Book review: The Way The World Works: Essays by Nicholson Baker

IN the final essay of this hodge-podgy collection, Nicholson Baker – best known for his microscopically detailed accounts of daily life, his love of the minute, the specific, the Seinfeld-ian small – notes that he’d like to write a book for children and adults called The Way the World Works, a book that would explain “everything about history, beauty, wickedness, invention, the meaning of life,” the “whole unseemly, bulging ball of wax.”

The Way The World Works: Essays

By Nicholson Baker

Simon & Schuster, 336pp, £14.99

The book he has actually written may be titled The Way the World Works, but it’s anything but a wide-angled take on the human condition. Rather, it’s just another random anthology of various pieces written for magazines and other publications about an assortment of subjects, including video games, Venetian gondolas, the use of earplugs (while writing), Steve Jobs and Wikipedia.

The individual essays not only carom around the world in terms of subject matter; they also vary greatly in quality. Some showcase his eye for detail and his ability to nail down those details in velvety, Updikean prose.

Some read like parodies of self-absorption that highlight Baker’s apparent need – shared with his idol, John Updike – to capture even the most trivial of his jottings between the covers of a book. “One 
Summer”, a list of things the author did over various summers, actually contains this paragraph: “One summer a raisin stuck to a page I was writing on, so I drew an outline of it and wrote ‘A Raisin Stuck here – Sunmaid.”’ And later on, this sentence: “One summer I was on the verge of making a baloney sandwich.”

The more substantive essays also fluctuate wildly in their persuasiveness. The book’s most forceful entry, “Truckin’ for the Future”, is an impassioned 1996 piece for the New Yorker about the San Francisco Public Library’s “weeding” of its collections. It and several other essays about libraries and pre-digital era newspapers deal with matters covered at greater length in his compelling 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, eloquently reminding us just how imperilled original texts are in the age of microfilm and optical scanning, and how the doctrines of “leveled access” and “use it or lose it” are undermining the very mission of great research institutions.

In contrast, a long essay from Harper’s Magazine called “Why I’m a Pacifist” reads like a tendentious and alarming follow-up to his tendentious 2008 book Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, which used highly selective news snippets to suggest that there are no just wars. In this essay, Baker questions how Britain and the United States waged the war against Hitler, making the dubious assertion that “the pacifists of World War II were right”. He even seems to suggest some sort of moral equivalence between the Nazis and the Allies, writing that “the Holocaust continued, and the firebombing continued: two parallel, incommensurable, war-born leviathans of pointless malice that fed each other and could each have been stopped long before they were”.

As for the essays about technology, Baker proves a remarkably observant witness, despite or because of the reverence for the past he’s evinced in his writings about libraries and newspapers. Indeed, these chapters – like his novels The Mezzanine and The Everlasting Story of Nory – underscore his gifts, to borrow a Saul Bellow phrase, as a “first-class noticer”.

Baker notices that the screen of the Kindle is not just gray, but “a greenish, sickly gray,” a “post-mortem gray”. And he points out that at the moment of death in the Call of Duty video games, “you are rewarded with a literary quotation” from the likes of Einstein, Churchill or Voltaire – quotes that may be cynical, pacifist or pro-war.

Baker is equally adept at coming up with evocative analogies. For instance, he describes Google arriving on the scene in 1998 “sponged clean, impossibly fast” – “like a sunlit white Formica countertop with a single vine-ripened tomato on it”. He describes the iPad as a “brilliant, slip-sliding rectangle of private joy”.

And he describes the vandals (“the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers”) who like to deface or sabotage Wikipedia pages as turning the online encyclopedia into “a fast-paced game of paintball” that fuels the commitment of editors devoted to policing pages and “whacking trolls.”

Taken together, the essays in The Way the World Works create a sort of self-portrait of the author. Baker can be an annoyingly pretentious fellow: the sort of guy who, as a teenager with a job at a mall, liked to whistle Ravel’s Bolero while he worked “so that the secretaries would know that I knew a few things about French music”. The sort of guy who writes things like “Truth wears sunglasses” in his notebook.

He even gives himself little rules concerning his annotation of books: no messy underlining or highlighting in yellow or pink, just a discreet little dot in the margin next to something he approves of – dots so discreet that they “could almost be a dark fleck in the paper” – and, also, no more than 10 or 15 dots per book.

In one essay, Baker writes about his curiosity, his love of research, his ardour for old-fashioned scholarship. He says he likes “finding things out” and argues that “curiosity is a way of ordering and indeed paring down the wildness of the world.”

“One’s head is finite,” he writes. “You pour more and more things into it – surnames, chronologies, affiliations – and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish. Then you can forget most of the details – eject them, clean those warrens out, make room for more.”