BOOKS
It makes you go blind
James Buchan
VOX by Nicholson Baker
Granta, £14.99, £7.99, pp. 169
Anybody who has travelled on public transportation in the United States will know that many Americans delight in telling their intimate histories: it is part of their notion of Liberty.
Nicholson Baker is an artist of this con- fession compulsion. His people plump themselves down, pale and atwitch from long study and self-abuse, and quite soon you've heard about their career ambitions, medical problems, reading programmes, upstate New York childhoods, deodorants; how they put on their socks in the morning; their failure to win or even be entered for the National Book Award; their sexual fan- tasies and anxieties about bad breath; why they didn't go to Harvard; their mothers, wives, babies, bowels. Once there was some irony in this, but the wind seems to have changed: Baker's last book, U and I, was a nervous and half-hearted assault on the writer John Updike; his latest, Vox, is pretentious amateur pornography in an expensive wrapping. Baker remains a maddeningly talented writer.
Nicholson Baker's first novel, The Mezzanine, was published in Britain in 1989. It is an account, more or less, of an office-worker's lunch hour:
Chance found me that day having worked for a living all morning, broken a shoelace, chat- ted with Tina, urinated successfully in a corporate setting, washed my face, eaten half of a dog and a cookie with some milk; and chance found me now sitting in the sun on a green bench, with a paperback on my lap. What, philosophically, was I supposed to do with that?
It is a book in which a small corner of an adult world is reconstructed on the scale of early childhood. Shoelaces and lavatories loom like mountains. The US is a kind of capitalist Sparta and American children are largely reared by corporations: Baker writes affectingly about branded foods, the mechanical and electro-mechanical innova- tions that America used to produce effort- lessly and the lost security of corporate bureaucracies. His style is a triumph of affectation: earnest-cretinous, in the man- ner of a prose Warhol, with the periphrastic precision of Updike and Nabokov thrown in. It shouldn't work but it does.
In an ideal literary biography, Nicholson Baker would, in his second novel, have quit the literary coterie of New York, broken decisively with his masters and applied the technical self-confidence gained from writing about shoelaces and escalators to something much, much bigger: maybe even opened up the theme of The Mezzanine in all its magnificent oddity, a generation of Americans dwarfed or arrested in perma- nent infancy by the unrepeatable inven- tions of their parents! Baker goes in the opposite direction. Room Temperature, which came out in 1990, is smaller than The Mezzanine: the lunch hour is now half an hour and the body being fed is now a baby's. It is a beautiful book. Immobilised by the baby on his lap, Baker's narrator must keep his thought in narrower compass and under discipline. Nothing happens; but there are elegant variations of theme and modulations of key, as in music. And with a baby on his hero's lap, Baker at last has some adult responsibilities. Warhol's albino ghost has receded, though Updike is still in there, metaphoring away.
As an act of emancipation from a literary influence, U and I, published last year, was less than ideal. In this essay on Updike and his influence, Baker pretends — quite unconvincingly — to be quoting his master only from memory. The notion, and the specious arguments for it, come from Borges's famous story Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote: but whereas Borges's purpose was 'satire and fantasy, Baker's is to mitigate his timid insolence. I'm not against beating up on older authors (rather the contrary), and especially if they make a thing about sport or home improvements as Baker seems to claim, but why come like a thief in the night? False naivety, faint praise and feeble digs: I am drawn to Updike's honest picture of himself in 'Getting the Words Out' as 'paw[ingj' through dictionaries and thesauruses are followed by apology, self-abasement and special pleading. There are interesting things in it but, sympathising with Updike, I felt as if my leg had been humped by a Pekinese. The Atlantic, which commis- sioned the essay, spiked it. (I should add, in fairness to Nicholson Baker, that no less a critic than Craig Raine thought U and I good.) And so, alas, inescapably, unpostponably, to the book I was paid to read, Vox. It is the story of a young man and young woman who meet on a telephone chat-line, masturbate noisily, exchange numbers and hang up. The chat-line is an emerging social arena and Baker will no doubt be praised — perhaps more in this country than in the US, because of our more complete commitment to tawdry literary novelty — for colonising this new space for high-brow fiction. In truth, Baker doesn't do anything with it: even so restricted a human relationship bores or overtaxes him, and the ending is teeth-achingly sentimen- tal. The bulk of the book is more child- hood, some pieces of descriptive whimsy that have evidently been lying around the yard since The Mezzanine, and dreary mas- turbation fantasies that are merely eccen- tric versions of the fantasy letters in men's magazines.
What is it with American literary fiction and masturbation? It seems but yesterday that I — one of the very few British finish- ers — was breasting the tape at the end of the Brodkeian wankathon! I can see why literary masturbation is fashionable: HIV, the inhibitions wrought in men by feminism — Vox contains many embarrassing pieties about women's sexuality — the example of Portnoy's Complaint, etc. But masturbation, while harmless or even benign in life, makes novelists go blind. Whole passages in Vox seem designed pre-eminently for authorial auto-stimulation. I coughed loud- ly, Britishly, once, twice, but to no avail: bent over his work, he did not hear me; the
reader has no place in this book. I hate to see such a talent dribble away in literary onanism. And if Onan is too remote and biblical a minatory figure, is not Harold Brodkey sufficient warning?
It may be that Baker genuinely wanted to write a new sort of male literary porno- graphy that is not offensive to women. If he did intend such a thing, he has not succeed- ed. And what if he had?
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