When my now-wife Nicolette lent me her hardcover edition of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker in 2016, I regarded it as a strange and somewhat foreboding presence. For the two to five months that it sat unread on my desk—in part due to the thick pieces of yellowing paper with indecipherable scrawls that were glued to the insides of the front and back covers (Nicolette had bought it used), and in part due to the way lent books generally tended to oppress me, beckoning me until I read them, which paradoxically caused me not to want to read them—it created a low-level, one-sided strain on my burgeoning relationship. The novel’s vivid presence in my bedroom—lying dumbly on my desk next to a mess of papers and books—slowly faded until I could barely see it; but as The Mezzanine disappeared with repeated sight, it grew ever more vivid in my mind: The Mezzanine expanded inside me, as all neglected obligations, like a tumor; it became burdensome and big, afflicting me, especially when I considered that I would need to respond to it in a way that not only matched Nicolette’s enthusiasm but was also insightful (Nicolette and I had only been dating for one or two months when she lent me the book, and I wanted to impress her)—feeling the increasingly tortuous fact of The Mezzanine half-reveal itself in my mind whenever we talked on the phone—“Is she going to ask about The Mezzanine?”; “Should I just lie and say I started it,1 then actually start it after we hang up the phone?”—then slink back into my subconscious after we hung up.
The physical dimensions of the novel (long and skinny) unsettled me, and the cover—a drawing of a man ascending an escalator from the perspective of someone going down the adjacent escalator (appearing to me then mainly as abstract black, purple and white shapes: diagonal rectangle, ovular splashes,2 “curlicues”3 and a floating man in a hat4)—in addition to the interior pages, which included footnotes so large that they occasionally took up more than half the page, didn’t entice me; it seemed an intuitively belligerent first5 book to recommend; too effortfully and distastefully “inventive.” But when another friend, a writer I admired (who would later go on to publicly accuse me of stealing his idea for an anthology I edited, which he also contributed to, called Pets) recommended it to me, I finally picked it up off my desk. I cracked it open (the spine literally creaked) and read the first chapter, after which I was buzzing with excitement. The Mezzanine took place over the course of a single escalator ride, and began with long digressions, often in footnotes, about various objects that the narrator was carrying, as well as objects associated with those things: shoelaces, the function of bags, straws6 and more. I loved it, and I read it in two sittings.
As occasionally happens, a particular novel, read at a particular time, has a profound and instantaneous effect. The Mezzanine made me laugh out loud, and propelled me forward, but it also had that mysterious quality that can’t be anticipated or feigned: it made me want to imitate it. Its cerebral, labyrinthine sentences, which were simultaneously jubilant and precise, often making unexpected connections between things7 and written with palpable delight,8 surprised me. The Mezzanine would, I intuited, with increasing conviction as it settled into my subconscious, serve as a perfect model for my own writing.
I had, seven months prior, gotten sober again after relapsing on benzodiazepines and opiates, during which I lost an enormous amount of money in a months-long blackout and ruined my role in the highly lucrative but illegal operation I’d become a part of. During this time, I didn’t write at all, despite telling myself that I was doing my relatively non-time-consuming and lucrative work in order to “give myself time to write,” and still thinking of myself in those nebulously cringe terms—cringe especially when applied as an identity, as opposed to a simple descriptor of one’s primary activity—“writer” and “author.” I wanted to start writing again, but had yet to find a way back in. In high school, I’d published two poetry books and a handful of articles, and had written a story collection on my laptop, which, in a fit of sickness, I’d given to my dealer—without backing up any of the writing—for around forty dollars’ worth of heroin.
After getting sober for the first time, my relationship with literature changed. Before, I only liked bleak books about depressed people (Richard Yates, Jean Rhys, Albert Camus), but once my life started to get better, I didn’t know what I liked anymore. I made a new friend (our relationship developed with such intensity that I adopted many of his mannerisms and verbal tics, and other friends who I’d known my whole life began to ask in earnest if we were gay), who recommended many books I hadn’t previously read: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Carlos Fuentes—but nothing took. The so-called “alt lit” pioneer, and one of my favorite novelists, Tao Lin—who served as my primary “model” in high school—no longer occupied the same role in my artistic life: before getting sober, I operated somewhat unconsciously, imitating Tao’s tone and style out of an adolescent identification with it, but now that I was coming into newfound self-awareness, I felt overwhelmed with possibility; I didn’t know how to write. I made haphazard attempts—falling back into past modes or ham-fistedly trying new things, which I frustratedly tried to “create out of nothing”—but for the most part I focused on other aspects of my life, wondering ambiently whether writing had been merely a drug-fueled delusion, or its own kind of “drug,” which allowed me to escape from reality and gave me an excuse to aestheticize my self-centered neurosis.
That is, until I read The Mezzanine.
Well, actually, no—I’m editorializing. Now, looking back after having written and published a novel that somewhat facetiously mentions The Mezzanine and was written in a The Mezzanine-esque style, it’s likely that I’m reading The Mezzanine back into my life and giving it a more prominent role than it actually had; The Mezzanine didn’t exactly get me out of my post-drug-kingpin-attempt literature slump (others—The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Gordon Lish and his protégés, the literary magazine NOON [which I flailingly imitated to varying degrees, but never felt truly able to “own”]—came before).
However, The Mezzanine did give me a glimpse of a way forward: my tiny stories, which I began writing again in part due to Nicolette concurrently writing short stories, would now occasionally include long, labyrinthine sentences, like Baker, as well as attempts at Bakerian interiority—which verged on neuroticism but also contained moments of observation-based joy. Still, it ultimately amounted to very little until I came into contact with another novel, which reemerged semiconsciously years after I had first read it, and which influenced me as I worked on what became my debut novel, The Novelist. That novel was Woodcutters, by Thomas Bernhard.
My memory of how I came to learn of Woodcutters is unclear: it may have been that my friend Michael Clune—an English professor and writer whose memoir White Out is perhaps the only book about drugs and recovery I’ve truly loved—recommended it; then, after googling, I saw that Tao had written a short review of it (or this could have been reversed, as Clune had also written about Woodcutters); I have a vague memory of the writer who accused me of stealing his anthology idea telling me about Woodcutters, and tweeting that he was also going to write a novel like Woodcutters, then messaging him to say I was also writing a novel like Woodcutters (however, when I search his username on Twitter + “woodcutters,” there is no such tweet9); but in any case, I obtained Woodcutters at some point while Nicolette and I were dating “long distance” (she was getting her MFA in Maryland; I was working a minimum-wage job in Cleveland, technically unable to leave the state due to being on probation). Despite my driver’s license being suspended, and my suspended sentence being two to three years in jail (if I ever got pulled over, thus violating my probation, I’d have to serve the time), I’d drive to visit Nicolette roughly once monthly; and I recall lying on her creaky twin bed during one of my visits, greedily reading Woodcutters, trying not to cackle too loudly so as not to wake up her roommates.
