39. Nicholson Baker

 

“We could just have lunch at the Friendly Toast.” -Nicholson Baker

 

One of the best things I learned this last year is that Nicholson Baker likes to write at Friendly’s. (Or at least he used to back before most of the chain restaurant’s locations shut down.) There’s something about the image of the novelist/essayist/part-time historian with his white beard and his flannel button-down shirts tucked away at the corner booth at his local Maine location, scribbling down his trademark left-of-center observations between bites of a cheeseburger, that comforts and delights. A lot of the appeal has to do with the everyman image it conjures up. Writing isn’t that serious of a business, this image says. It need not be something squeezed out in monastic solitude by a malnourished true believer, it can be done just as easily by an affable late middle-aged man at a casual dining restaurant, merrily jotting down his thoughts before the lunch rush hits.  

Of course, for all the zaniness of his books, writing is a very serious business for Baker. His earliest volumes, the novels Mezzanine, from 1988, and 1990’s Room Temperature, announced him as a miniaturist, wryly attuned to the tiny details that constitute the stuff of daily life as they flit across the minds of his narrators. These books made the case for serious attention, a renewed concentration on the world in front of us, even as they kept their focus narrow. Subsequent projects, though, would expand Baker’s interests to the wider world, and particularly to its larger political questions. In both nonfiction books like Human Smoke, in which Baker carefully marshals evidence to present a revisionist take on World War II, and novels like Checkpoint, which consists of a running dialogue between its two characters about whether or not to assassinate George W. Bush, Baker turned his attention in the 2000s to political questions, serving up provocative theses and offering a genuine challenge to received historical wisdom.

Through it all, though, Baker kept returning to his earlier mode as well, publishing novels of witty, small-scale contemplation in between his more outward-looking volumes, as when he chased 2008’s Human Smoke with the far less sober The Anthologist the following year. That novel follows sad-sack middle-aged poet Paul Chowder as he avoids writing the introduction to a new anthology of rhymed verse that is already considerably overdue. Along the way, he muses on his failures, offers an iconoclastic reading of the history of poetry, and lets us in on the day-to-day habits and activities that constitute his life. It’s a largely light-hearted affair, one that, though not without plenty to say on the subject of both 50-something malaise and the serious business of versifying, has fun coining witticisms, experimenting with voice, and poking its nose at the literary establishment. It’s exactly the type of book it’s easy to imagine Baker banging out at his local Friendly’s.

So, too, is its follow up, 2013’s Traveling Sprinkler, which continues the adventures of the now slightly less hapless Chowder and from which the above citation is taken. (The fictional Friendly Toast, if anything, sounds even more inviting than the chain restaurant whose name it recalls.) Having finally turned in his introduction at the end of The Anthologist, Chowder, in the newer book, switches his attention to song-writing, beat-making, and trying to win back his ex-girlfriend. As before, his wandering thoughts fill the spaces in between, but this time there’s a wrinkle: among the narrator’s musings is some decidedly political content. He gives serious thought to the brutal casualties of drone strikes and the murderous history of the C.I.A. as he tries to steer his newfound songwriting ambition in the direction of protest music.

It’s a largely successful mix that Baker achieves, as his narrator pulls himself out of the previous novel’s funk by attempting to engage with the wider world in a way he hadn’t before, melding small-scale political action (or at least thought) with personal development. But, still, what I like best about the book are the smaller moments, the scenes of Chowder interacting with his immediate surroundings. The narrator’s life in his small New Hampshire city is self-contained and cozy and, perhaps because the town I live in is a little too self-contained and cozy and, in any event, is largely shut down due to quarantine, my keenest pleasure in reading Traveling Sprinkler is to project myself into Chowder’s world. At one point in the book, he considers going to a Mexican restaurant at a strip mall and eating dinner at the bar. This sounds as good as lunch at Friendly’s—or better, given the margaritas—and when he decides against it, it feels suddenly like a colossal miscalculation on his part. The Friendly’s that I grew up eating at became a mattress store about five years ago and the Mexican restaurant where I used to have dinner at the bar closed two years back, the building still without a tenant. Now, many more restaurants and businesses have shut down and still many more are likely to do so this year. Paul Chowder—and Nicholson Baker when he was creating Paul Chowder—lived in another time, even if it wasn’t that long ago. I hope they enjoyed the nachos and cheeseburgers while they could.