The charm of the commonplace
Kevin Jackson
A BOX OF MATCHES by Nicholson Baker
Chatto, £10, pp. 178, ISBN 070116977X
Where other contemporary American novelists, mandarin or popular, like to write about war in South-east Asia, corruption in the boardroom, organised crime and the alienated condition of the human soul, Nicholson Baker prefers to tackle the truly important issues of our time: how to lift a pair of underpants with your toes, how to make a bar of soap revolve in your hand by strategic squeezing, why it is perfectly permissible, indeed thoughtful, for gentlemen to relieve their bladders in the seated position traditionally favoured by ladies, the demonstrable superiority of the English spelling 'grey' to the standard American 'gray'.
For readers who discovered the uniquely beguiling qualities of Baker's project in the late Eighties, when he published his mockheroic tale of an office worker's lunch hour, The Mezzanine, his latest novel represents a welcome return to terrain at once comfortingly familiar and bracingly fresh.
In recent books, Baker has digressed into the realms of sexual obsession (The Fermata), childhood as seen from inside (The Everlasting Story of Nary) and, in nonfiction, the iniquities of librarians (Double Fold); A Box of Matches sees him back on the quotidian front, following the traditional Socratic mission of examining daily life with a meticulousness that would have made Socrates seem sluggish.
Stubbornly devoid of any plot as Messrs Grisham or King would recognise the term, the novel offers, instead, a gradually unfolding portrait of a pleasant, middleclass American family. Our narrator-hero, whose domestic circumstances are suspiciously reminiscent of Baker's own, is Emmett, a 44-year-old editor of medical textbooks, who shares his inconspicuous life with his wife Claire, 14-year-old daughter Phoebe, eight-year-old son Henry and a recently adopted duck called Greta, 'who has enriched our lives considerably'. (There is also a male cat, but he is somewhat neglected.) At the start of the hook. Emmett has begun a new regime of rising unwontedly early, brewing coffee in the dark, then attempting to start an open fire with a single match. Thirty-two mornings and 32 chapters later, the box is empty and the story done.
With the home fire burning, Emmett ruminates, discusses, advises, explains. He has extremely strong views on such issues as the right way to munch a crisp apple (you need to search for what he terms the sclonk point'), put on your glasses in the dark and wash a dish that has been soaking overnight. Though the uninitiated might find it hard to believe, Baker has the knack of making these trifles seem at least mildly amusing, and at best surprisingly funny, not to say instructive. But his cleverest trick, his neatest sleight-of-hand, is in sustaining the illusion that one is simply listening to the rambling chat of a likeable, regular guy, even though he is shamelessly indulging, on almost every page, in the most highly wrought literary conceits: stars are 'private needle-holes of exactitude in the stygian diorama"; the day breaks in 'gnat-swarms of dawnlight".
Among its other quiet virtues, A Book of Matches both practises and advocates a connoisseur's approach to the generally unadmitted enjoyments of life. Most professional writers could probably make a fair job of pinning down, say, the seductive textures of a ripe pear, but it takes a Baker to pin down the exact satisfactions of using a sink-plunger, writing and posting cheques, hitting a round figure on the price gauge when filling your petrol tank. More impressive still. Baker's miniature fiction defies Tolstoy's maxim in Anna Karenina, and offers a memorable account of one family's particular happiness. Like the small, agreeable sensations it so deftly evokes, this modestly scaled story is a pleasure that can add cheer to an entire day.
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