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With 'Box of Matches,' Baker illuminates a life

Sunday, April 06, 2003

By John Schulman

Emmett, the narrator of Nicholson Baker's sixth novel, lives in an old New England farmhouse with his wife, two children and a duck. Early each morning, he rises alone in the dark, descends to the fireplace and lights a fire in the dark, using a box of wooden matches.

	"A Box of Matches" By Nicholson Baker Random House ($19.95)

Then, he turns on his laptop and composes his journal, which consists of ruminations, advice, bits of autobiography and the like, and these passages form the book at hand. When he uses the last match in the box, the book ends, rather abruptly.

Nothing happens of any great moment in this book (Emmett gets a cold), but we do acquire an increasing sense of Emmett's complexity. We learn that he makes his living editing medical textbooks, that his children share certain obsessive-compulsive traits with him and that he concocts elaborate suicidal fantasies in order to combat insomnia.

Emmett, a creature of habit, considers his morning ritual to be supremely important. While it is abundantly clear that he loves his family and they love him, he also needs to be alone and has made these matins a sacred time.

We have the double paradox of the family man needing solitude in order to share his innermost thoughts with his readers.

That there can be structured time within a larger measure of time is a common feature of Baker's novels, beginning with the decelerated lunch hour of "The Mezzanine" (1988) and culminating in his ribald masterpiece, "The Fermata" (1994), whose hero, Arno Strine, can stop time for all but himself, and uses this gift mainly to undress women.

As with other Baker male leads, there is little that is manly about Emmett, who says, "I basically want nothing to do with all men except my son, my father and a few others. Robert Service, the poet, I like."

How striking that Emmett, an egghead and a softy, should choose Robert Service, the early 20th-century balladier of the Yukon and World War I, as his literary companion. It surely serves to connect this novel with Service's friend and fellow Klondike adventurer Jack London, especially his story "To Build a Fire."

In that classic tale, the hero trudges through the freezing Arctic wilderness, surrounded by wolves, night coming on, down to his last match. Compare and contrast!

So this is a novel that dwells on the psychology of manhood and the encroachments of family life. It is difficult not to speculate on the tangents with Baker's own life, as he, too, lives in New England with a wife and two children and for all we know, a duck.

Indeed, the sentiments of this novel are closer to those in William Carlos Williams' famous poem "Danse Russe," where the poet dances naked and "grotesquely" before his mirror while his wife and children sleep, singing to himself:

"I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" and ending, "Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?"

Baker is the poet laureate of the mundane, and here, as with his other novels, one can find the trademark descriptions of minutiae capturing precisely the way things are. Two samples: "The dandelion head of little sparks shooting out from the match," "a stave of long wires elegantly arranged like the plectrum of a hardboiled-egg slicer, buried in the glass."

Yet, despite a faintly humorous riff on the problem of urinating in the dark, this novel lacks the hilarious bawdiness that enlivened "The Fermata," where Baker's descriptive capacities and raunchy humor merged to form a new kind of literature.

Here, the emasculated Emmett dispenses matronly advice on all manner of topics, ranging from building a proper fire to washing dishes. The legacy of this novel may be not in its vague and disquieting notions of the place of the male in modern family life, but in what our narrator has to say on how to get out of bed in the morning:

"What you do first thing can influence your whole day. If the first thing you do is stump to the computer to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you're going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning. So don't do it."

Words to live by.

John Schulman is co-owner of Caliban Bookshop, a used bookstore in Oakland.