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The Mezzanine

3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 · rating details · 2,913 ratings · 365 reviews

Although most of the action of The Mezzanine occurs on the escalator of an office building, where its narrator is returning to work after buying shoelaces, this startlingly inventive and witty novel takes us farther than most fiction written today. It lends to milk cartons the associative richness of Marcel Proust's madeleines. It names the eight most significant advances...more

Paperback, 144 pages

Published January 16th 1990 by Vintage (first published 1988)

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Apr 02, 2013 Nick rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mmxiii-there-will-be-gass, made-me-want-to-punch-a-squirrel, reviewed

This is the Seinfeld of novels. Yep. A book about nothing. Or really, a book about the mundane, the everyday. A book about milk cartons and plastic straws vs. paper. A book about tying one's shoelaces and the proper procedure for applying deodorant. A book about the objects we see every day, about our everyday experiences*. A book that is just plain tedious and boring. At first there is a certain humor in the tedium of what the narrator describes. Quickly, though,—for me, at least—the humor wore...more

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Apr 14, 2011 Megha rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews, its-not-you-its-me, didn-t-finish

I feel bad about giving this book only two stars. Because Baker is a good writer. No, not just good, he is quite brilliant. It can't be easy to write a book about everyday life's nothingness. But Baker pulls it off. The novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness kind of manner, except the thoughts aren't incomplete or muddled up. The writing is perfectly articulate. Baker flows from one thought to another very smoothly. You know there are times when we find ourselves thinking of something, bu...more
I feel bad about giving this book only two stars. Because Baker is a good writer. No, not just good, he is quite brilliant. It can't be easy to write a book about everyday life's nothingness. But Baker pulls it off. The novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness kind of manner, except the thoughts aren't incomplete or muddled up. The writing is perfectly articulate. Baker flows from one thought to another very smoothly. You know there are times when we find ourselves thinking of something, but can't remember what train of thoughts led us there. This book too has that kind of a feel, to an extent. On the whole, I doubt if this could have been written any better.

BUT...

Yawwwwwnnnnnnn. It is a very tedious read. The narrator is in awe of every not-at-all-fascinating thing that we barely ever pay a thought to. And all these mundane things are described in excruciating detail. The kind of things that he discusses at length include why plastic straws are the way they are, what makes shoe laces wear out, the art of tying shoelaces, why it is better to cut a toast diagonally, staplers, milk cartons, garbage trucks and lot more. How to put on deodorant after he was fully dressed, shoe tying etc. count as life-changing lessons for him. There might have been some pieces that I found funny or interesting. I liked how the narrator would often re-visit his childhood days and build up on his thoughts from back then. In-spite of that it was just too tiring to read, even when I started skipping sentences.

I can't help but wonder about the narrator's sanity. Such over-analysis of anything and everything can easily drive him crazy. Perhaps a career counselor should have directed him to a research lab so that he would have something to occupy his mind with. But given how easily he is fascinated, he might have died of excitement on his own discovery/invention. Had this dude been born in an older era, stuff like discovery of fire or invention of wheel would have totally blown his fuse off.

I am still somewhat curious to see how Baker concludes the novel. I found a few 5-star reviews where the readers seemed to have found it a tedious read, but ended up liking it 5-stars worth. May be I should finish it after all, but am not sure if it going to be worth the effort.
I might pick up another book by Baker in distant future, but warily. He will have to go through a more thorough background check before he gets a place on my bookshelf again.(less)

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Aug 24, 2010 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

As I read/battled with/was exasperated by/yelled at/finally accepted/was tickled pink by/was strangely transformed by Nicholson Baker’s utterly brilliant not-really-a-novel various thoughts went off in my brain and made snapping cracking noises like ice breaking. It’s one of the world’s thoughtiest books, even though it’s really quite tiny, but they’re not thoughts like Einstein or Wittgenstein or Stephen Hawking, they're all eensy-weensy thoughts, it’s more like being attacked by a slow but rel...more As I read/battled with/was exasperated by/yelled at/finally accepted/was tickled pink by/was strangely transformed by Nicholson Baker’s utterly brilliant not-really-a-novel various thoughts went off in my brain and made snapping cracking noises like ice breaking. It’s one of the world’s thoughtiest books, even though it’s really quite tiny, but they’re not thoughts like Einstein or Wittgenstein or Stephen Hawking, they're all eensy-weensy thoughts, it’s more like being attacked by a slow but relentless army of tiny little geeks with pincers like red ants all over everything geeking everything to bits, in your desk drawer, in your stationery, in your toilet, all these thoughts everywhere but at the same time very statelily expressed, very demure, with many graceful clauses, like Henry James osmosised a technical manual, a kind of iciness and a charm, particularly when talking about his inability to urinate if another man is standing next to him in the office urinal, and straws and pencils, O God all these things you really never wanted to think about much.

