The Anthologist - ISBNLookup.com

David Orr

Nicholson Baker has written a novel about poetry that's actually about poetry—and that is also startlingly perceptive and ardent, both as a work of fiction and as a representation of the kind of thinking that poetry readers do…Chowder is possibly the most appealing narrator Baker has invented.
—The New York Times Book Review

Janet Maslin

[Baker] slips effortlessly into the eager, friendless voice of a man who is every bit as glamorous and dynamic as his name suggests. But Paul turns out to be oddly likable, thanks not only to his funny, self-deprecating thoughts but also to his chronic struggle with language…a portrait of a man whose loneliness, self-consciousness and professional insecurity ought to be painful but turn out to be backhandedly endearing…enjoy this book's intensity. Don't break its spell. Notice the way Mr. Baker glides from Paul's plain talk to his plummier locutions, knowing that Paul is miserably aware of how he sounds. Share Paul's joy in the writing he adores. And remember his best ideas as if they came from a classroom, because they could.
—The New York Times

David Kirby

Like characters in such earlier Baker novels as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Chowder isn't afraid of the trivial. Indeed, in this witty satire of literary culture, he confers importance on just about whatever pops into his mind by letting his thoughts billow and accumulate. As he natters on about the poor quality of today's brooms or what he'd do if he had a ponytail ("which I don't"), he grows on the reader the way Humbert Humbert or Holden Caulfield does. Or Stuart Smalley, the weepy optimist Al Franken played on "Saturday Night Live." Paul Chowder is endearingly goofy, in other words, like other fictional poets: Percy Dovetonsils, say, from the old "Ernie Kovacs Show," the martini-sipping versifier who lisped "Leslie the Mean Animal Trainer."
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

In Baker's lovely 10th novel, readers are introduced to Paul Chowder, a "study in failure," at a very dark time in his life. He has lost the two things that he values most: his girlfriend, Roz, and his ability to write. The looming introduction to an anthology of poems he owes a friend, credit card debt and frequent finger injuries aren't helping either. Chowder narrates in a professorial and often very funny stream of consciousness as he relates his woes and shares his knowledge of poetry, and though a desire to learn about verse will certainly make the novel more accessible and interesting, it isn't a prerequisite to enjoying it. Chowder's interest in poetry extends beyond meter and enjambment; alongside discussions of craft, he explores the often sordid lives of poets (Poe, Tennyson and Rothke are just some of the poets who figuratively and literally haunt Chowder). And when he isn't missing Roz or waxing on poetics, he busies himself with a slow and strangely compelling attempt at cleaning up his office. Baker pulls off an original and touching story, demonstrating his remarkable writing ability while putting it under a microscope. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Baker has a gift for writing novels about the unlikeliest of subjects. In his first novel, The Mezzanine, he wrote about buying new shoelaces, while Vox concerned an intimate phone conversation. His newest work of fiction is about poetry. The narrator, Paul Chowder, is a poet who is struggling to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems he's collected. He's also trying to win back Roz, the woman who has just left him. These dilemmas make for some enlightening, absorbing reflections on poetry, the creative process, and life itself. While Chowder admits that he despises teaching, the narrative offers a wonderful explanation of what poetry is and the relationship between form and meaning. In the process, Chowder comes to understand himself better and pulls out of a slump. The novel's subtle sense of humor comes through as Chowder deals with injured fingers, a misbehaving dog, and the perils of reading his poetry in public. VERDICT Recommended especially for readers who appreciate—or would like better to appreciate—poetry.—Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC

Kirkus Reviews

Novelist/polemicist Baker (Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, 2008, etc.) takes a nullity as a protagonist. Narrator Paul Chowder is a published poet of more renown than many. He has accepted a commission to compile and write the introduction for an anthology of rhymed verse entitled-perhaps with a nod toward E.M. Forster-Only Rhyme. Otherwise, Paul is defined by the nothingness of his life. Though the novel initially appears to concern his attempt to write the anthology introduction, it ultimately exhausts most of its narrative on his avoidance of writing it. Paul's editor sends him threatening e-mails. His devoted girlfriend of eight years leaves him, exasperated. He can't quite let her go, but he also can't quite make himself write, or even start, that introduction. Instead, he cleans his office. He attempts to trap a mouse-ambivalently, for the rodent has become his major companion. He lays a floor for his neighbor. And he thinks so much about poetry and poets that it's clear he could write the introduction at any point, if only he could find the proper tone and format. (He thinks maybe three or four sentences could pass, but the intro could just as easily balloon to more than 200 pages.) Despite his matter-of-fact composure and the chatty tone of his narrative, Paul is always on the verge of breaking down. He rails against the standard elevation of iambic pentameter in the poetic pantheon and builds his case for the four-beat line as all-American meter. He thinks of poets in an oddly chummy manner and holds imaginary conversations with the likes of "Ted" Roethke ("Whoa, Ted . . . Sounds a little like Dr. Seuss, except dark"). He reveals that hepreviously worked for a mutual fund and fled teaching in the middle of a semester, before turning to writing poetry-or not writing poetry, or not writing about poetry-full time. The author's characteristic obsessiveness and attention to minutiae will appeal mainly to those who know and care as much about poetry as Paul. Agent: Melanie Jackson/Melanie Jackson Agency