Like The Mezzanine, Woodcutters gave me that pleasurably disorienting sensation of being propelled, almost thrown, forward: as I read, my eyes moved faster than my brain, like an impatient child dragging his elderly parent behind, such that the pace produced a gnawing ache. The rhythmic, recursive, ever-darkening prose struck me as nothing short of genius: it made a claim on me (which, I’d learn later, after publishing The Novelist [which explicitly mentions both Baker and Bernhard on the back of the book jacket, as well as within the novel itself], was such a common occurrence that it was a cliché among those “in the know”; W. G. Sebald, for example, said that one shouldn’t talk too openly about Bernhard’s influence on them, because “then you get shoved in a box labeled Bernhard, and never get out”10), and when, about nine months later, I got off probation early for “good behavior” and moved to Maryland to live with Nicolette, I began writing more seriously—first a tortured third-person novel about my experience as a drug addict and criminal, then a first-person novel about writing my failing novel (in the style of both The Mezzanine and Woodcutters), and I felt, once again, the power of having an orienting model, even if by then I retained only a distant memory of certain hazy details of the prose (recursive repetition, rant/anecdotal digression-type sections, “being funny,” attention to small detail, and “stretching time” so that small movements created a sense of tension and rising action).
While working on The Novelist, I read roughly three pages of U and I by Nicholson Baker—a nonfiction book about Baker’s obsession with John Updike—which Tao, as well as an ex-friend who’d also served as a kind of model for me briefly, had recommended many years prior, but which I put down when I saw that, like my novel, U and I was about writing, or trying to write, and also began with an opening sentence that contained the word “keyboard.” The Mezzanine and Woodcutters were only present in the background of my consciousness, and not, as would have been the case if I read U and I right then, in the foreground. (Two months ago, when I finally read U and I—after the writer Zans Brady Krohn texted me saying she was reading U and I—I would comfortingly recognize the dissimilarities between it and The Novelist, while also feeling mimetically inspired to write an essay with a similar structure, as a way of finally writing an essay I’d been drafting and redrafting, connecting Nicholson Baker and Thomas Bernhard, and exploring the role of imitation in artistic production, in the hopes that my attempt would result in something valuable or even “new” [after publishing The Novelist, despite the novel “wearing its influences on its sleeve”—literally mentioning The Mezzanine and Woodcutters on the book sleeve—reviewers would frequently make a point to talk about how original and new the novel was, my self-conscious imitation having resulted paradoxically in a book “unlike any other,”11 according to one reviewer].)
In U and I, Baker explores his relationship with John Updike through what he facetiously calls “closed book examination”: he doesn’t actually read or revisit any more of Updike’s work—of which he’s read, he calculates, less than half—although he does go back later to insert the actual quotes in brackets, after his own misremembered quotes. Baker jokes that he could start a new school of criticism: “memory criticism,” in which one treats his “haphazard book-memories as a fund of data on which to operate.”12 Baker fantasizes about the outcome of creating this new “school” of criticism before disavowing it and saying that the last thing he would want is “manifesto-fame,” which would cheapen his project overall, and invariably lead to a kind of imposter syndrome (not his phrase) from which he might then never escape. Baker, in creating “closed book examination,” or “memory criticism,” would become a “manifesto” guy—and this would be the end of his career as a serious novelist.
Yes! I thought as I read U and I, feeling my mischievous, troll instincts emerge: I could do what Baker did with Updike, but with Baker. I could mimic Baker’s somewhat creepy near-eulogization of a still-living writer as a pretext for finally writing my Baker/Bernhard essay! I could U and I Baker, just as Baker had U and I’d Updike. This was my way in.
I had already basically done “closed book examination”—or rather “closed book imitation”—with The Novelist; now I could do “memory criticism” in essay form, cheekily goading Baker while making connections between him and Bernhard, while also creating an effect—like all literature I enjoyed—of a particular texture of consciousness, which interested me much more than the pushes-in-glasses-and-gives-a-learned-analysis thing I’d been attempting.
So this was it. My chance at finally writing my Baker/Bernhard essay. I texted Zans about wanting to write the essay, or maybe something about pitching the essay, before I finished reading U and I, and she said something like, “That’s great. And you and Baker talk!”
My excitement at the prospect of the essay quickly turned into near-panic, as I scanned my brain for moments where I might have accidentally made it seem as though Baker and I “talked.” Zans’s text concerned me twofold: 1) In what I’d read so far of U and I, Baker and Updike hadn’t interacted directly (perhaps Zans had inadvertently given something away about the end of the book?); and 2) Baker and I didn’t really “talk,” we’d only briefly interacted once over Twitter DM, which, it dawned on me, she likely saw, after I posted a screenshot of the first line of his DM to my Instagram story, and that was what she was probably referring to.
My and Baker’s single interaction was meager, and, in my view, didn’t constitute a proper “conversation”: I had messaged him to ask if I could send him a copy of The Novelist, after a review of another novel in the New Yorker opened with a sentence about The Novelist and mentioned The Mezzanine shortly thereafter. Baker replied with a message that began, “jeepers -,” which made my heart flutter; I was delighted by the “jeepers”—my first interaction with Nicholson Baker had included the word “jeepers”! What was the rest of the message going to say? I couldn’t think of any more appropriate word to pop up in my inbox beneath his name that could so thoroughly confirm my distant impression of him as “jolly”: jeepers! Before opening the message, I screenshotted it (while it was still unread, showing only his name, Twitter avatar and the first line of his message, “jeepers – let me try…”), and posted it on my Instagram story. But as I relished in the “jeepers” and responded to the Instagram story replies (“So cool!”; “No waaaay”; [heart emoji]), I neglected the central thing: I failed to actually respond to Nicholson Baker.
When I finally opened his message later that night, intent on responding, I saw that he had in fact sent two messages—one typo-ridden message,13 then another, two minutes later, which began with “jeepers -”14—and so I got nervous, then distracted, and decided to wait. The next day, when I told Nicolette that I still needed to respond to Baker, she encouraged me to stop thinking so much and just “fire one off,” which I agreed would be the most efficacious approach: but when I went into my Twitter inbox, nearly 24 hours after his initial responses, I saw, to my dismay, that Nicholson had sent me yet another message. I clicked it.
“The Novelist not plural.”
I couldn’t believe it. I reread his initial responses: he had, I noticed then, referred to The Novelist as “The Novelists.” Nicholson must have sent his initial responses, seen that I had seen the message, then gone back the next day to read his message again, possibly wondering why I hadn’t responded yet, then recognized his error—which, in my excitement and haste, I failed to notice (yet another way Nicholson was ongoingly proving himself to be more linguistically exacting than I was)—and corrected himself.
I told Nicolette that, though I had initially intended to fire off a response, the situation now seemed to call for something more. We joked about me writing a sequel to The Novelist called The Novelists,15 then she took my phone out of my hand and wrote the response herself, which I glanced at, grimacing at how it began—“Amazing!”16—but hitting send regardless. “Amazing!” wasn’t something I’d normally lead with, but I sensed—due to Nicholson’s neurotically following up to correct his entirely forgivable typo—that time was of the essence, and any response would be preferable to further delay.
So, while my U and I essay wouldn’t include any significant interactions between Baker and me, it would at least include our Twitter DMs, which contained some implicit, humorously fraught Baker-narrator-esque interiority. I didn’t have to worry about Baker being put off by it—my limited interaction with Baker and my relative insignificance in “the literary world” made it such that I would never be able to match the bizarre, serial-killery quality of Baker’s book-length treatment of Updike (like the scene where Baker is at a party for the Atlantic, and asks Tim O’Brien, somewhat flounderingly, whether or not he thought Updike would show up).