I’ve had to buy about four copies of The Mezzanine because I lend them and I don’t get them back. This book made me break one of my two rules of book lending, which are :

1. Never lend anyone a book. Don't do it.

2. Never borrow a book from anyone. Don't do it.

Number 1 is easily explained – you’ll never get it back and if you do this person who eagerly seized it and claimed that she wished to do nothing other than devote her next waking moments to reading it six months later will not only not have done so but will have forgotten that she borrowed it and where she put it. And maybe forgotten who the hell you are, too. As for rule number two, I have met a few people who read one book a year and then wish to immediately lend it to me because they know I like books – yes, I do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I like all books, and I really don’t want to read Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab.

Anyway, yes, The Mezzanine. Lovely.
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Mar 23, 2011 Mariel rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: who are the adwizards who came up with that one?

Recommended to Mariel by: Greg

It is all because of Greg that I picked up The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. It looked down on me from a high bookshelf in a local closing bookstore. "This sounds familiar. I think Greg loved it!" I thought to myself. It turns out that it is not on Greg's goodreads bookshelf at all. Paul Bryant loves it, however. He assured me that it would drive me insane. The Bryant was correct. (Baker probably was familiar to me from Joels The Fermata review about those subway hipsters.) If I were a different...more It is all because of Greg that I picked up The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. It looked down on me from a high bookshelf in a local closing bookstore. "This sounds familiar. I think Greg loved it!" I thought to myself. It turns out that it is not on Greg's goodreads bookshelf at all. Paul Bryant loves it, however. He assured me that it would drive me insane. The Bryant was correct. (Baker probably was familiar to me from Joels The Fermata review about those subway hipsters.) If I were a different sort of goodreads reviewer I could turn all of this thinking into a parody of the book. It's all about nowhere man thoughts. I have those. I can't do it! It's too familiar to my own bullshit as it is.

I am a child, according to The Mezzanine wonderer, if the end of adulthood is the end of childhood nostalgia as basis of comparison. I am a child. It was a time (it felt like the kind of forever when your mind wanders and you can't remember what you were doing before when you snap out of it. This is not a long book) before I let go of my old childhood definitions. I had a name for the "personality type" of the narrator: "Protected dork". They were awkward as I was in a way that society didn't touch. At least, they didn't seem to be bent under the pressure as I was (appearances can be deceiving, yet somehow it seems impossible they were familiar with bullying). The self concern with things like everything being just so. This guy is very much a "just so" kinda guy. Crisp shirts, underpants, the sounds of ball point pens. The importance of small talk. The ability to be made happy by small talk, as if that were the height to reach. Those are all hallmarks of the "protected dork" to me. (Related to the protected dork are people who eat tuna fish sandwiches. Check!) Maybe it isn't protected so much as it is stifled. I invented these terms because I was envious and scornful of the kids that were not bullied as I was, despite being tuna fish sandwich eaters and bug collectors. Their parents probably gave them strict bed times too. They never doubted finding a middling place in life. They'd get decent grades on tests (the only important part, right?) and never invent a story about anything.

It was uncomfortable to be in this head space. I still feel the self hatred for not being functional in day to day society as this guy is. He doesn't know the rules (more like tolerated small talk) but he's protected. They do not engage. I am forced to feel bad for the guy now. He's going to think way too much and get nowhere just as I'm getting nowhere. Sure, I like to think my stupid thoughts are better than shoelaces and straws. No way. I'm no better than he is. I'm just miserable, is all.