From the Publisher

"A slyly intelligent rant about the crazy paradoxes of artistic careerism, and a casual and hilarious series of lessons on poetry." —-O: The Oprah Magazine

The Barnes & Noble Review

In a career stretching back more than two decades, Nicholson Baker has repeated himself only once. Room Temperature, his second novel, was arguably a refinement of the navel-gazing technique he brought to near perfection in his first, The Mezzanine. But since then, the only consistent thing about his work has been its delightful, sometimes loopy inconsistency. In a 1999 interview, he compared his zigzagging output to a buffet table: "Sometimes you're at the soup trough, sometimes you're at the salad. It would be nice to be thought of as offering a variety of things, on different kinds of silver salvers."

This is all by way of saying that his follow-up to Human Smoke -- a crazy quilt of anecdotes meant to make the case for pacifism -- is not a thorough debunking of the Spanish-American War. No, Baker has changed gears on us once again. With The Anthologist, we are back on fictional turf, and the focus has shifted from such larger-than-life figures as Churchill, FDR, and Hitler to a minor poet with a savory surname: Paul Chowder.

Baker's protagonist is beset by two major crises. First, he has signed a contract to write the introduction to a new anthology of rhymed poetry: a quasi-impossible task, given his longstanding writer's block. Second, he must win back the affections of his girlfriend Roz, who has recently abandoned him.

As Paul explains, the two crises are not completely unrelated. "She moved on, period," he tells us. "I know why. It's because I didn't write the introduction to my anthology. And I was morose at times with her, and I was shockingly messy. And I had irregular sleeping habits. And she was supporting us, and I was nine years older than she was."

The bill of particulars actually goes on longer than that, and includes Paul's tendency to get gassy after a Caesar salad. But the big picture is clear. We're dealing with a depressive -- a cousin, perhaps, of the nameless narrator in Baker's last novel, A Book of Matches, whose intense pleasure at the tiny increments of experience is persistently overshadowed by the thought of death.

And what is Paul depressed about? To some extent, he argues, such feelings are the poet's occupational hazard.

"Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing," we read. "We've got to face that. And if that's true, do we want to give drugs so that people won't weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will come next."

Rhyme, in other words, is nature's Prozac. And the singing regularity of the four-beat, balladic stanza is something out of the same medicine cabinet: bardic Benadryl.

But this brings us to the crux of the matter. For Paul, like all of Baker's narrators, is a man with an idée fixe -- a man firmly mounted atop his hobby horse. (The same might said of Baker himself, whose fascination with, say, old newspapers led him to accumulate an entire warehouse of them. But his fixations keep changing, as per his smorgasbord metaphor above.) And what Paul really hates is blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, the sort of thing Shakespeare found perfectly serviceable for 18,000 lines of dramatic poetry. The modern, footless, freewheeling stuff favored by so many American poets is bad enough, "merely a heartfelt arrangement of plummy words requesting to be read slowly." But blank verse (and even rhyming iambic pentameter) is worse: another kinky French import, like structuralism or Béarnaise sauce. In Paul's view it has warped the progress of English poetry, by drawing it out of its natural four-beat orbit.

It will do no good to brandish your roughly cubical copy of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, with its tiny type and tweedy abbreviations, and read aloud the bit that identifies blank verse as "the most prestigious and successful modern rival to the greatest meter of antiquity." (This strapping volume also notes that Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and among the earliest practitioners of blank verse, called it a "straunge meter": point to Paul.) This is not a scholarly argument, and Paul won't be swayed by the "mind-forged shrivelments" offered up by the standard critical histories.

No, his attachment to the tetrameter is intensely emotional. It is the meter of childhood, of nursery rhymes, of Edward Lear's sublimely nonsensical "Pelican Chorus," which was the first thing to give Paul "the shudder, the shiver, the grieving joy of true poetry -- the feeling that something wasn't right, but it was all right that it wasn't right."

Fine. That leaves the awkward matter of the last four centuries of English poetry: the gazillions of iambic pentameter lines cranked out by Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Bishop, and Lowell (which sounds like the most forbidding law firm ever assembled). Has Paul perversely thrown all these worthies overboard? Not in the least. Instead he's found an ingenious mechanism to let them in the back door: at the end of every five-beat line, he insists, there is an additional, silent stealth beat. This evens out the wicked, sprawling irregularity of the pentameter. In fact, the extra beat transforms it into an elastic sort of waltz, which is ultimately a tetrameter in three-beat clothing, since Paul has tacked an extra beat onto the trimeter, too.

