John’s Blog

I’ve wanted to read Nicholson Baker for a while now, and with his new, controversial book Checkpoint coming out, I figured it was time (that review is coming up).

Book of Matches, like all of Baker’s fiction, is a short book — under 200 pages, and incredibly focused. Each 3-5 page chapter is the 1st person narrative of a middle-aged man who’s begun to get up around 4a every morning by himself to start a fire and think about things.

Basically the book is about his time to pause and notice some things around him while he lived his life. Some of his revelations are big, most are small — and that’s probably most of the point. I think it’s a little bit like the first couple of seasons of Six Feet Under: the message in both is that life is full of mostly small moments that most people just move right past, always waiting for the bigger ones. And that when it comes down to it, if you can take the time to notice the "small" ones, and take joy in them because they’re part of life, then things can be pretty good. Along the lines of a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about lately, so I was happy to read it.

There’s no way around it: we’re in an unfortunate period in our nation’s history — one that’s gotten particularly polarized and nasty and personal and divisive. One signal is that politics is creeping into everything we do, including the books that we read, more than ever.

This is an even shorter & more focused book than Box of Matches, weighing in at a svelte 120 pages, and only considering the direct act of assassinating President Bush. This book will not make Nicholson popular at Karl Rove’s house, or in approximately half the households in the US, if not more. It’s just the focused dialog between two characters: one wants to kill the president, the other is a little roped in.

I was hopeful about this book, mostly because I feel like there are things that we’re not "supposed" to discuss lately — and that as a country we’re playing increasingly fast & loose with the truth — talking about the "spin tactics" of modern political parties like they’re legitimate and that the way they’re doing it is the story. The story, of course, should be that more people are lying to other people than ever before. Not really that encouraging.

Anyway, having said all that, as I mentioned, I was hopeful about this book, and it was interesting, but ultimately not that thought-provoking. You might borrow it from someone if you’ve got an afternoon to kill, but I probably wouldn’t run out to buy it.

I’d recommend you read anything that Richard Russo writes — he’s fantastic. I read Empire Falls a couple of years back — a Pulitzer-winning novel. His novels aren’t really about all that much — mostly about small town life in the Northeast. But here’s why I read them: he writes with such empathy that you can’t help but like his main protagonist (in both books, a middle-aged man who’s too much a smartass for his own good, but can’t really help himself). Here’s the quote of the main character, who’s teaching his creative writing class:

“Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?”

He asks it as a leading question to his class; he’s saying that good fiction isn’t about the stuff that’s obvious & all around us — at some level, that’s history, or journalism, or something else. Good fiction helps us to understand our relationship with all that. I hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms before, but think it’s great & right on.

The book is funny, and painful, and true — I think the excerpt below (main character, 1st person point of view) is central (don’t read it if you want to read the book soon — it might not even make any sense):

“Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we’ll sleep with given the opportunity, who we’ll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own…Only after we’ve done a thing do we know what we’ll do, and by then whatever we’ve done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, “I know you, Al. You’re not the kind of man who.”

Great book.