I don't feel normal reading other goodreads reviews of this book. Charming?! Says the book review quote on the back. I feel... squirmy. (less)

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Dec 31, 2007 Debbie rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's hard to rate this book, because on many levels it is brilliant. Just brilliant. Yet, lets just say, there is not much narrative tension and that is an understatement of the century.

The writer is hilarious. And the character, a complete nerd who cannot stop thinking about the most mundane daily activities that we all don't bother thinking about, is amazingly well developed in merely 120 pages.

So, basically it's about a man who leaves his office to find new shoelaces. That is the book. Alon...more

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Aug 22, 2007 Teague rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those with OCD or who are prone to non-sequitors

Shelves: readrecently

I really loved this book. I've not read many novels since high school, and thus don't have a lot to compare it to, but I think it might now be my favorite book.

To give away the plot: Man rides up escalator, thinks about stuff. That's it -- no other characters, no "rising action," or whatever they called it in English class, but it's still dazzling and engaging. Nicholson Baker picks up little details and riffs on them, spending pages nesting digression within digression (with the aid of liberal...more

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Oct 14, 2010 Luna rated it 3 of 5 stars

The Mezzanine is a writing exercise all grown up. Nicolson Baker’s 135 page book is about nothing at all – a man enters his hotel lobby and takes the escalator to the mezzanine level. That is the entire storyline, but the main character’s firsthand narration flows from little note to trivial description, exploring all the things people think about or do every day that don’t seem to make it to the “what’s important” level. The ridges on record players and the design of staplers are considered at...more The Mezzanine is a writing exercise all grown up. Nicolson Baker’s 135 page book is about nothing at all – a man enters his hotel lobby and takes the escalator to the mezzanine level. That is the entire storyline, but the main character’s firsthand narration flows from little note to trivial description, exploring all the things people think about or do every day that don’t seem to make it to the “what’s important” level. The ridges on record players and the design of staplers are considered at great length.
The premise makes the book sound like an irritating, even tedious read – something that would be interesting for a few pages and then slowly fall away into dull repetitiveness. Actually, Baker does a better job of getting the reader’s attention than expected. The descriptions pull in a strong sense memory that is easy to connect to. Everyone has experienced at least something that the book digs into, and so everyone can connect to at least something.
Just because Baker does a good job does not mean that The Mezzanine will hold the attention of everyone, or even hold the attention of anyone for the entire book. It is certainly not a page turner, and the occasional two-to-four-page-long footnote can be downright boring. My copy of the book was actually missing the last 30 or so pages. When I got to the end, I was certainly disappointed. I wanted to read more of the descriptions and see how Baker would end the simple plotline. I was not, however, upset enough to go buy another copy. Although I enjoyed reading The Mezzanine, it made me miss the comparative action and plot of, well, pretty much anything else.
The Mezzanine is not a book you should try if you always insist on finishing every novel you start. There is a fair chance that the narrative will put you to sleep within a page. On the other hand, there are some magical moments when something Baker describes clicks perfectly with something you’ve experienced – and for that reason, the book is worth trying out.
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Apr 14, 2013 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: they-made-me-do-it, here-is-new-york

This book is so good. It's about something I've wondered about and been fascinated by but have remained unable to articulate for almost my entire life: how the material culture and physical environment of our time and place shape human experience. I've been interested in that idea since I was a little kid but have never understood how to conceptualize it clearly.

At the moment I can't think of many things more exciting than discovering a novel that addresses a huge question you've had for so long...more

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Aug 27, 2010 James rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, postmodern

