of thought, but the minute details of what we think about reveal us all to be very different from each other, and alone.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 69 © Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2021
About the contributor
Ysenda Maxtone Graham is the author of three Slightly Foxed Editions: Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School, The Real Mrs Miniver and Terms & Conditions. Her latest book, British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays, 1930–1980, was published in 2020.