Far be it from me to decide whether Paul's theory holds water. Ideally he and James Fenton, cited approvingly in the book as our best modern love poet, would settle the question by arm-wrestling at Westminster Abbey. But the beat that Paul has appended to so many indelible lines -- the poetic pause that refreshes -- seems related to one of Baker's most enduring obsessions. Yes, I will now dabble in a Baker-like inconsistency of my own, and argue that many of his variegated books are about the same thing: stopping time.

His earlier, insanely mandarin novels sought to dissect things -- shoelaces, milk cartons, staplers, a baby and her bottle -- down to their very atoms. To his detractors, this marked Baker as a connoisseur of trivia, unable to see the forest for the trees, and possibly unable to see the trees for the bark. (Along these lines, Stephen King called one of his novels a "meaningless little fingernail paring," a thrust that Baker effectively parried by writing an entire essay about fingernail clippers.) But there was always a purpose behind his microscopic approach. Study a thing closely enough, linger sufficiently over its delicious details, and you impart to it something like eternity.

Baker wrestled with this idea most directly in The Fermata. Since it was published on the heels of Vox -- whose steamy yet cigar-free sexual fantasies caused the young Monica Lewinsky to buy a copy for Bill Clinton -- it was widely viewed as an encore performance by America's dirtiest mind. Certainly the novel, Baker's longest, is not Sunday school fare. It is crammed with erotic woolgathering, with masturbatory sequences of such deep-dish lyricism and flagrant absurdity that they seemed to have been scored by Richard Wagner, if Richard Wagner had been hanging around the Playboy Mansion a little more often. But The Fermata is, literally, a book about stopping time.

And so, in a different way, is The Everlasting Story of Nory, an attempt to freeze-dry the mental processes and the springy, Silly-Putty-like vocabulary of a nine-year-old girl. Most novels are works of preservation, of course. But Baker was especially methodical in this book, which I would call the runt of the fictional litter, about capturing the likeness of his own daughter. In the same interview mentioned above, he described how "her childishness was on the brink of vanishing. I knew her quite well as a 7-year-old and as an 8-year-old and as a 9-year-old, and if I didn't try to create a fictional world that was true to her personality, I'd lose it."

All of which brings us back to that phantom beat at the end of each line. Paul Chowder is quite correct to insist that when we get to the end of All human things are subject to decay, we stop. But we are not stopping out of a compulsion to even things out, like frantic hosts filling an empty chair at a dinner party. We are in the midst of a fermata: a pause of indefinite duration. The mind is, at that instant, a kind of reverberation chamber, in whose boomy confines we absorb the information we have just read. And during that instant we are somehow outside the poem, outside its insistent cadence and pedal-to-the-metal urgency. Time has stopped. The preceding syllables, no lengthier in their aggregate than a popsicle stick, mingle with what came before and point to what will come next. It's like Wordworth's gloss on eternity in The Prelude, whose five iambic stresses would make Paul Chowder's scalp itch: "Of first and last, and midst, and without end."

Needless to say I'm advancing a theory as idiosyncratic as Paul's. And needless to say I'm convinced that they secretly overlap. His stealth beats are the same as my everlasting pauses. Readers, meanwhile, may wonder what happened to the plot of The Anthologist --you know, Paul's wooing of the absent Roz.

"Oh, plot developments," says Paul, toward the end of this slender book. "Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself. I want everything to be all right." Folks, the poetry is the plot. The Anthologist is itself Paul's introduction, over which he has sweated and wept and whined, with his personal life creeping in around the margins. The romance is a thing of sweetness and delicacy, but the events are small, as they so often are in Baker's books. In his hands, remember, even World War II, the Greatest Generation's greatest epic, turned into a string of anecdotal pearls, most of them no longer than a paragraph. Like watching paint dry, is the dismissive phrase some might apply to his micro-narratives, which is exactly the wrong one, since I'm sure Baker could write a charming, brilliant book about paint drying if he felt like it.

But it would probably be a small one. That, again, is no complaint. I'm reminded of Gore Vidal's lofty, backhanded swipe at The Great Gatsby, which he called "a small but perfect operation comparable, say, to Grant's investiture of Fort Donelson." (That battle, incidentally, marked the last time Grant ever listened to his council of generals -- which is to say, his critics.)

Small is good, small is beautiful. Baker, I think, has taken his cue from the inchworm that falls onto Paul Chowder's pant leg in the early pages of The Anthologist: "It was still for a moment, recovering from the fall, and then its head went up and it began looping, groping for something to climb onto. It looked comfortably full of metamorphosive juices -- full of the short happiness of being alive." --James Marcus

James Marcus is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut, as well as six translations from the Italian. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, and his essay "Faint Music" was selected for Best American Essays 2009. He also edits the "Ideas + Reviews" section of the Columbia Journalism Review and is the proprietor of a blog, House of Mirth.