Nicholson Baker's novels are examples of of trying to imbue the minute trivialities of modern life with unseen philosophical and personal significance. Exhibiting an affinity for minutiae and ponderous disquisition, he is noted for transforming otherwise banal human activities into finely wrought descriptions of thought and serious consideration. His technique of extreme magnification and loitering contemplation has been described as creating a “clogging” effect in his fiction, thus slowing narr...more Nicholson Baker's novels are examples of of trying to imbue the minute trivialities of modern life with unseen philosophical and personal significance. Exhibiting an affinity for minutiae and ponderous disquisition, he is noted for transforming otherwise banal human activities into finely wrought descriptions of thought and serious consideration. His technique of extreme magnification and loitering contemplation has been described as creating a “clogging” effect in his fiction, thus slowing narrative time to a near standstill while retraining the reader's attention on otherwise overlooked objects and minor events, all presented through Baker's scrupulous authorial subjectivity. The effect of this in The Mezzanine, an essentially plotless, stream-of-consciousness novel, which examines in great detail the lunch-hour activities of a young office worker named Howie is bracing for about two pages. His simple lunch—a hot dog, cookie, and milk—and purchase of a new pair of shoelaces are juxtaposed against his reading of a paperback edition of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Baker's digressive novel contains copious footnotes, some of which are several pages long, while following the ruminations of Howie as he contemplates a variety of everyday objects and occurrences, including how paper milk cartons replaced glass milk bottles, the miracle of perforation, and the nature of plastic straws, vending machines, paper towel dispensers, and popcorn poppers. That he would take more than eighty per cent of the novel to reach his epiphany from a random passage in the Meditations, which lasts less than a page before he returns to memories of cookies and milk as a youth, gives you some idea of the misadventure that this slight novel encompasses. The author's hubris at thinking that his disquisition on drinking straws and shoelaces constitutes a novel of humor or ideas or anything else is merely a symptom of the artistic morass of literature at the end of the twentieth century.(less)

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Feb 25, 2010 John rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone who can indulge their streaming consciousness

Shelves: re-read

there is so much to love about the tremendously micromanaged everyday minutiae that baker appreciates.

i came to this book via my experimental film and video class as a freshman at uni and it and my t.a. for the course (and now personal friend), renato umali, really changed the way i think about what literature is and can be and also consoled my fears that i was alone in the tacit consideration and appreciation of things like the smell of permanent markers, making faces at myself when alone in fr...more

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Aug 31, 2012 Sean Masterson rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have this way of annotating books where I write WOW next to page numbers with passages that blew me away. I'm doing that a lot with this one.

Amazing that it was his first and that he cranked it out in 6 months. Though I guess you spend every moment of your life prior to that first sentence writing the first book.

I haven't read anything where he says so, but I gotta think DFW was a big fan of this novel. Not just because of the footnotes. There is that sad optimism and, dare I say, sweetness...more

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Sep 30, 2007 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: weird

(written 1/2001)

The intricacies of human life and culture here in America - beautiful in its completeness. Overanalyzing and reporting objectively so you can't help but look at your own life the same way.

The periodicity of conversations, periodicity of thoughts in a year... theme of speculating exactly how his shoelaces both broke within two days, after two years of being worn.

On hot blow dryers in bathrooms:
"Come to your senses, World! ... How can you let your marketing men continue to make cla...more

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May 22, 2010 Mara rated it 5 of 5 stars

I, too, have wondered, based on the handrail of an escalator moving faster than the steps, how often the handrail laps the steps! And I had to read the perforation footnote aloud to my puzzled husband trying to explain how perfect this book is, and how seriously funny it is and at the same time how the evocation of a texture of our lives -- like the perfect description of that satisfaction in the two-stage resistance of a stapler -- creates something that feels like nostalgia, but more substanti...more

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Dec 26, 2008 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

"This was the kind of important and secretive product that CVS stores sold--they were a whole chain dedicated to making available the small, expensive, highly specialized items that readied human bodies for human civilization. Men and women eyed each other strangely here--unusual forces of attraction and furtiveness were at work. Things were for sale whose use demanded nudity and privacy. It was more a woman's store than a man's store, but men were allowed to roam with complete freedom past shel...more

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May 04, 2013 Bill rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary

Getting Small

Baker, Nicholson. (1988). The Mezzanine. New York: Grove Press.

This strange little book (107 pages) is the stream of consciousness of a generic office worker in a generic company in a generic American city in the 1980’s. He comments on his sensations and experiences, and relates them back to his childhood and to changes in American industrial design, all as he rides up an escalator one day.

He is no passive recorder of experiences. His comments are thoughtful, often humorously faux-...more Getting Small

Baker, Nicholson. (1988). The Mezzanine. New York: Grove Press.

This strange little book (107 pages) is the stream of consciousness of a generic office worker in a generic company in a generic American city in the 1980’s. He comments on his sensations and experiences, and relates them back to his childhood and to changes in American industrial design, all as he rides up an escalator one day.

