Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Plot Schmot, Mr. Bigshot: A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker

In her 2003 review of A Box of Matches, Salon.com writer Amy Reiter nominated novelist Nicholson Baker for the title of "Grand Poo-bah of the High Art of Navel-Gazing." She meant it as a compliment, since "no one gets more out of his navel- and head and life and ever-evolving sense of time and space- than Baker. A Box of Matches is basically just a really lovely and almost plotless novel about our ordinary and short lives.

Emmett, the narrator in Baker's novel, wakes up every morning before dawn, makes coffee in the dark, builds a fire in the dark, and then sits in front of that fire and thinks. It's his "fire journal" that we're reading. What does a married medical textbook editor with two children, a cat, and a duck think about? Well, his growing children, belly button lint, and death, obviously.

Emmett on his growing children, sparked by noticing his son's ability to touch both ends of the bathtub: "I remember how proud Phoebe was to be able to touch both ends of the tub, too—‘Nice growing!’ I said to her. And I even remember how proud I was myself to touch both ends of the tub.”

Emmett on belly button lint: "While I stretched...my hand strayed under my pajama top and my middle finger found its way to my belly button where it discovered some lint. I rolled the lint into a tube, as one does, and having done so, I became curious about what such a tube would look like if burned. I tossed it into one of the spaes between the coals. It went orange for a moment, fattened, and then darkened. It is still there now but it will be lost when I stir the coals."

In Baker's hands, a passage about burning belly button lint becomes one about the unrelenting passage of time. His fires, in fact, represent not only destruction, but also the search for warmth and love, as well as for some sense of our own purpose and our desire for a lasting impact. Don't believe me? Here's Emmett history and death, being completely direct:

"The ungraspableness of history, which can seem thrilling or frightening depending on your mood, can assert itself at any moment. I just found another small bedroll of lint in my automatic lint-accumulator and I tossed it into the fire; there was an almost imperceptible flare of differently colored fire--ah! lint fire!--and it was gone. That is part of why I like looking at those burning logs: they seem like years of life to me. All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn."

There's something really comforting about this book. It's nice to take a break from the constant fear of being bland and unremarkable, and just enjoy the beauty of the ordinary.

Balls Plus Brains Equals Me, Swooning: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Hey. Huh. So. This is awkward. It's been, what, six months or something? In that time, I've read far too many books to write about in any kind of impressive detail, so I'll do a bunch of short posts about the unremarkable ones, and longer posts about the others. This torturous game of catch-up is actually fine with me, considering the reason for my long absence (new job 2 hours away) and the reason for my reappearance (the desperate need for some sort of life outside of working and travelling to and from work. This need became very clear last week when I basically lost my mind and sobbed for 2 straight days). So yes, I will blog. And no one will read my posts except for my friend Duff (hi, Duff!), but that's okay with me too.

Anyhow, I read Cloud Atlas back in November. It was my first experience with David Mitchell, and I had been unsure of what to expect. I might have even been resistant. See, people are always raving about Cloud Atlas, but every time I picked it up and read the back cover I thought to myself, "Huh. This looks a bit too much like work." Of course, this is coming from the woman who not-so-recently downloaded a copy of Eastern Promises and then let it sit, unwatched, on her desktop for something like two months before finally watching it and having her mind blown by the greatest naked knifefight in the entire history of nakedness and knives and fighting. That's sort of how I felt after finally getting around to Cloud Atlas: Why the hell did it take me so long?

Here's the thing: Cloud Atlas is not one story, but six. And by six stories, I don't mean that the book is a story cycle or a novel with five subplots. It actually takes us to six different but equally intensely imagined and detailed worlds. Six different time periods, each with its own vocabulary and literary style. In one story, Mitchell is summoning Evelyn Waugh. In another, a Grisham-like writer of thrillers. In still another, Martin Amis. The last two stories are the most frightening, and call to mind Philip K. Dick and Cormac McCarthy. We're taken to each world twice, with the exception of the sixth, as the novel follows this format: 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1.

1. Adrift in the Pacific in 1850, a Yankee notary named Adam Ewing sojourns on the island of Chatham, where he surveys the impact of colonialism.

2. Robert Frobisher, a penniless cad and criminal, travels to Belgium in the 1930s to track down a reclusive, ailing composer. He succeeds, starts working on "The Cloud Atlas Sextet," and seduces the composer's wife. He also finds a book, annoyingly torn in half, called "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing."

3. A journalist named Luisa Rey uncovers a corporate nuclear scandal in 1970s California, and is at constant risk of assassination. One of the scientists who she speaks with is Rufus Sixsmith, who had been Robert Frobisher's lover in the 1930s. She also purchases a record: "The Cloud Atlas Sextet."

4. Timothy Cavendish is a vanity publisher in London in the 1980s. He has a found manuscript called "Half-Lives: the First Luisa Rey Mystery," that he thinks will get him out of debt, but ultimately ends up trapped in a retirement home.

5. Sonmi-451 is a cloned slave in some future state who has acquired intelligence and vision. She is soon to be executed, and her dying wish is to see the end of a film (films are called "Disneys" in the future) she once started to watch called "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish."

6. Zachry is a tribesman in an extremely violent postapocalyptic society on the island of Hawaii after the fall of civilization. His narrative is told in a thick dialect that is difficult to read. Somni-451 returns here as a hologram and ultimately as God for Zachry.

What connects these stories- what effectively prevents the book from being a collection of (brilliantly written) short stories or novellas- is a peculiar reappearing birthmark and, more compellingly, the unifying theme of the endurance of and our need for human communication between generations.

Cloud Atlas is hilarious and terrifying and beautiful and huge. It's also a literary experiment that would be a total slog if it were written by anyone else but the insanely gifted David Mitchell. As it stands, it's a challenging read but enormously entertaining and each story is equally engaging regardless of the reader's personal feelings about the literary genres represented. For pulling this whole thing off without resorting to gimmickry, David Mitchell gets a spot on the top five.