A review by shimmer
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

3.0

I had a very split reaction to this. I loved the narrator's microscopically focused, wandering voice (which I always love in Baker's fiction) and the way he developed as a character through his clumsy accidents and awkward moments. His procrastination instead of doing the writing he was meant to was hilarious but also bound up with his anxieties as a minor poet and aging lonely man that his shifting, struggling identity became really compelling to me. But even while the way he understood himself largely through the lives and struggles of other, more famous poets was interesting, I also felt like the "lectures" about poetry, meter, etc. became too much -- at some point I started feeling like those technical, academic passages in the story weren't as organically woven into the personal story as I wanted them to be, and they began to feel tangential and repetitive. I resisted the urge to skip over those passages to the next "scene," but I did feel it often as the novel progressed. I should admit, though, that I felt pretty out of my depth concerning most of historical and technical descriptions of poetry, and was reminded how shabby my knowledge of that genre really is -- perhaps better chops on my part would have made those sections integrate more smoothly with the rest of the book.