He is no passive recorder of experiences. His comments are thoughtful, often humorously faux-naïve, phenomenological reflections on life's little mysteries and frustrations, like how difficult it is to find a new pair of shoelaces of the right length, style, and color.

He talks about office carpeting, the frustration of taking the last piece of tape from a tape dispenser, the pleasures of refilling a stapler. He gives a phenomenology of tying a bow in a shoelace, which, when you think about it, is a remarkably complex skill, so automatic now, it is difficult to remember when or how it was learned.

“Howie,” the office worker, remembers his delight upon ordering his first rubber stamp, comments on sliced olives in cream cheese, the demise of home milk delivery, and how to put on deodorant without removing your shirt. He is impressed by the technological innovations in public rest rooms. He is nostalgic for cigarette machines, paper straws, now-defunct Band-Aid shapes, and the aluminum foil that once wrapped sticks of gum.

The fun of the book is the extreme attention to tiny detail. Every writer knows how difficult it is to “get small” and look, really look at the world, and how easy it is instead to write vague abstractions. So it is not only enjoyable, but instructive to get small with the author. The tiny details are often described in poetic language, which illustrates even further how much reflection the author has put into each tiny aspect. The small loops of a shoelace bow are “dicotyledonous.” The marble lobby of his office building is a “great silver glacier.” The deadness of office life is evoked succinctly. Many ordinary objects and practices are described in so much detail that you wouldn’t think it possible to say another word about them but there are footnotes, which continue the discussion in a “digression” that can run over a page, although what counts as a digression and not as just another thought in Howie’s chaotic stream of consciousness, is arbitrary.

On the downside, Howie is a one-trick pony. He has a knack for extreme close up observation and excellent phenomenology, but little else. We learn next to nothing about him, who he is, where he comes from, what he believes, what motivates him, what he wants, what he looks like. He is presented to us only as an associative flow of linguistically sophisticated, intellectual conceptualizations. One’s clinical impression is that he is disturbed, possibly suffering from mild Asperger’s syndrome, possibly comorbid with a touch of OCD.

heT endless free-association does become tedious, even in such a short “novel,” if that’s what this book is. Some serious questions are raised, but not analyzed or resolved, such as the nature of nostalgia and how it differs from sentimentality. He implicitly questions our fascination with industrial design and marketing of consumer technologies, but says no more than that, making the book no more than an idle amusement. (less)

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Nov 12, 2012 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Nicholson Baker is only a couple of years older than me. I mention this because the fact that he is only a couple of years older than me was one of the factors that contributed to my enjoyment of this book because I share with him many of the same life experiences. Of course I'm not talking here about the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the breakup of The Beatles. I'm talking about the invention of the hot-air blower and the fact that you can no longer get milk delivered to your doorstep in bottl...more Nicholson Baker is only a couple of years older than me. I mention this because the fact that he is only a couple of years older than me was one of the factors that contributed to my enjoyment of this book because I share with him many of the same life experiences. Of course I'm not talking here about the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the breakup of The Beatles. I'm talking about the invention of the hot-air blower and the fact that you can no longer get milk delivered to your doorstep in bottles, the small things. And this is a book obsessed with minutia, with curiosity over minutia. He spends pages talking about paper towels, the various kinds there have been over the years and why they are superior to hot-air blowers. He ponders when childhood ends, the history of shampoo, his diminishing interest in straws, why his shoe laces would both choose to snap a day apart, office etiquette, how to pee when some guy's standing next to you at the urinals, when precisely lunch hours begin and other such stuff. This should be the most stultifyingly boring book ever written—it covers one hour (one lunch hour to be precise) in the life of an office worker during which he does little of any interest; he buys shoelaces, a carton of milk, a cookie, tries to read his book but can't get past the first line (big surprise there)—and yet it's far from it. Many stand-up comics eschew formal joke telling and simple talk about the absurdity of things they've observed and yet manage to keep us laughing. Well this book's like that. It won't have you bent double but (and especially if you're my age) it will have you nodding and wondering why you'd never noticed that too.

I'm not entirely sure that the long digressive footnotes are all that necessary considering the level of microscopy in the text itself (I'm a little surprised that some of his footnotes didn't have footnotes) and some were more interesting than others but the longer ones did distract me and slow down the action (if that was possible because it's already crawling along at a snail's pace).

