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In The Stacks: The Fermata
🕑 Added 2023-05-06 20:06:54 +0000 UTCIn the 1950's, the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet proposed a new type of novel. This phrase might sound redundant, since "novel" means "new," but not in French since they call the novel a roman or "romance." The nouveau roman was supposed to de-emphasize character development (with its attendant psychological assumptions) and plot, and would instead focus on the life of objects in the world.
This sounds rather avant-garde, and in Robbe-Grillet's execution it was, but in my opinion the novelist who really made good on this idea was Nicholson Baker, in whose hands it becomes witty and whimsical, fascinatingly intricate. His books are populated with shoelaces, straws escalators, ice-trays, matches, washing machines, all of which adds up to some kind of novel (in both senses) phenomenology or micro-physics of the mind.
No French ennui here: Baker, a New Englander, is full of Yankee ingenuity and American pluck, and he plumbs the mysterious life of everyday objects with gusto, and yet he also never completely detaches from the convention of narrative; he merely slows it down, often to the point freezing. Quite literally in the case of The Fermata, whose conceit is that a man (the typical curious Baker hero) is able to stop time, a superpower he exploits in the same way most men likely would: to undress and molest women.
This sounds ultra-creepy, and yet somehow in Baker's hands it isn't--quite. His 90's books developed an obsession with sex (his previous novel was Vox, an extended phone sex conversation) that is on the same wavelength as his obsession with the mechanics of everyday objects. He is explicit without being dirty, probably because he's uninterested in transgression or degradation, unlike 90% of writers who write about sex. He is interested in the precise quality of ordinary experience, which happens to include sex and erotic fantasies.
This recording dates from 2016. It's essentially a pilot for a literary podcast I wanted to do before I finally got around to starting The Forest of Symbols. The audio is rough. It was recorded on a handheld digital voice recorder and I had a cold at the time. It's also mostly me reading from The Fermata. Enjoy as an outtake or a rough draft.
