Nicholson Baker


Nicholson Baker is an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. His early novels such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were distinguished by their minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Out of a total of ten fiction books, he also wrote three erotic novels: Vox, The Fermata and House of Holes. Amongst others, Baker has published articles in Harper's Magazine, the London Review of Books and The New Yorker.
Baker also writes non-fiction. A book about his relationship with John Updike, was published in 1991. He created the American Newspaper Repository in 1999. He then wrote about the American library system in his 2001 nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Calw Hermann Hesse Prize for the German translation. A pacifist, he wrote Human Smoke about the buildup to World War II. Baker has also written about and edited Wikipedia.

Life

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in New York City.
He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received a B.A. in English from Haverford College.
Baker describes himself as an atheist, although he occasionally visits Quaker meetings. Baker says he has "always had pacifist leanings."
Baker met his wife, Margaret Brentano, in college; they live in Maine and have two grown children.

Career

Baker established a name for himself with the novels The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Both novels have for the most part a very limited time span. The Mezzanine occurs over the course of an escalator journey and Room Temperature happens while a father feeds his baby daughter.
' is a non-fiction study of how a reader engages with an author's work. It is partly about Baker's appreciation for the work of John Updike and partly a self-exploration. Rather than giving a traditional literary analysis, Baker begins the book by stating that he will read no more Updike than he already has up to that point. All of the Updike quotations used are presented as coming from memory alone, and many are inaccurate, with correct versions and Baker's commentary on the inaccuracies.
Critics group together Vox, The Fermata and House of Holes since they are all erotic novels. Vox consists of an episode of phone sex between two young single people on a pay-per-minute chat line. The book was Baker's first New York Times bestseller and Monica Lewinsky gave a copy to President Bill Clinton when they were having an affair. In Vox, Baker coined the word. The Fermata also addresses erotic life and fantasy. The protagonist Arno Strine likes to stop time and take off women's clothes. The work proved controversial with critics. It was also a bestseller. House of Holes is about a fantastical place where all sexual perversions and fetishes are permitted. It is a collection of stories, more or less connected to each other. The novellas are erotic in the sense of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. The titular House of Holes is a fantasy sex resort in which people can engage in absurd sexual practices, such as groin transference and sex with trees. Akin to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, people enter the House of Holes through such techniques as tumbling through a clothes dryer or through a drinking straw.
Baker is a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media. He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library for sending thousands of books to a landfill, eliminating card catalogs, and destroying old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm. In 1997, Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts. In 1999, Baker established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries. In 2001, he published Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper about preservation, newspapers, and the American library system. An excerpt first appeared in the July 24, 2000, issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past." The exhaustively researched work details Baker's quest to uncover the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and 1990s.
The 2004 novel Checkpoint is composed of dialogue between two old high school friends, Jay and Ben, who discuss Jay's plans to assassinate President George W. Bush.
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization is a history of World War II that questions the commonly held belief that the Allies wanted to avoid the war at all costs but were forced into action by Hitler's unforgiving actions. It consists largely of official government transcripts and other documents from the time. He suggests that the pacifists were correct in their views.
In March 2008, Baker reviewed John Broughton's ' in the New York Review of Books. In the review, Baker described Wikipedia's beginnings, its culture, and his own editing activities under the username "Wageless". His article "How I fell in love with Wikipedia" was published in The Guardian newspaper in the UK on April 10, 2008.
The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet, who is attempting to write an introduction to a poetry anthology. Distracted by problems in his life, he is unable to begin writing, and instead ruminates on poets and poetry throughout history.
In 2014, Baker spent 28 days as a substitute teacher in some Maine public schools as research for his 2016 book Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids. Baker tried to find out "what life in the classroom is really like." He also wrote about the experience for The New York Times Magazine.

Works

Fiction