Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Bakeris an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 January 1957
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.
In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.
In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.
A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.
Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.
I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.