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.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.
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.
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.
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