Whereas Baker began writing about Updike for the Atlantic, I would begin writing about Baker for Harper’s;17 the thought of finally publishing something about these two writers was exhilarating to me. I was eager to get started.
Besides the review in the New Yorker (which I couldn’t read more than a paragraph of, because I didn’t have a subscription), people didn’t tend to focus on my work’s kinship with Baker as much as with Bernhard—the LA Times published an article about Bernhard’s influence on contemporary novels, which featured The Novelist and butchered quotes by me18—despite the fact that I felt much more indebted to Baker than to Bernhard, who is only ironically invoked in The Novelist, when the narrator begins writing “his own version of Woodcutters” two-thirds of the way through the novel.
And it was precisely due to this public association with Bernhard, and not Baker, that I feared Baker wouldn’t like The Novelist. After the publication of The Novelist, I received an email from a stranger in Paris who said that he was also writing a novel in the tradition of Woodcutters and The Mezzanine, and that he had actually talked to “Nick Baker” (the stranger felt comfortable calling him “Nick,” whereas I was still only able to appropriately muster a “Nicholson,” or, as in most of this essay, the even more formal “Baker”), during which time Baker had apparently told him that he “hated” Bernhard. If Baker hated Bernhard, perhaps he would also hate my novel.
But why would Baker hate Bernhard? At first, I assumed it was because Baker and Bernhard were similar. They both wrote dense, rhythmic, labyrinthine sentences; they both had written essentially “plotless” novels that took place over the course of mere minutes or hours; they were both funny. I’d felt compelled by the French theorist René Girard’s idea that people disliked each other not due to their differences but due to their similarities, and I thought this might be applicable here. Girard’s central thesis was about what he called “mimetic desire”: we want things not because of their inherent value, but because we see someone else wanting the same things. When this leads to conflict, we exaggerate or even manufacture differences between ourselves and our rival in order to justify our superior claim on the object. This mimetic rivalry then moves from being primarily about the object of desire to being primarily about the rival—thereby causing us to despise people who we are in fact quite similar to and who we might, under different circumstances, be disposed to admire. Baker would be one of many in a long list of authors who concealed their admiration for another author from themselves due to their similarities.
More, Baker and Bernhard both wrote about imitation. U and I is about Baker’s relationship with Updike, who was a mimetic model for Baker (even culminating in what Girard would call “mimetic doubling,” wherein Updike seems, near the end of the book, to take Baker as his own model, thus entering into the cycle of mimetic reciprocity, whereby the imitated becomes the imitator, and so on). This reciprocal escalation, under circumstances where the mimetic doubles are closer in proximity to one another, can lead to rivalry, which is exactly the subject of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, wherein two aspiring piano virtuosos enter into a triangular relationship with each other and the pianist Glenn Gould. The narrator of The Loser and his friend Wertheimer want to “be Glenn Gould,” whereas Glenn Gould wants to be “the Steinway itself”—the two friends are mirror images of one another, competing with each other due to wanting the same thing, each becoming more similar to the other in the process, until eventually Wertheimer (who has committed suicide) is revealed to be a kind of scapegoat for the narrator, who himself has quit playing the piano and given up on life due to his failure to become Glenn Gould. For Girard, in human relationships as well as in art, imitation is primary: we learn to read, write, speak, even see by imitating others. Imitation precedes all. Artistic production, as opposed to welling up out of some mysterious place within, like the Romantics believed, was fundamentally imitative (Harold Bloom, I think,19 said that great literature is created by great misreadings of great work). Literature isn’t written in a vacuum; our eyes are made of other eyes; the contents of our inner lives belonged to other people first. Imitation was a prerequisite for writing, not necessarily a mark against it.
If Girard was right, then just as Baker wanted to be Updike, I wanted to be Baker. But I also wanted to be Bernhard, and Baker apparently did not. I initially suspended judgment, hoping it wasn’t true—until I encountered something that seemed to speak directly to the situation later on in U and I.
Baker’s admiration for Updike, which permeates the entire book, is not without limits: Baker at one point expresses a surprising distaste for a passage in Updike about a woman’s “yellowy breasts,”20 due to Baker’s inability to read it without imagining how Updike’s wife would have likely felt upon reading the passage herself. Baker wrote that fiction’s main function should be to “delight and instruct,” and should not be wielded as a weapon against others, whether real or fictional. Perhaps this was why Baker didn’t like Bernhard, whose narrators were often cruelly ungenerous, endlessly talking shit about almost everyone and everything that they thought of or encountered.
Baker’s assertion that fiction should “delight and instruct”21 almost offended me: Why couldn’t fiction do all kinds of things, including, for example, offend and tear down? But the reactionary voice that welled up in me like a sob in response to Baker’s proposition was recognizably old: I had believed in the value of “offense” and “tearing down” in the past but had recently become disillusioned with them as literary modes for their own sake. I, too, thought literature should delight and instruct, and was perhaps merely responding to the possibility that Baker might misunderstand my own novel’s intent, which was exoterically, at times, to offend and tear down, but was esoterically, I realized now, meant to delight and instruct. Delighting and instructing, I defensively considered, almost imagining myself as Baker, asking and then half-answering my own semiconscious question about what it might mean to “delight and instruct,” did not necessarily mean writing ideologically or thinly, but rather entertainingly, exuberantly22—as the Updike line about Nabokov’s prose goes (referenced in U and I)—with the reader fundamentally in mind. But this couldn’t have been what Baker meant by “delight and instruct,” or at least it couldn’t have been all he meant, because if we agreed, as I thought we did, that fiction should “delight and instruct,” then why did Baker not like Bernhard, whereas I liked him a lot?
In Baker’s “Art of Fiction” interview, he says, “Mainly, I just want a book to be funny”;23 perhaps humor is what he meant by “delight”? But if this were the case, if humor was the main Bakerian criterion, why didn’t he like Bernhard, who was among the funniest novelists I’d ever read? Perhaps it had more to do with the “instruct” part of the equation. Was Bernhard insufficiently “instructive”?
Despite being read by many as a kind of extreme pessimist, Bernhard had always felt counterintuitively life-affirming to me. In an episode of Montez Radio I recorded with Michael Clune—during which Clune read an excerpt of his novel-in-progress, written from the perspective of a pedophile priest, and we talked about the value of dark comedy in literature—Clune told me about Mikhail Bahktin’s application of Christian iconoclasm in the context of literary fiction: we often mistake the symbols of the Ultimate for the truly Ultimate—which is fundamentally ineffable and indescribable, escaping any symbolic box we try to cram it into—and we tend to make idols of these symbols, thus inadvertently worshiping our own creation instead of the Truly Divine. A relentless “tearing down,” in this case, could work to reveal a truer divinity than the lesser gods or idols we worship by mistake. So Bernhard could be instructive in this regard: while he seemingly assaults all morality and goodness, what he actually assaults are lesser goods, endlessly chipping away at them in order to get closer to the Truly Divine. (Clune may have also discussed Keats’s idea of “negative capability,” which he wrote about in his book A Defense of Judgment, but which I can never remember the actual meaning of, and may be thinking of here solely due to its containing the word “negative.”) Bernhard’s prose also contained a kind of joy that burst through the bleakness of what it expressed; perhaps, as it says on Clune’s website, “Literary style isn’t decoration but a form of knowledge,” and can thus be “instructive” even if the content is deceptively amoral, or even immoral or mean.
