paul j. griffiths

Nicholson Baker’s latest novel The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster, 2009) has all his tics: obsessive interest in the particulars of creatures (inchworms, poems, flesh, food, words, metrical form), and a narrator whose interest in those particulars transfixes him, pins him to the fabric of the cosmos as its helpless observer. How can this narrator not be Baker? And how can the reader not love him and thereby the world he helps us to see with greater clarity and depth? This is the man who has written the best essay (the only essay?) on the loss entailed by the mass destruction of card-indexes performed by libraries, their supposed custodians (later incorporated into his book Double Fold). And this is also the man who has written at length about the possibilities for sexual adventure (no, let’s not mince words: predation) brought about by the ability to stop time (The Fermata). Well, of course it’s easy not to love him: I suspect most women don’t enjoy reading him. And the intensity of the Baker-gaze, its omnivorousness, is disturbing. Are there things, real things, actual occurrences, that ought not be gazed on or depicted? But in this book what Baker gazes on, most of the time, is poetry: something worth looking at. For Christians, he is best read as a contemplative of the particularities of the cosmos; and as such very much worth reading. [a Salon interview with Baker || a Baker fanpage || an LA Times piece about Baker, 9/09]