A Box of Matches

by Nicholson Baker

(Random House) $19.95

Almost 10 years ago, I attended a workshop in which writers as disparate as Buck Henry and Michael Crichton offered the same advice: Rise early and write off the top of your head. Henry warned that rising early to write usually amounts to a lot of thinking about nothing, and not much writing. He's right on all counts, but I do it anyway.

Emmett, the protagonist of Nicholson Baker's new novel, A Box of Matches, gets up early every morning, lights a fire, and thinks. Every chapter begins with a friendly "Good morning," before Emmett notes the time and then proceeds to talk about absolutely nothing in the most elegant language. Early on, he discusses the difference between wearing a holey sock all day and wearing it to bed, where it suddenly becomes a nuisance: "I can and do wear socks all day that have a monstrous rear-tear through which the entire heel projects like a dinner roll. But at night the edges of the hole come alive." Emmett struggles with the sock, finally throwing it off just before his wife, Claire, gets into bed. "She shifted her warmly pajamaed bottom towards me and I steered through the night with my hand on her hip." And right there was the prettiest thought about nothing I've read in a long while; the fact that a holey sock leads to it is specifically why Baker's fiction is so enchanting.

It was Baker's first novel, The Mezzanine, that hooked me. The entire story takes place during a ride up an escalator, and just as in A Box of Matches, the protagonist is thinking about everything and nothing in great detail. Room Temperature follows the same formula, only this time the protagonist is feeding his infant daughter a bottle while his mind spins and inspects.

I intensely disliked Baker's following novels--Vox, which was about phone sex, and The Fermata, another masturbatory excursion--not because they were badly written, but because they were just ick. Take The Fermata, for instance. A guy makes a pair of glasses that allows him to stop time, so he hides inside women's clothes hampers waiting for them to break out the dildos in the bathtub, at which point he stops time just as they orgasm? It might be a sexy scene, except for the nerd with the glasses in the hamper.

Years later, at Cyclops, I was introduced to John Wesley Harding, a singer and writer who had recently traded his U.K. homeland for Seattle. He'd just purchased a copy of The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, a collection of Baker's essays and articles that had just come out in paperback. At the end of our conversation he pulled the book out of his bag and gave it to me, telling me he was sure I'd love it--even though neither Baker's name nor any of his books had been discussed. It wasn't until I got home that I realized, "Oh, yeah, this is the guy who wrote The Mezzanine." Then I wondered if Harding had given it to me because I had been going on and on about nothing.

Returning to Baker's A Box of Matches, later in the book Emmett catches on that he has always secretly been a morning man: "I used to be amused by those men who get to work at six-thirty, 'bright and early'--but they're right: you want to be doing things when the world is still quiet; the quietness and uncrowdedness is your fuel. Except for me the phrase would be 'dark and early.'" The thought of fuel sends Emmett into a memory of pumping gas into his car the day before, and--well, let's just say I'll never look at the numbers whizzing by as the pump hits five dollars in quite the same benign way again.

While reading Baker's steady investigations, I felt a ball of envy beginning to form, as I don't get to indulge in the "dark and early" that much anymore. When I do, however, the photos on the wall before me launch crazy somersaults of thought, and it feels almost like heaven. Go, Emmett.