Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Bakeris an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 January 1957
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.
I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.
I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.
There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.
In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.