| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780679725763 | | Publisher: Vintage Books | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 30117967 | | Item#: RY33F2 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.25L x 0.5T |
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| | | | "At almost one o'clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top..." (from the first line) Turns an ordinary ride up an office escalator into a meditation on our relations with familiar objects--shoelaces, straws, and more. Baker's debut novel, and a favorite amongst many of us here.
Annotation:
Nicholson Baker's divinely nutty first book, THE MEZZANINE, takes place as Howie, the protagonist, rides down the escalator in the office building where he works, planning to buy a new shoelace because his has broken. From this series of nonevents in a plotless novel, Baker fashions a brilliant and hilarious narrative about nothing more (or less) than Howie's view of the world. As one digression leads to another (and to a whirlwind of elaborate, funny, and/or informative footnotes), Howie ponders such things as milk cartons, bathrooms, staples, the little thread you pull to open a band aid, Pez dispensers, doorknobs, and of course shoelaces (the physics of their breakage) and even footnotes themselves. Of all his novels, THE MEZZANINE seems the most accurate mirror of what the inside of its author's curious (in both senses) mind must look like: a roomy, well-stocked fusion of the astutely scientific and the purely childlike, full of fascinating facts, utterly unique observations, and an enviable way with the English language.
| PraiseNew York Times Book Review
"THE MEZZANINE...has no story, no plot, no conflict. When somebody describes it to you it sounds stupid (which, by the way, is a characteristic of all good gimmick novels). Yet its 135 pages probably contain more insight into life as we live it than anything currently on the best-seller lists....THE MEZZANINE is a very funny book about the human mind, in particular that part of the mind that processes the triviality of daily events that seem to have no importance but end up occupying so much of our existence....[T]here is a first-rate comic mind at work here, so let's be thankful he's chosen to toil in the salt mines of fiction rather than making a fortune writing for David Letterman." - Robert Plunkett 02/05/1989Washington Post Book World
"I confess to finding Nicholson Baker's prose so witty and hypnotic that I never want it to stop." Harper's
"[A] wonderfully pedantic take on five minutes of normal life..." - Vince Passaro August 1999 Salon
"This novel traces a few hours in the life of an overly analytical, urban office worker named Howie. It sounds boring, but Nicholson Baker's first-person creation mixes old-fashioned wit with a keen eye for meaningful minutiae, giving the book a surprising heft." - Damien Cave 11/12/2001 |
| Author Bio| Nicholson Baker | | Nicholson Baker attended Haverford College, studied bassoon at the Eastman School of Music, and worked as an office temp before he became a novelist and essayist. His novel VOX, which takes the form of a conversation between two anonymous partners on a phone-sex chat line, was thrust to the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist in 1998 when Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr's office investigated whether the book was given by Monica Lewinsky to President Bill Clinton. Baker has become a passionate advocate for the conservation of original archival materials (particularly newspapers) by libraries, and has created the American Newspaper Repository as a storage site. |
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