Good and Bad #6: The Mezzanine, The Novelist
Adam Rothbarth asks: Is The Novelist a beautiful example of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or is it a mournful reflection on an increasingly despairing generation’s inability to focus on the real world?
“Look around/ Is it windows or a mirror that you’re looking out?” - Turnstile, “NO SURPRISE”
Nicholson Baker’s 1988 novel The Mezzanine, though cumbersome at times, is a very unique and worthwhile experiment. A postmodern work through and through, the entire book centers around a man riding up an escalator, its content mainly comprising all the things he associates to, reflects on, and experiences while ascending. Through this escalator ride an entire history unfolds; our narrator not only discloses the reason he’s on the escalator (his shoelace broke and he had to buy a new one), but the minutiae that caused that reason, and the things he contemplates while considering those minutiae, and so on and so forth. The book is an interesting critique of how we write and read memoirs, as well as a very entertaining meditation on the history of corporate culture.
Ultimately, as a novel, I think The Mezzanine wants to show how all of history is contained in what we do in our daily lives—it’s not just our political and social thoughts that constitute our consciousness, but mundane, everyday events like buying milk and magazines, using a straw, going to the dry cleaners, and boiling pasta. To paraphrase an article on capitalism in history by Marxist academic Chris Cutrone, the narrative one tells about history is also one’s theory of the present; conversely, we might say that one’s understanding of the present could serve as their philosophy of history. A shoe being taken off leads to a discussion of the meaning of carpet; the breaking of a shoelace yields a reflection on the history of office tools, from staplers to Scotch tape, and a thesis on workplace interactions, from small talk to our anxious avoidance of it. To this end, Baker even offers a detailed and very funny analysis of office bathroom encounters. Ultimately, the way we categorize our experiences says something about what we think our lives mean.
The book’s form involves the use of extensive footnotes and lists (and combinations of them) to mirror the paths of conscious and unconscious recollection that happen as one moves through time. Normally, I would find this very corny, but it’s often executed in a very engaging, amusing, consonant way that makes it easy to follow (though I do admit that some passages here are simply extremely boring, perhaps necessarily). In a diluted, ‘80s spin on the madeleine moment from Swann’s Way, the entirety of The Mezzanine’s present action takes place in a moment. It reminds me in some ways of Pale Fire, or a few of Philip Roth’s novels: Roth likes to “pause” a narrative to delve into long histories and associations, later returning to the moments you forgot you were left idling at. The Mezzanine is sort of a skeletal, extreme alternative to other, more substantial works that mess with form and narrative, and seeks to show us something true and meaningful about how we think about and record our day-to-day activities.
I read The Mezzanine because it is mentioned in Jordan Castro’s wonderful first novel, The Novelist, which came out earlier this summer. Castro’s book is a staggering examination of artistic alienation in the age of social media. The main character, “The Novelist,” sees himself as a novelist who has yet to authentically write a real novel. The book takes place over the course of a single morning, where the more the novelist attempts to write, the less work he’s able to do. Distracted by everything from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and email—chatting with Li, a character clearly based on Tao Lin—to making tea and coffee, going to the bathroom, and reflecting on his hatred of certain people he encounters online, he mostly fails to do or produce anything meaningful whatsoever (outside of wasted time and a revelation about how he wipes his ass).
But is his failure to ontologically *be* a novelist what allows him to eventually conceive of an actually good idea for a novel? Is the whole thing a beautiful example of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or is it a mournful reflection on an increasingly despairing generation’s inability to focus on the real world? I think it is both. Bolstering its affecting commentary on artistic production in our moment is the fact that The Novelist is just an hysterical piece of writing. In one scene, Castro tells us about an editor who followed and then unfollowed the novelist on Twitter three times, writing, “That is exactly the kind of thing I got myself into when I checked my new followers, I considered—I got thrust into some deranged editor’s undignified psychodrama; sucked into some vacuous sycophant’s bizarre self-worth battle, involving me when I did not want to be involved.” It is among the funniest sentences I’ve ever read.
Later, he talks about another editor’s self-indulgent tweet about going “BANANAS on a manuscript” while eating “shrimp chimps”—this is exactly the unfortunate, embarrassing stuff I would see daily on “writer Twitter” or “journalist Twitter” or whatever my own feed was called when I used Twitter. The Novelist’s nuance, especially with regard to its depiction of the internet, lies in the way it shows us an unsettling, increasingly destructive piece of contemporary life not by making it exciting or imbuing it with intense drama, but rather by miring us in the narrator’s own boredom, distress, and judgment. This is why the realism of alt-lit is able to evoke an emotional response from me; because, even though Castro is considerably more optimistic than much of his cohort, his novel isn’t trying to teach me a lesson or depict somebody going through profound positive change. Case in point: the book’s ingenious final sentence, which I won’t spoil here. In my favorite way, this profound and very moving book is simply too real.