However, my defense of Bernhard still feels a little haphazard (or perhaps I feel a desire to hedge, in case Baker actually reads this and disagrees). Surely, for example, Dostoevsky is more instructive than Bernhard (who loved Dostoevsky); or Tolstoy is more instructive than Bernhard (who Baker mentions in U and I, when he calls Anna Karenina “the perfect novel”2425). Baker’s The Mezzanine was certainly “instructive” for me while writing The Novelist (just as U and I has been instructive for me while writing this essay); however, I doubt that this is the kind of instruction Baker had in mind.
Another way, besides his writing, that Baker was instructive for me had to do with age and cigars. While living in Maryland, not yet having finished a draft of The Novelist, I watched an interview with Baker on YouTube, where he sat on a stage talking to a woman in black. Baker was serious but jovial (it’s hard to know how much of this apparent “joviality” was a result of what he said, or the fact that he was balding and had puffy gray hair and round rosy cheeks). During the interview, Baker mentioned smoking cigars—a brand called “Fausto” or “Faustus” (I’m tempted to say “Faustus 500,” although that can’t be right26)—to get him through writing The Mezzanine.27 The cigars, he said in an awestruck tone, were “powerful,” and he described them in a borderline psychedelic way, as only an inexperienced and hypersensitive smoker or drug user could: it was, after all, just a cigar. “It’s hard to finish a book,” he said, “you get three quarters of the way through and it’s still not done.” Therefore, “you need help.” So Baker used cigars.
I felt inspired, if a little bored, by the interview; but as an ex-smoker, I didn’t need any more of a reason to rekindle my relationship with nicotine, especially if it would help me with my novel. So that week I went to the cigar store around the corner from my house and purchased a cigar. I proceeded to mimic Baker’s method: I drove to the edge of the woods where I liked to hike, parked my car and smoked a cigar, while sitting in the driver’s seat and working on my novel with the laptop on my thighs. In the same interview, Baker mentioned having set the arbitrary goal of finishing his debut novel by the time he was thirty. I was 26 when I first watched the interview; from that moment on I decided that I, too, would finish my debut novel before I turned thirty—and I finished the first draft of The Novelist at 27; it came out when I was 29. Baker, on the other hand, was 31 when The Mezzanine came out. So I had him beat there.
My relationship with Nicholson Baker was mimetic in the way Girard described, at least in some respects: I have never pretended to despise Baker; in fact I have always greatly admired him and his writing, but I also wanted to acquire certain qualities of that writing as “my own”; I wanted, in some sense, to use Baker, like a tool, or to take some of Baker’s essence, like a fantastical supervillain sucking up his spirit from the dead letters on the page, or his moving image in a YouTube video, thus acquiring new powers. In the end, I imitated Baker—just as Baker had imitated Updike, and Updike had imitated Nabokov, and so on—and as a result, came up with something “new.” The role of imitation in literature has been concealed, like a secret, in favor of some mystifying “inspiration” or “creativity”—but the fact remains: we become who we are by trying and failing to become other people. And in our failure we succeed in differentiating ourselves, albeit only superficially.
Art credit: Max Rumbol. Portrait in Progress, 2021. Acrylic, buttons, oil shoelace, wax crayon on wood & cotton, 48 x 36 in. Private collection, courtesy of the artist and Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles. The Window, 2021. Acrylic, graphite, oil, oil stick, pigment and wood stain on wood and linen, 40 x 32 in. Fundación MEDIANOCHEO, ES. Courtesy of the artist and Ojiri Gallery, London.
When my now-wife Nicolette lent me her hardcover edition of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker in 2016, I regarded it as a strange and somewhat foreboding presence. For the two to five months that it sat unread on my desk—in part due to the thick pieces of yellowing paper with indecipherable scrawls that were glued to the insides of the front and back covers (Nicolette had bought it used), and in part due to the way lent books generally tended to oppress me, beckoning me until I read them, which paradoxically caused me not to want to read them—it created a low-level, one-sided strain on my burgeoning relationship. The novel’s vivid presence in my bedroom—lying dumbly on my desk next to a mess of papers and books—slowly faded until I could barely see it; but as The Mezzanine disappeared with repeated sight, it grew ever more vivid in my mind: The Mezzanine expanded inside me, as all neglected obligations, like a tumor; it became burdensome and big, afflicting me, especially when I considered that I would need to respond to it in a way that not only matched Nicolette’s enthusiasm but was also insightful (Nicolette and I had only been dating for one or two months when she lent me the book, and I wanted to impress her)—feeling the increasingly tortuous fact of The Mezzanine half-reveal itself in my mind whenever we talked on the phone—“Is she going to ask about The Mezzanine?”; “Should I just lie and say I started it,11. I’d already done this with Tenth of December by George Saunders, and she had in fact asked me about it; I was fortunately able to navigate away from the subject without betraying the fact that I hadn’t actually read any of it (I told her I’d read “the first story”), but remained aware that sooner or later my dishonesty about reading things would likely be revealed (it eventually was, and is something we joke about now). then actually start it after we hang up the phone?”—then slink back into my subconscious after we hung up.
The physical dimensions of the novel (long and skinny) unsettled me, and the cover—a drawing of a man ascending an escalator from the perspective of someone going down the adjacent escalator (appearing to me then mainly as abstract black, purple and white shapes: diagonal rectangle, ovular splashes,22. There are three thought bubbles above the escalator man’s head, increasing in size, and three more circles on what appears to be a robot or a robot-like man(?) half-off frame, but nothing that would qualify as “ovular.” “curlicues”33. There are no curlicues. and a floating man in a hat44. He is not floating.)—in addition to the interior pages, which included footnotes so large that they occasionally took up more than half the page, didn’t entice me; it seemed an intuitively belligerent first55. second book to recommend; too effortfully and distastefully “inventive.” But when another friend, a writer I admired (who would later go on to publicly accuse me of stealing his idea for an anthology I edited, which he also contributed to, called Pets) recommended it to me, I finally picked it up off my desk. I cracked it open (the spine literally creaked) and read the first chapter, after which I was buzzing with excitement. The Mezzanine took place over the course of a single escalator ride, and began with long digressions, often in footnotes, about various objects that the narrator was carrying, as well as objects associated with those things: shoelaces, the function of bags, straws66. “I stared in disbelief the first time a straw rose up from my can of soda and hung out over the table, barely arrested by burrs in the underside of the metal opening. I was holding a slice of pizza in one hand, folded in a three-finger grip so that it wouldn’t flop and pour cheese-grease on the paper plate, and a paperback in a similar grip in the other hand—what was I supposed to do? The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback. I soon found, as many have, that there was a way to drink no-handed with these new floating straws: you had to bend low to the table and grasp the almost horizontal straw with your lips, steering it back down into the can every time you wanted a sip, while straining your eyes to keep them trained on the line of the page you were reading.” and more. I loved it, and I read it in two sittings.
