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A review by jmullenbach
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
5.0
This book was revolutionary for me. If you are a person who even slightly enjoys thinking about the billions of tiny details that make up everyday life, you will probably thoroughly enjoy this novel.
I was browsing TV tropes one day, as one does. For some reason I had been thinking about works that take place over really short time spans, and of course there's a short time span page on TV tropes, where I found this novel listed, with apparently the shortest time span in the list.
This is only sort of true. You can argue that the time span is over the course of a single elevator ride, but the narrator reminisces over many years of past experience in the book. To say it has a short time span is like saying it doesn't have a plot, which is like, vacuously true. The point is that the novel was exactly what I wanted and more.
It's an examination of the minutiae of our lives, and how everything simple is actually complex, but in a good and fascinating way. It's about industrial design and mechanical engineering and lay psychology and cognitive science and what would happen if you thought a lot more about things that you generally only think a little about. It's also about how to put on deodorant after you already tucked your shirt in. It's like the anti-Freakonomics, which claims that things are interesting because they have a "hidden side" to them. In the Mezzanine, things are interesting because they just plainly are, on the face of it. Like, just look around you, pick an object, and think for even thirty seconds about where it came from, how many people were involved, the human effort that probably went into that object. I can't claim to know Baker's intention with this book, but to me, it acts as a celebration and appreciation of life in its most basic components. It's beautiful, and a pleasure to read.
I was browsing TV tropes one day, as one does. For some reason I had been thinking about works that take place over really short time spans, and of course there's a short time span page on TV tropes, where I found this novel listed, with apparently the shortest time span in the list.
This is only sort of true. You can argue that the time span is over the course of a single elevator ride, but the narrator reminisces over many years of past experience in the book. To say it has a short time span is like saying it doesn't have a plot, which is like, vacuously true. The point is that the novel was exactly what I wanted and more.
It's an examination of the minutiae of our lives, and how everything simple is actually complex, but in a good and fascinating way. It's about industrial design and mechanical engineering and lay psychology and cognitive science and what would happen if you thought a lot more about things that you generally only think a little about. It's also about how to put on deodorant after you already tucked your shirt in. It's like the anti-Freakonomics, which claims that things are interesting because they have a "hidden side" to them. In the Mezzanine, things are interesting because they just plainly are, on the face of it. Like, just look around you, pick an object, and think for even thirty seconds about where it came from, how many people were involved, the human effort that probably went into that object. I can't claim to know Baker's intention with this book, but to me, it acts as a celebration and appreciation of life in its most basic components. It's beautiful, and a pleasure to read.