In one of the more exquisite tortures scientists have perfected inside those fiendish primate labs, they take a newborn monkey from its mother and put it in a cage with a doll supposed to look like a real simian. The poor orphan clings instinctively to this bag of dust as if it were actual flesh and blood–“bonds with” it, as the phrase goes–and can’t be pried off even when reunited later with its birth monkey. This is roughly the position of people who read novels nowadays: like the little ape, they take what they can get.
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Consider Baker’s first book, The Mezzanine. It’s one long scroll of observations the narrator unwinds as he rises on an escalator during his lunch hour: childhood memories, the machinery of everyday life, and of course the operation of his own mind. It’s a mishmash, but there is a principle of selection at work. What connects a remark about the way cafeteria workers’ hairnets hang down like the butt ends of garbage trucks to a disquisition on the science of applying deodorant while wearing a shirt is the fact that Baker thought of them both. The book means to be funny–not witty but humorous, a much harder thing to do–and it often is. But the style, which is everything in this kind of writing, just as often falls flat. For every line like “the holy expression that women have only for themselves in mirrors” there’s a page of maundering about “a sneaker-shoelace knot and a dress-shoelace knot standing side by side saying the Pledge of Allegiance.” Reading a book like this is like watching a seal bonk horns in a vaudeville bit: whether he hits the right one or not doesn’t really matter–you didn’t come for the music, but the shtick.
The trouble with shtick is that you can take only so much. In Baker’s second book, Room Temperature, nothing has changed except the window dressing. The whimsy is sprinkled onto the page in exactly the same voice as before, but now the narrator calls himself “Mike” instead of “Howie,” and his girlfriend, “L.,” is his wife, “Patty.” Do we really need to be told all the pet names Baker and his wife have for each other, their child, and the act of defecation? This last theme, by the way, is spread over several pages of Room Temperature, but that’s just a hint of the obsessive analism to come in later books. There are a few other premonitory signs of bad taste, like Baker’s fantasy about the person who recorded the voice for an exhibit of a transparent female in the science museum of Rochester, New York, where he grew up. He imagines this woman talking herself into such a sexual heat during the taping that she had to rush home where she “clitted her yum-stump to a box-spring-deep pelvis-lifter. . . . I know she did.”
The simplest thing would be to take Baker’s openness at face value: he just wants to tell his own truth. And his truth happens to be one that people want to hear. In the 1960s Baker’s idol, John Updike, gave middlebrows the sensation of reading literature when he ennobled their very own ardors on the page; their adolescent children, meanwhile, took the chance to peek at those silky-smooth descriptions of the genitalia of suburban neighbors’ wives. Baker was one of those kids, and now that they’ve all grown up he’s busy giving them a literature of their own. But it’s not his lewdness that has made him such a success–it’s his narcissism.
Baker is less a novelist than a writer of vignettes. In Vox and The Fermata they are frankly pornographic, but his earlier books were also made up of loosely connected anecdotes. What they all have in common is that their gaze is directed inside to feelings, memories, and anxieties–not outward in the masculine way. Consider this: Baker has lived in New York and Boston (where The Fermata is set); he is nothing if not observant; yet his sketches have none of the restlessness or the passionate detachment of the urban prowler. He is impassive before the swirl of the city, yet the sight of a man polishing the handrail of an escalator (“by leaning motionlessly on a white cotton rag, using the technology”) sends him into a long Proustian reverie on the theme of moving stairways through the years of his own life, his one true subject. When Arno Strine snoops around a woman’s apartment early in The Fermata, he doesn’t look for letters, diaries, or anything else that would interest a real voyeur. Instead he goes to her bed, runs his hand over the dimples in her bedsheet, and senses an immediate bond: “Feeling Joyce’s mattress pad,” he says, “made me want to kiss her.” I could be wrong, but I think that’s just going to embarrass the men who read it. Women, perhaps, might be able to understand the kind of longing behind it.