As occasionally happens, a particular novel, read at a particular time, has a profound and instantaneous effect. The Mezzanine made me laugh out loud, and propelled me forward, but it also had that mysterious quality that can’t be anticipated or feigned: it made me want to imitate it. Its cerebral, labyrinthine sentences, which were simultaneously jubilant and precise, often making unexpected connections between things77. “On sunny days like this one, a temporary, steeper escalator of daylight, formed by intersections of the lobby’s towering volumes of marble and glass, met the real escalators just above their middle point, spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels, and adding long glossy highlights to each of the black rubber handrails which wavered slightly as the handrails slid on their tracks, like the radians of black luster that ride the undulating outer edge of an LP.” and written with palpable delight,88. “It seemed that I always liked to have one hand free when I was walking, even when I had several things to carry: I liked to be able to slap my hand fondly down on the top of a green mailmen-only mailbox, or bounce my fist lightly against the steel support for the traffic lights, both because the pleasure of touching these cold, dusty surfaces with the springy muscle on the side of my palm was intrinsically good, and because I liked other people to see me as a guy in a tie yet carefree and casual enough to be doing what kids do when they drag a stick over the black uprights of a cast-iron fence. I especially liked doing one thing: I liked walking past a parking meter so close that it seemed as if my hand would slam into it, and at the last minute lifting my arm out just enough so that the meter passed underneath my armpit.” surprised me. The Mezzanine would, I intuited, with increasing conviction as it settled into my subconscious, serve as a perfect model for my own writing.
I had, seven months prior, gotten sober again after relapsing on benzodiazepines and opiates, during which I lost an enormous amount of money in a months-long blackout and ruined my role in the highly lucrative but illegal operation I’d become a part of. During this time, I didn’t write at all, despite telling myself that I was doing my relatively non-time-consuming and lucrative work in order to “give myself time to write,” and still thinking of myself in those nebulously cringe terms—cringe especially when applied as an identity, as opposed to a simple descriptor of one’s primary activity—“writer” and “author.” I wanted to start writing again, but had yet to find a way back in. In high school, I’d published two poetry books and a handful of articles, and had written a story collection on my laptop, which, in a fit of sickness, I’d given to my dealer—without backing up any of the writing—for around forty dollars’ worth of heroin.
After getting sober for the first time, my relationship with literature changed. Before, I only liked bleak books about depressed people (Richard Yates, Jean Rhys, Albert Camus), but once my life started to get better, I didn’t know what I liked anymore. I made a new friend (our relationship developed with such intensity that I adopted many of his mannerisms and verbal tics, and other friends who I’d known my whole life began to ask in earnest if we were gay), who recommended many books I hadn’t previously read: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Carlos Fuentes—but nothing took. The so-called “alt lit” pioneer, and one of my favorite novelists, Tao Lin—who served as my primary “model” in high school—no longer occupied the same role in my artistic life: before getting sober, I operated somewhat unconsciously, imitating Tao’s tone and style out of an adolescent identification with it, but now that I was coming into newfound self-awareness, I felt overwhelmed with possibility; I didn’t know how to write. I made haphazard attempts—falling back into past modes or ham-fistedly trying new things, which I frustratedly tried to “create out of nothing”—but for the most part I focused on other aspects of my life, wondering ambiently whether writing had been merely a drug-fueled delusion, or its own kind of “drug,” which allowed me to escape from reality and gave me an excuse to aestheticize my self-centered neurosis.
That is, until I read The Mezzanine.
Well, actually, no—I’m editorializing. Now, looking back after having written and published a novel that somewhat facetiously mentions The Mezzanine and was written in a The Mezzanine-esque style, it’s likely that I’m reading The Mezzanine back into my life and giving it a more prominent role than it actually had; The Mezzanine didn’t exactly get me out of my post-drug-kingpin-attempt literature slump (others—The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Gordon Lish and his protégés, the literary magazine NOON [which I flailingly imitated to varying degrees, but never felt truly able to “own”]—came before).
However, The Mezzanine did give me a glimpse of a way forward: my tiny stories, which I began writing again in part due to Nicolette concurrently writing short stories, would now occasionally include long, labyrinthine sentences, like Baker, as well as attempts at Bakerian interiority—which verged on neuroticism but also contained moments of observation-based joy. Still, it ultimately amounted to very little until I came into contact with another novel, which reemerged semiconsciously years after I had first read it, and which influenced me as I worked on what became my debut novel, The Novelist. That novel was Woodcutters, by Thomas Bernhard.
My memory of how I came to learn of Woodcutters is unclear: it may have been that my friend Michael Clune—an English professor and writer whose memoir White Out is perhaps the only book about drugs and recovery I’ve truly loved—recommended it; then, after googling, I saw that Tao had written a short review of it (or this could have been reversed, as Clune had also written about Woodcutters); I have a vague memory of the writer who accused me of stealing his anthology idea telling me about Woodcutters, and tweeting that he was also going to write a novel like Woodcutters, then messaging him to say I was also writing a novel like Woodcutters (however, when I search his username on Twitter + “woodcutters,” there is no such tweet99. The fact-checker for this essay, Julia, said she “found the tweet (or a very similar one) pretty easily…,” the difference being that the actual tweet says that the writer “began” writing it, not that he was “going to.”); but in any case, I obtained Woodcutters at some point while Nicolette and I were dating “long distance” (she was getting her MFA in Maryland; I was working a minimum-wage job in Cleveland, technically unable to leave the state due to being on probation). Despite my driver’s license being suspended, and my suspended sentence being two to three years in jail (if I ever got pulled over, thus violating my probation, I’d have to serve the time), I’d drive to visit Nicolette roughly once monthly; and I recall lying on her creaky twin bed during one of my visits, greedily reading Woodcutters, trying not to cackle too loudly so as not to wake up her roommates.
Like The Mezzanine, Woodcutters gave me that pleasurably disorienting sensation of being propelled, almost thrown, forward: as I read, my eyes moved faster than my brain, like an impatient child dragging his elderly parent behind, such that the pace produced a gnawing ache. The rhythmic, recursive, ever-darkening prose struck me as nothing short of genius: it made a claim on me (which, I’d learn later, after publishing The Novelist [which explicitly mentions both Baker and Bernhard on the back of the book jacket, as well as within the novel itself], was such a common occurrence that it was a cliché among those “in the know”; W. G. Sebald, for example, said that one shouldn’t talk too openly about Bernhard’s influence on them, because “then you get shoved in a box labeled Bernhard, and never get out”1010. The actual quote is: “I was always, as it were, tempted to declare openly from quite early on my great debt of gratitude to Thomas Bernhard. But I was also conscious of the fact that one oughtn’t to do that too openly, because then immediately one gets put in a drawer which says Thomas Bernhard, a follower of Thomas Bernhard, etc., and these labels never go away.”), and when, about nine months later, I got off probation early for “good behavior” and moved to Maryland to live with Nicolette, I began writing more seriously—first a tortured third-person novel about my experience as a drug addict and criminal, then a first-person novel about writing my failing novel (in the style of both The Mezzanine and Woodcutters), and I felt, once again, the power of having an orienting model, even if by then I retained only a distant memory of certain hazy details of the prose (recursive repetition, rant/anecdotal digression-type sections, “being funny,” attention to small detail, and “stretching time” so that small movements created a sense of tension and rising action).