And yet this book works. And I loved it. If you've ever seen a comedian like Eddie Izzard or Billy Connolly get up on stage and waffle on for an hour about this and that moving seemingly seamlessly from one topic to the next and keeping your attention right the way through then you'll get how this book works. We are curious people. It's the first thing I would imagine that you would require if you want to be a writer or a scientist. I saw a photo a few days ago of a few grains of sand under a microscope and they were beautiful. And what's more bland than sand? This could have been presented as a number of short essays—'On shoelaces', 'On ice makers'—but I like this approach.

The book was written in 1986 and so we don't get Howie's insights into mobile phones or computers which is a shame. I'm not surprised to see reviews all over the shop though. I do see this as a love-it-or-loathe-it book and I suspect the younger the reader the less patience they might have with a book like this.
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Oct 03, 2012 tartaruga fechada rated it 4 of 5 stars

"They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, question marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of 'ibids' and 'compares'and 'sees' that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They know the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, a gray silt of further example a...more

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Jun 04, 2012 Benjamin Obler rated it 5 of 5 stars

Nicholson Baker was a name I knew from shelving his titles (the interesting "Vox" and "Fermata") when I worked at a used bookstore. I'd often see blurbs from other writers whom I liked and find the jacket flap and back-cover summaries tantalizing if not scandalous and mildly arousing. (Wait, what?) Just never got around to reading him. Finally, the story of someone meeting him in person sent me to the B's at Sixth Chamber in St. Paul.

This guy was doing David Foster Wallace when DFW was still app...more Nicholson Baker was a name I knew from shelving his titles (the interesting "Vox" and "Fermata") when I worked at a used bookstore. I'd often see blurbs from other writers whom I liked and find the jacket flap and back-cover summaries tantalizing if not scandalous and mildly arousing. (Wait, what?) Just never got around to reading him. Finally, the story of someone meeting him in person sent me to the B's at Sixth Chamber in St. Paul.

This guy was doing David Foster Wallace when DFW was still applying to Johns Hopkins and hadn't yet licked John Barth's shoes for the first time. He has testicles of steel, and his implements are the scalpel, feather duster and elastic band. He does minutia better than Updike, and this is coming from a long-time Updike fan. But crucially it is not about observing EVERYTHING, but all the consecutively flowing things. There is incredible focus here, and though it's pressing it's also very gentle, like a kayak on a small lake.

The story this novel aims to tell is not about a man arriving at an office, breaking a shoelace, using the restroom, going to lunch, and buying popcorn. The narrator seeks to "understand the proportion and range and effect of those changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives." He finds such examples in the evolution of the milk carton, the qualities of the packaging found in dress shirts, the fiscal tendencies of company departments, the regard one has for escalators, and many many other wonderfully specific and familiar things along the way. I found it an enchanting travel. The only part of reading this that was not pleasurable was when struck by chagrin to see my life on the page with such shocking accuracy, in a way I'd never recorded myself, when Baker talks about the absurd social dance performed by two men in an office men's room.

Wordcount-wise, a third of the book is in footnotes. The charge of pretension that could be leveled at Baker for this choice is nullified by his obvious passion, inquisitiveness and complete lack of false airs. His sentences are exquisite too, and that goes a long way. I have not marked up a book like this, in pen, in a long time, with indications of a remarkable passage. He really operates in units of paragraph, too. Though no one line captures the depth and closeness of what this text is all about, I'll offer one: "When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards."

I recommend "Mezzanine" unequivocably.

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Apr 04, 2012 Tara rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book follows the story of Howie, a typical American corporate employee, on his lunch break one day during the week. He goes to get a hot dog, stops to buy a cookie, milk, and replacement shoelaces, and takes the escalator back up to his office. Spoiler alert: this is the plot of the story. This is literally all that happens.

However, what makes this novel brilliant is the fact that because it’s written in a stream-of-consciousness format, it covers all of Howie’s thoughts over this brief per...more This book follows the story of Howie, a typical American corporate employee, on his lunch break one day during the week. He goes to get a hot dog, stops to buy a cookie, milk, and replacement shoelaces, and takes the escalator back up to his office. Spoiler alert: this is the plot of the story. This is literally all that happens.

