A Box of Matches is the greatest satire ever perpetrated by Nicholson Baker. I am the object of the satire. Ho, ho, Ned Meritt! Look how you are indeed a foolish representation of your most dearly held beliefs about seeded psychological narrative arcs! Baker’s sometimes-autobiographical fireside memoir is not the carefully coded and stylized toadstool it appeared to me to be. And he told me so himself.
It seemed like everyone at the Harbourfront Reading Series reading of A Box of Matches (with interview by Ian Brown, and no snacks by anyone) wanted to talk to Nicholson Baker about Nicholson Baker. They wanted to ask him about his quixotic quest to save hundred-year old copies of the rube-hayseed apple-pie-times from the mulch. They wanted to ask him about the Vonnegutian (soon, soon, it will be an adjective) ecstasies of having his book Vox used as a go-between for Bill Clinton and America’s most famous technical virgin. And do you really play the bassoon. And he does. And he loves velvet cases, and mechanical things, and a million other trivia that had nothing to do with the first-persona-fiction that he’d just been tribuning.
Except this: Emmett (protagonist and agonist of A Box of Matches) is a middle-aged man with a young daughter, a younger son, and a middle-aged urge to wax poetic about which side of a slice of buttered bread lands floor-first in a moonscape of a winter house; and Nicholson Baker is a “precisionist” novelist (Baker’s own term, by way of John Updike) with a similar 46-year itch. They both conducted the same experiment in writing: waking up early-early and daily touch-typing (and daily touch-coffee-making, and touch-fireplace fire-starting with each touch-picked match from the box; that is, very clearly seeing with the new eyes, which are the old eyes, which are the hands of memory, etc.) a single chapter of ironically observational observations.
Anyway, this box of matches contains 33 chapters (which Baker in person assures is possible from a box of thirty matches, packaged by weight, and details the pleasant surprise of finding the supernumerary matches, etc.) arrayed into 170 pages, pared down from the nearly 400 pages in an earlier draft that never made it past Mrs. Nicholson Baker.
Nicholson Baker comes across the stage like Hephaestus, by way of Archie comics: shoulders bowed, huge straight-legged strides—a hundred feet across at least. He is a pudgy Donald Sutherland-type. He has the manner of an actor playing an author. He has manic fingers with which he explains everything, with which he punctuates everything. He loves manila folders. He mimes squaring a stack of manila folders. He used to sort all his musings into arcanist categories like “plastic straws, flotational characteristics of” and then folderize them into a cross-referential matrix that preserved the texture, if not the flavour, of life. He mimes flipping through his folders and retrieving the one labelled “plastic straws, flotational characteristics of.” He is being interviewed by a man who seems to be an actor playing an interviewer (perhaps James Caan). They greet each other with a precise exchange of scripted “good evening”s. They are introduced by an actor playing an emcee: he is balding academically and has a pushbroom hussar mustache with the slightly pointed, slightly upturned ends. Nicholson Baker’s favourite of his books is the latest of his books. He was a man writing a book every day for a month at 5:00 in the morning, noting the date and time at the bottom and top of each day’s work as he has done for years, and the book is about him. Emmett only notes the time, and only at the beginning of each of his chapters, but it may be safe to assume he edited the redundant elements in post. Emmett and Nicholson both live in rural houses and have ducks. And this is what the ducks eat: etc.
When I met Nicholson Baker alone I asked him about a story I’d read once, about a thing he’d said (also once) about John Updike: “I realized that not only does [Updike] write better than me, but he’s smarter than me as well.” So does he at least think he’s better and smarter than most of the writers around?. “I wouldn’t be writing if I didn’t think I had something interesting to add.” On his sub-conscious he’d said earlier: “I have little respect for my sub-conscious… it rarely seems to be doing anything.” Yet he lets his sub-conscious do much of his stylistic work. I asked him if he’d been conscious of crafting a fabulous stylistic study of a man learning to communicate with his audience over a month’s writing jaunts; was he aware of the forceful sub-textual narrative that carried his alias’ precise memoirizing from unreadably pedantic to exuberantly alive? “If it’s there, it’s unintentional.” And he didn’t cotton to having an over-riding narrative arc pinned to him either.
Baker is a gifted and digressive storyteller, the kind who can describe a man by the sprawl of his handwriting and the locus of positions of the aglets of his swinging shoelaces. And that’s life. But all stories tell the story of the storyteller as well, and Baker does not tell this story with the same conscious exactness. Jean Cocteau gives us a proverb about a man and his beard: “There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.” And Emmett does just that in a chapterful of A Box of Matches, and he tells you all about it in a chapterful of Nicholson Baker’s own words—but, if you hadn’t heard it before, it’s news to you.