While working on The Novelist, I read roughly three pages of U and I by Nicholson Baker—a nonfiction book about Baker’s obsession with John Updike—which Tao, as well as an ex-friend who’d also served as a kind of model for me briefly, had recommended many years prior, but which I put down when I saw that, like my novel, U and I was about writing, or trying to write, and also began with an opening sentence that contained the word “keyboard.” The Mezzanine and Woodcutters were only present in the background of my consciousness, and not, as would have been the case if I read U and I right then, in the foreground. (Two months ago, when I finally read U and I—after the writer Zans Brady Krohn texted me saying she was reading U and I—I would comfortingly recognize the dissimilarities between it and The Novelist, while also feeling mimetically inspired to write an essay with a similar structure, as a way of finally writing an essay I’d been drafting and redrafting, connecting Nicholson Baker and Thomas Bernhard, and exploring the role of imitation in artistic production, in the hopes that my attempt would result in something valuable or even “new” [after publishing The Novelist, despite the novel “wearing its influences on its sleeve”—literally mentioning The Mezzanine and Woodcutters on the book sleeve—reviewers would frequently make a point to talk about how original and new the novel was, my self-conscious imitation having resulted paradoxically in a book “unlike any other,”1111. I don’t know where I got this from. When I googled “the novelist jordan castro ‘unlike any other’” I dimly glanced at some results, but didn’t read any. I might be thinking of Michael Clune’s blurb, which begins, “This book, better than any other I know…” Another blurb, by Kimberly King Parsons, does call it “wholly unique.” according to one reviewer].)
In U and I, Baker explores his relationship with John Updike through what he facetiously calls “closed book examination”: he doesn’t actually read or revisit any more of Updike’s work—of which he’s read, he calculates, less than half—although he does go back later to insert the actual quotes in brackets, after his own misremembered quotes. Baker jokes that he could start a new school of criticism: “memory criticism,” in which one treats his “haphazard book-memories as a fund of data on which to operate.”1212. I know that this is the correct quote because, while I didn’t revisit the book for this piece, I did revisit my pitch, which included this phrase. Baker fantasizes about the outcome of creating this new “school” of criticism before disavowing it and saying that the last thing he would want is “manifesto-fame,” which would cheapen his project overall, and invariably lead to a kind of imposter syndrome (not his phrase) from which he might then never escape. Baker, in creating “closed book examination,” or “memory criticism,” would become a “manifesto” guy—and this would be the end of his career as a serious novelist.
Yes! I thought as I read U and I, feeling my mischievous, troll instincts emerge: I could do what Baker did with Updike, but with Baker. I could mimic Baker’s somewhat creepy near-eulogization of a still-living writer as a pretext for finally writing my Baker/Bernhard essay! I could U and I Baker, just as Baker had U and I’d Updike. This was my way in.
I had already basically done “closed book examination”—or rather “closed book imitation”—with The Novelist; now I could do “memory criticism” in essay form, cheekily goading Baker while making connections between him and Bernhard, while also creating an effect—like all literature I enjoyed—of a particular texture of consciousness, which interested me much more than the pushes-in-glasses-and-gives-a-learned-analysis thing I’d been attempting.
So this was it. My chance at finally writing my Baker/Bernhard essay. I texted Zans about wanting to write the essay, or maybe something about pitching the essay, before I finished reading U and I, and she said something like, “That’s great. And you and Baker talk!”
My excitement at the prospect of the essay quickly turned into near-panic, as I scanned my brain for moments where I might have accidentally made it seem as though Baker and I “talked.” Zans’s text concerned me twofold: 1) In what I’d read so far of U and I, Baker and Updike hadn’t interacted directly (perhaps Zans had inadvertently given something away about the end of the book?); and 2) Baker and I didn’t really “talk,” we’d only briefly interacted once over Twitter DM, which, it dawned on me, she likely saw, after I posted a screenshot of the first line of his DM to my Instagram story, and that was what she was probably referring to.
My and Baker’s single interaction was meager, and, in my view, didn’t constitute a proper “conversation”: I had messaged him to ask if I could send him a copy of The Novelist, after a review of another novel in the New Yorker opened with a sentence about The Novelist and mentioned The Mezzanine shortly thereafter. Baker replied with a message that began, “jeepers -,” which made my heart flutter; I was delighted by the “jeepers”—my first interaction with Nicholson Baker had included the word “jeepers”! What was the rest of the message going to say? I couldn’t think of any more appropriate word to pop up in my inbox beneath his name that could so thoroughly confirm my distant impression of him as “jolly”: jeepers! Before opening the message, I screenshotted it (while it was still unread, showing only his name, Twitter avatar and the first line of his message, “jeepers – let me try…”), and posted it on my Instagram story. But as I relished in the “jeepers” and responded to the Instagram story replies (“So cool!”; “No waaaay”; [heart emoji]), I neglected the central thing: I failed to actually respond to Nicholson Baker.
When I finally opened his message later that night, intent on responding, I saw that he had in fact sent two messages—one typo-ridden message,1313. “Hi Jordan many thanks for those kind words. I’m at for writing and for the kindness about my writing” then another, two minutes later, which began with “jeepers -”14“jeepers – let me try again Hi Jordan many thanks for those kind words. I’m at [address]. The Novelists sounds interesting! Best regards Nick”—and so I got nervous, then distracted, and decided to wait. The next day, when I told Nicolette that I still needed to respond to Baker, she encouraged me to stop thinking so much and just “fire one off,” which I agreed would be the most efficacious approach: but when I went into my Twitter inbox, nearly 24 hours after his initial responses, I saw, to my dismay, that Nicholson had sent me yet another message. I clicked it.
“The Novelist not plural.”
I couldn’t believe it. I reread his initial responses: he had, I noticed then, referred to The Novelist as “The Novelists.” Nicholson must have sent his initial responses, seen that I had seen the message, then gone back the next day to read his message again, possibly wondering why I hadn’t responded yet, then recognized his error—which, in my excitement and haste, I failed to notice (yet another way Nicholson was ongoingly proving himself to be more linguistically exacting than I was)—and corrected himself.
I told Nicolette that, though I had initially intended to fire off a response, the situation now seemed to call for something more. We joked about me writing a sequel to The Novelist called The Novelists,1514. This riff was actually from a Gchat conversation that I had with Tao on another day. then she took my phone out of my hand and wrote the response herself, which I glanced at, grimacing at how it began—“Amazing!”1615. The whole message read, “Hey! Amazing, sounds good, i’ll send it over this week. hope you had a great weekend” with a heart emoji.—but hitting send regardless. “Amazing!” wasn’t something I’d normally lead with, but I sensed—due to Nicholson’s neurotically following up to correct his entirely forgivable typo—that time was of the essence, and any response would be preferable to further delay.