However, what makes this novel brilliant is the fact that because it’s written in a stream-of-consciousness format, it covers all of Howie’s thoughts over this brief period of time. Howie muses about the history of the milk straw, the coincidence of both of his shoelaces breaking on the same day, the reasoning behind the perforations of paper towels, the pattern of small talk necessary when running into a coworker on the way to lunch versus in the bathroom at the office… and more. He examines, in detail, all of the mundane elements that most people may think about for a millisecond in passing but don’t take the time to really contemplate. But Howie also analyzes deeper ideas about life in general, and his narrative provides a profound example of the human experience.

The Mezzanine is the sort of book that you will either adore or detest. It’s very well-written, with brilliant construction on Baker’s part. Howie’s thoughts flow naturally from topic to topic, and move seamlessly between the present and his past recollections. Additionally, Baker uses language to describe everyday items in ways that are completely new, so that you end up thinking about said objects differently. His use of complex vocabulary is also impressive.

Some elements of the book may not appeal to everyone. There is no real plot and there is little character development because the whole novel takes place over the span of about an hour. The book also includes massive footnotes. Seriously, the footnotes are about 35% of the novel. I happened to love them because oftentimes they were both funny and thought-provoking, but it can get tedious when most of the page is a footnote or when said footnote sprawls out over three to four pages.

One of the main complaints about this novel is that it is too “boring.” I disagree. I absolutely loved The Mezzanine. This book makes you think. It’s short, but don’t let that fool you - it took me much longer to read than I expected because it forces you to stop and contemplate the ideas that it brings up. Howie’s thoughts are both intriguing and humorous, and as I mentioned earlier, the entire book is written in a way that is complex yet entertaining. I highly recommend at least giving it a try, even if it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea. Despite it’s lack of plot (or perhaps because of it), The Mezzanine is a fantastic piece of literature that you will remember for years after you finish it.
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Sep 20, 2011 Michael William West rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is such a wonderful, consistent, droll collection of minutiae, almost entirely deadpan and completely fascinating, weird accounts of the rise and fall of paper drinking straws, shoelaces, the relative design ethics of office equipment and steam trains, it seems worth reiterating how consistent the tone of the Mezzanine is, the sign of a master at work, refusing all digressions (although perhaps this is easier in a book that is fundamentally about digressing, page-long footnotes and all).

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Jul 07, 2011 Jamie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Oh, I rate everything four. I really do.

I read through most of this book and then skipped to the end. Although Baker has some gorgeous sentences (I'm particularly enamored with one at the end where he refers to bees in trash cans making "slum honey") I wasn't able to appreciate it fully. Perhaps in another century, when all of the things he describes are changed in ways we can't imagine, I might find it interesting to read about a day in the life of a corporate worker in the 1980's.

I'll backtr...more

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May 27, 2011 Sabra Embury rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Mezzanine sent my head into over analytical floptwist; the relatable introspection, the crisp details, and oh geez god...the footnotes, from up to down to across and back up again.

Options explored with footnotes: 1) Stop mid sentence, read the footnotes, come back 2) finish the tangent, go back and read the footnotes 3) screw these footnotes.

But I never chose option 3 for fear that I might miss something crucial, regarding broken shoelaces, the buoyancy of paper straws, whistling in the me...more

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May 06, 2011 Peter rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was another candidate in my search for teachable, discussion-worthy, something-I-actually-like novellas/short novels for a fall class. And just because of that categorization, I went in expecting not to like it. It felt, in short, like homework.

Also, for those unfamiliar with this book, The Mezzanine is a book-planet that is almost equally composed of text and footnote. I thought, going in, it would be a more water to land ratio, with text making up the water in this kind of obvious earth...more

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Mar 07, 2011 MJ Nicholls rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, merkins

Whenever I get onto a train I look for the seat farthest from other passengers as possible. If I’m going to read, I need silence, or near silence—I need at least five or six seats distance. Finding the right seat is an exact science. This night, coming home from a concert, I enter the car and there are people spread at an infuriating equidistance apart, almost positioned on purpose at four-seat gaps to upset my four-to-six gap rule. I walk past a few shaggy night-people, including a man lurking...more Whenever I get onto a train I look for the seat farthest from other passengers as possible. If I’m going to read, I need silence, or near silence—I need at least five or six seats distance. Finding the right seat is an exact science. This night, coming home from a concert, I enter the car and there are people spread at an infuriating equidistance apart, almost positioned on purpose at four-seat gaps to upset my four-to-six gap rule. I walk past a few shaggy night-people, including a man lurking at the back who wants to rape me.

