Book review: The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Published on Friday 14 August 2009 17:01

Simon and Schuster, £14.99 Review: PEGGY HUGHES

'HELLO, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know" begins Nicholson Baker's anthologist, a "once-in-a-while-published kind of poet" labouring over the introduction to a new poetry anthology. His girlfriend Roz left him, exasperated by his procrastination, and he is freefalling through days of writer's block and chronic self-analysis. He sits in his barn, contemplating the weather, "the overboiled potato of the moon", his lack of income.

This is one of those books in which, on the surface, nothing much appears to happen. Baker is an acknowledged purveyor of the insane voluptuousness of tiny detail. Critics have taken umbrage with his meandering trivia, but he defends it thus: "You kind of notice things in passing, and never put a frame around them – and then somebody like me comes along and writes a book about them. And then that book itself becomes the frame."

This book is indeed a frame – a beautifully constructed frame that makes art of a few difficult months of one man's life. A mouse's faeces; the number of cheese slices one can consume in one sitting; the sound a windmill fashioned from Pabst beer cans makes: Baker's details have details. And though this book could run aground on the treacherous rocks of pointlessness, it blends mundane inactivity articulated with an affirmation to the power of poetry; and the effect is uplifting and compelling.

Large portions of its relative slenderness are given over to dismantling poetry's cogs, duplets and triplets and spondees and pentameter. Stresses are marked with little bubbles, making some sections look "like an air-balloon festival"; poetry's whisper is shown by way of tiny print.

Paul riffs a lot, enjoying the frisson of wordplay, free association and non sequiturs. One moment he is philosophical, the next he is factual or amusing, or maudlin: "You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering. I have a mouse in the kitchen."

The whole book is multisensory, lavishly onomatopoeic as well as olfactory: especially satisfying rhyme rests are awarded an air-punching 'BOOM!'; the quality of Tennyson's early recording of The Charge Of The Light Brigade is a source of humour when he attempts a phonetic transcription. Baker makes tangible flesh of whimsical, frightened, brittle, ebullient Paul, and by rooting him so squarely in the American poetry scene he situates the book in a strange hinterland between fiction and non-fiction.

The Anthologist purports to be a novel but reads more like a monologue; it has some aspects of the diary and the memoir, but also the riches we'd expect of a critical book. Whatever name we decide to bestow on it, we can know that using beautiful words to tell a story about a life, anthologised, Baker manages to produce a feast for the senses, mind and soul.

Nicholson Baker is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 24 August, 11.30am

www.edinburgh-festivals.com