So, while my U and I essay wouldn’t include any significant interactions between Baker and me, it would at least include our Twitter DMs, which contained some implicit, humorously fraught Baker-narrator-esque interiority. I didn’t have to worry about Baker being put off by it—my limited interaction with Baker and my relative insignificance in “the literary world” made it such that I would never be able to match the bizarre, serial-killery quality of Baker’s book-length treatment of Updike (like the scene where Baker is at a party for the Atlantic, and asks Tim O’Brien, somewhat flounderingly, whether or not he thought Updike would show up).
Whereas Baker began writing about Updike for the Atlantic, I would begin writing about Baker for Harper’s;1716. As you can undoubtedly see, this essay has been published in The Point, not Harper’s. When I sent a pitch to Jon Baskin, my editor for this piece, I already had another essay on contract with Harper’s, with a different editor, and they said they didn’t normally take multiple assignments from the same writer simultaneously, unless he had an extant, ongoing relationship with the journal, which I did not. While I was still waiting for the first essay to come out, and thus for a verdict on whether Harper’s was interested in this one, Jon was fired from Harper’s, and went back to editing exclusively for The Point. My other Harper’s essay, on weight lifting, was the “most read” on the site after the issue’s release in January, but despite that success, my Harper’s editor felt that this piece “would be hard to justify running for a general interest audience” (which I can understand). Additionally, he noted, it reminded him of a 2015 book called B & Me by J. C. Hallman, which I’d never heard of, but which seemingly did exactly the thing I’m doing in this essay (sans Bernhard), although possibly, according to the Amazon description, was focused more on Baker’s sex books, which I’ve never felt personally compelled by. the thought of finally publishing something about these two writers was exhilarating to me. I was eager to get started.
Besides the review in the New Yorker (which I couldn’t read more than a paragraph of, because I didn’t have a subscription), people didn’t tend to focus on my work’s kinship with Baker as much as with Bernhard—the LA Times published an article about Bernhard’s influence on contemporary novels, which featured The Novelist and butchered quotes by me1817. Looking back at it now, the quotes are actually fine, and it was uncharitable of me to call them “butchered.” I remember feeling self-conscious about the piece when it came out, and perhaps this lingering association of my own discomfort with the LA Times piece led me to project onto the quotes themselves, looking for something in my memory to blame for my weird feelings, when in reality it had nothing to do with the quotes.—despite the fact that I felt much more indebted to Baker than to Bernhard, who is only ironically invoked in The Novelist, when the narrator begins writing “his own version of Woodcutters” two-thirds of the way through the novel.
And it was precisely due to this public association with Bernhard, and not Baker, that I feared Baker wouldn’t like The Novelist. After the publication of The Novelist, I received an email from a stranger in Paris who said that he was also writing a novel in the tradition of Woodcutters and The Mezzanine, and that he had actually talked to “Nick Baker” (the stranger felt comfortable calling him “Nick,” whereas I was still only able to appropriately muster a “Nicholson,” or, as in most of this essay, the even more formal “Baker”), during which time Baker had apparently told him that he “hated” Bernhard. If Baker hated Bernhard, perhaps he would also hate my novel.
But why would Baker hate Bernhard? At first, I assumed it was because Baker and Bernhard were similar. They both wrote dense, rhythmic, labyrinthine sentences; they both had written essentially “plotless” novels that took place over the course of mere minutes or hours; they were both funny. I’d felt compelled by the French theorist René Girard’s idea that people disliked each other not due to their differences but due to their similarities, and I thought this might be applicable here. Girard’s central thesis was about what he called “mimetic desire”: we want things not because of their inherent value, but because we see someone else wanting the same things. When this leads to conflict, we exaggerate or even manufacture differences between ourselves and our rival in order to justify our superior claim on the object. This mimetic rivalry then moves from being primarily about the object of desire to being primarily about the rival—thereby causing us to despise people who we are in fact quite similar to and who we might, under different circumstances, be disposed to admire. Baker would be one of many in a long list of authors who concealed their admiration for another author from themselves due to their similarities.
More, Baker and Bernhard both wrote about imitation. U and I is about Baker’s relationship with Updike, who was a mimetic model for Baker (even culminating in what Girard would call “mimetic doubling,” wherein Updike seems, near the end of the book, to take Baker as his own model, thus entering into the cycle of mimetic reciprocity, whereby the imitated becomes the imitator, and so on). This reciprocal escalation, under circumstances where the mimetic doubles are closer in proximity to one another, can lead to rivalry, which is exactly the subject of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, wherein two aspiring piano virtuosos enter into a triangular relationship with each other and the pianist Glenn Gould. The narrator of The Loser and his friend Wertheimer want to “be Glenn Gould,” whereas Glenn Gould wants to be “the Steinway itself”—the two friends are mirror images of one another, competing with each other due to wanting the same thing, each becoming more similar to the other in the process, until eventually Wertheimer (who has committed suicide) is revealed to be a kind of scapegoat for the narrator, who himself has quit playing the piano and given up on life due to his failure to become Glenn Gould. For Girard, in human relationships as well as in art, imitation is primary: we learn to read, write, speak, even see by imitating others. Imitation precedes all. Artistic production, as opposed to welling up out of some mysterious place within, like the Romantics believed, was fundamentally imitative (Harold Bloom, I think,1918. I haven’t read him (just as Baker hadn’t read him at the time of writing U and I), and when I googled I couldn’t find the quote. (From Julia, during fact-checking: “You’re likely thinking of the title of one of Bloom’s books, A Map of Misreading. That book has a couple lines that do essentially amount to the assertion that great literature is created by great misreadings.”) said that great literature is created by great misreadings of great work). Literature isn’t written in a vacuum; our eyes are made of other eyes; the contents of our inner lives belonged to other people first. Imitation was a prerequisite for writing, not necessarily a mark against it.
If Girard was right, then just as Baker wanted to be Updike, I wanted to be Baker. But I also wanted to be Bernhard, and Baker apparently did not. I initially suspended judgment, hoping it wasn’t true—until I encountered something that seemed to speak directly to the situation later on in U and I.
Baker’s admiration for Updike, which permeates the entire book, is not without limits: Baker at one point expresses a surprising distaste for a passage in Updike about a woman’s “yellowy breasts,”2019. In a short story in Pigeon Feathers, Updike’s narrator (who resembles Updike) tells his wife (who resembles Updike’s wife), “In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly. … The skin between your breasts is a sad yellow.” due to Baker’s inability to read it without imagining how Updike’s wife would have likely felt upon reading the passage herself. Baker wrote that fiction’s main function should be to “delight and instruct,” and should not be wielded as a weapon against others, whether real or fictional. Perhaps this was why Baker didn’t like Bernhard, whose narrators were often cruelly ungenerous, endlessly talking shit about almost everyone and everything that they thought of or encountered.
