''The Mezzanine,'' an atypical
short story by Nicholson Baker, is definitely not like any other story you’d
read: it has no main themes, no standard plot, no conflict. When somebody who’s
read the book describes it to you, it would probably sound ridiculous – (a man
who tells us, in painstaking detail, his thought process while riding an
escalator to his office??) – yet its 135 pages most likely contain more deep perceptions
about our everyday life and the things we often overlook or take for granted
compared to any other modern novel you’d come across.
It is a very deep (and humorous)
book about the mind – in particular, the exhaustive, continuous thought
processes we tend to have while coming across seemingly trivial things and
daily events in our everyday lives.
One particular thing I liked
about the main character, Howie – a very weird individual who is a little obsessed
with over-analyzing every little thought he has and his inane daily encounters
and brief social interactions – is his eloquence when describing these things.
He makes something that at first seems so unimportant and kind of stupid at the
surface, transform into something so mesmerizing and dumbfounding when he puts
in his own words. He makes the reader take a second look at things and enjoy
these small things in life we usually take for granted. Howie also attempts to re-analyze
some of his childhood memories so that he can come to terms with the nostalgia
he feels sometimes.
It is clear that Howie
keeps learning new things every moment of his life, developing deeper
understandings of things nonstop. Howie himself indicates this when he says “…but
the truth was that it was only the latest in a fairly long sequence of
partially forgotten, inarticulable experiences, finally now reaching a point
that I had paid attention to it for the first
time.”
In conclusion, I see Nicholson
Baker’s exceptional novel as a very strongly voiced short story narrated by an inspiring
protagonist.
