A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker
The Nicholson Baker buzz these days is about Human Smoke, his pointillist, revisionist take on the origins of World War II. But the book I’ve just finished reading is his 2003 novel A Box of Matches, a book that hearkens back to such early works as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature.
Each of these books relies for its substance on almost insanely detailed observation of everyday life. I enjoy them, but I question myself while I’m doing it. A Box of Matches, for instance, concerns the thoughts that go through a man’s mind each morning as he gets up very early, makes himself a cup of coffee in the dark, and starts a fire in his fireplace. The book comes to an end when he gets to the last wooden match in his box, after which the early-rising impulse seems to leave him.
The book creates a quiet atmosphere that is easy to sink into, and it is full of the pleasurable shocks of recognition that come from seeing something familiar described with a loving accuracy that you would never have expected. Nearly every page could furnish an example, but the one that stuck with me begins on page 140, when the narrator discusses the bar of soap that he uses in the shower.
It is filled with very dense heavy soap material: it’s harder and heavier than, say, Ivory soap. And it is a beautiful smooth oval shape, an egglike shape almost. But it’s as heavy as a paperweight, as hard as travertine when dry or newly wetted, and extremely slippery. More than once I have lost control of a bar of this soap. And yesterday when I dropped it I noticed that as soon as the soap squirted out of my fingers, my toes lifted, arching up from the tub as high as they could go, while the rest of my feet stayed where they were.
His toes, evidently, had learned on their own that if the soap happened to drop onto them, it would hurt less if they were arched than if were flat on the bottom of the tub.
All this is wonderful in its way (how did Baker know that travertine was just the right kind of stone to compare his soap to?) but after a while you ask yourself, “Is that all there is?” Updike can do this sort of thing too (it’s no accident that Baker created a book from his obsession with Updike), but it’s generally in the context of a real story with real characters and something real at stake. The main character of A Box of Matches, on the other hand, seems all but indistinguishable from Nicholson Baker himself, at least to those of us who don’t know him personally, and you wonder whether his book, beautifully written though it is, might not have come pretty directly from the author’s journals. Is it even a novel at all?