Baker’s assertion that fiction should “delight and instruct”2120. As Julia pointed out, the idea that writing ought to “delight and instruct” wasn’t Baker’s own invention but a reference to the ancient Roman poet Horace’s Ars Poetica. almost offended me: Why couldn’t fiction do all kinds of things, including, for example, offend and tear down? But the reactionary voice that welled up in me like a sob in response to Baker’s proposition was recognizably old: I had believed in the value of “offense” and “tearing down” in the past but had recently become disillusioned with them as literary modes for their own sake. I, too, thought literature should delight and instruct, and was perhaps merely responding to the possibility that Baker might misunderstand my own novel’s intent, which was exoterically, at times, to offend and tear down, but was esoterically, I realized now, meant to delight and instruct. Delighting and instructing, I defensively considered, almost imagining myself as Baker, asking and then half-answering my own semiconscious question about what it might mean to “delight and instruct,” did not necessarily mean writing ideologically or thinly, but rather entertainingly, exuberantly2221. The word I was thinking of here was “ecstatically,” from the line “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written: ecstatically.”—as the Updike line about Nabokov’s prose goes (referenced in U and I)—with the reader fundamentally in mind. But this couldn’t have been what Baker meant by “delight and instruct,” or at least it couldn’t have been all he meant, because if we agreed, as I thought we did, that fiction should “delight and instruct,” then why did Baker not like Bernhard, whereas I liked him a lot?
In Baker’s “Art of Fiction” interview, he says, “Mainly, I just want a book to be funny”;2322. “Most of the time, what I want from a book is for it to be funny.” perhaps humor is what he meant by “delight”? But if this were the case, if humor was the main Bakerian criterion, why didn’t he like Bernhard, who was among the funniest novelists I’d ever read? Perhaps it had more to do with the “instruct” part of the equation. Was Bernhard insufficiently “instructive”?
Despite being read by many as a kind of extreme pessimist, Bernhard had always felt counterintuitively life-affirming to me. In an episode of Montez Radio I recorded with Michael Clune—during which Clune read an excerpt of his novel-in-progress, written from the perspective of a pedophile priest, and we talked about the value of dark comedy in literature—Clune told me about Mikhail Bahktin’s application of Christian iconoclasm in the context of literary fiction: we often mistake the symbols of the Ultimate for the truly Ultimate—which is fundamentally ineffable and indescribable, escaping any symbolic box we try to cram it into—and we tend to make idols of these symbols, thus inadvertently worshiping our own creation instead of the Truly Divine. A relentless “tearing down,” in this case, could work to reveal a truer divinity than the lesser gods or idols we worship by mistake. So Bernhard could be instructive in this regard: while he seemingly assaults all morality and goodness, what he actually assaults are lesser goods, endlessly chipping away at them in order to get closer to the Truly Divine. (Clune may have also discussed Keats’s idea of “negative capability,” which he wrote about in his book A Defense of Judgment, but which I can never remember the actual meaning of, and may be thinking of here solely due to its containing the word “negative.”) Bernhard’s prose also contained a kind of joy that burst through the bleakness of what it expressed; perhaps, as it says on Clune’s website, “Literary style isn’t decoration but a form of knowledge,” and can thus be “instructive” even if the content is deceptively amoral, or even immoral or mean.
However, my defense of Bernhard still feels a little haphazard (or perhaps I feel a desire to hedge, in case Baker actually reads this and disagrees). Surely, for example, Dostoevsky is more instructive than Bernhard (who loved Dostoevsky); or Tolstoy is more instructive than Bernhard (who Baker mentions in U and I, when he calls Anna Karenina “the perfect novel”2423. Though I could remember this clearly, and have in fact told multiple people that Baker says this in U and I, Julia tells me: “This is the only mention in the book of Anna Karenina, when he’s listing what little he remembers of various books he’s read: ‘Anna Karenina survives as a picnic basket containing a single jar of honey.’” After reading Julia’s comment, and feeling dismayed, I frantically downloaded U and I, so I could search specific words and phrases easily without having to flip through pages, and it turns out that, as Julia said, he does not call Anna Karenina “the perfect novel.” Unable to believe that I had been so wrong, I spent nearly thirty minutes online, searching variations of “Nicholson Baker,” “Anna Karenina,” “Tolstoy” and “perfect novel,” and eventually was able to find the quote: in his “Art of Fiction” interview in the Paris Review, Baker says, “Sometimes I take a peek at Anna Karenina, which is the best novel I’ve read.”2524. Clune also mentioned Anna Karenina on our radio show, and kept pronouncing it Anna Ka-re-na.). Baker’s The Mezzanine was certainly “instructive” for me while writing The Novelist (just as U and I has been instructive for me while writing this essay); however, I doubt that this is the kind of instruction Baker had in mind.
Another way, besides his writing, that Baker was instructive for me had to do with age and cigars. While living in Maryland, not yet having finished a draft of The Novelist, I watched an interview with Baker on YouTube, where he sat on a stage talking to a woman in black. Baker was serious but jovial (it’s hard to know how much of this apparent “joviality” was a result of what he said, or the fact that he was balding and had puffy gray hair and round rosy cheeks). During the interview, Baker mentioned smoking cigars—a brand called “Fausto” or “Faustus” (I’m tempted to say “Faustus 500,” although that can’t be right2625. It was “Fausto” (from the YouTube video “Nicholson Baker: Delighting in the Details,” posted by Chicago Humanities Festival).)—to get him through writing The Mezzanine.2726. It was actually Traveling Sprinkler. The cigars, he said in an awestruck tone, were “powerful,” and he described them in a borderline psychedelic way, as only an inexperienced and hypersensitive smoker or drug user could: it was, after all, just a cigar. “It’s hard to finish a book,” he said, “you get three quarters of the way through and it’s still not done.” Therefore, “you need help.” So Baker used cigars.
I felt inspired, if a little bored, by the interview; but as an ex-smoker, I didn’t need any more of a reason to rekindle my relationship with nicotine, especially if it would help me with my novel. So that week I went to the cigar store around the corner from my house and purchased a cigar. I proceeded to mimic Baker’s method: I drove to the edge of the woods where I liked to hike, parked my car and smoked a cigar, while sitting in the driver’s seat and working on my novel with the laptop on my thighs. In the same interview, Baker mentioned having set the arbitrary goal of finishing his debut novel by the time he was thirty. I was 26 when I first watched the interview; from that moment on I decided that I, too, would finish my debut novel before I turned thirty—and I finished the first draft of The Novelist at 27; it came out when I was 29. Baker, on the other hand, was 31 when The Mezzanine came out. So I had him beat there.
My relationship with Nicholson Baker was mimetic in the way Girard described, at least in some respects: I have never pretended to despise Baker; in fact I have always greatly admired him and his writing, but I also wanted to acquire certain qualities of that writing as “my own”; I wanted, in some sense, to use Baker, like a tool, or to take some of Baker’s essence, like a fantastical supervillain sucking up his spirit from the dead letters on the page, or his moving image in a YouTube video, thus acquiring new powers. In the end, I imitated Baker—just as Baker had imitated Updike, and Updike had imitated Nabokov, and so on—and as a result, came up with something “new.” The role of imitation in literature has been concealed, like a secret, in favor of some mystifying “inspiration” or “creativity”—but the fact remains: we become who we are by trying and failing to become other people. And in our failure we succeed in differentiating ourselves, albeit only superficially.
Art credit: Max Rumbol. Portrait in Progress, 2021. Acrylic, buttons, oil shoelace, wax crayon on wood & cotton, 48 x 36 in. Private collection, courtesy of the artist and Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles. The Window, 2021. Acrylic, graphite, oil, oil stick, pigment and wood stain on wood and linen, 40 x 32 in. Fundación MEDIANOCHEO, ES. Courtesy of the artist and Ojiri Gallery, London.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.