Once I’ve passed people walking up the aisle, I don’t want to turn around and go back if the seat situation is more favourable where I came from. I don’t want my behaviour to appear to these passengers, who watch you out of boredom, as odd, and I don’t want it to seem as though I’m dithering because I’m somehow repelled by their presence.* It’s important to have this sensitivity on a night train, when all passengers are potential rapists and murderers, until proven otherwise.

So I find a seat on the left row in between two solo passengers, with a gap of about three seats in front and two seats behind, with another man two seats ahead on the right row. There’s a group of women conducting a conversation up ahead, their voices quiet at first but getting louder from time to time, competing with the rattle of the train as it speeds up. This will pose the greatest threat to my undisturbed reading of the Nicholson Baker.

The Mezzanine requires concentrated reading and is not ideal for trains. It’s ideal front room reading.* The book’s protagonist discusses the exaggerated minutiae of certain trivial aspects of his life, from shoelaces to escalator etiquette, to the value of paper towels over hand driers, each topic getting more and more detailed until it becomes absurd comedy, Flann O’Brien style. I read for a few moments before a large giggle hits my ears from across the train. The women misled me. I had expected late-night sleepy train talk, instead I got a rowdier bunch, with one blonde shrieker the ringleader.

I push on, but it becomes impossible. My ears are picking up threads in the conversation, following the repeated half-drunk drivel about some bloke being a dick and someone needing to phone someone and tell him something about being a dick or something because he shouldn’t have said that, whoever he is, the dick. It becomes useless to keep reading knowing this will go on and on, this dick and this phoning of. There are frustrating lurches in the conversation when the woman shuts up, but almost invariably, she will start talking again when I get into a long sentence, forcing me to backtrack and read it again.

There are further dilemmas. I don’t have the greatest eyesight, and the lights on Scotrail trains are diffuse and dim. So reading the footnotes becomes a chore for me, trying to follow these complex sentences in the tiny font under appalling lights, and the darkness outside offers no additional help. I don’t want to bring the book right up close to my eyes, as that can effect my long-range vision, so I have to squint a little or focus really hard. If I’m focusing my eyes, I’ll stop focusing my brain, meaning I’m reading but not taking in the words, their meaning or what’s being said. So there’s no emotional response: no laughter, merely slavish word-counting. There is no point reading like this.

As the train picks up people from other stops, the pressure of concentrating my mind and my eyes becomes impossible, so I stop reading and wait until the women get off. When they do, I start reading again. At the next stop, the paranoia that a psychopath has boarded the train and wants to rape me in the bum becomes so great, I have to look up and make a quick assessment of the new passenger, check his psycho credentials. If he sits behind me, which he does, of course, I’ll have to keep one hand on my possessions, in case he should slide a hand through the half-inch seat gap and steal my valuables. (Or go for my penis).

When the inevitable happens, and I’m alone in the train with a man behind me, I get too paranoid and start thinking about rape and how terrible it might be to get raped tonight. I start thinking how awful it must be to be a woman and be paranoid about getting raped, but here I am, an ugly man, thinking about getting raped, so I’m there already. All I need are the breast implants. There’s no point reading now, not with rape and death on the cards. I start to get a little dour, thinking about other problems—financial, personal, familial—making each problem into something huge and insurmountable, until I can’t stand to even hold the book, so depressed and self-involved have I become in those four minutes.

Soon it’s time to get off. My only concern then is getting away from the rapists. All fourteen of them. Fast.

----

* This may be the case, depending on the smell of alcohol or cigarettes coming from each passenger. If there’s an especial stink, I will make allowances and escape to the next compartment, if available, or the farther end, if not.

* There are three categories of books: those to be read with extreme patience and concentration in my front room, with next to no sounds except outside traffic or my girlfriend clawing at her keyboard. (Ideally she wouldn’t be in the room, but I read a great deal, and we do live together, so it isn’t exactly plausible to get her to leave while I read. I could try, though.) The other two are bedtime reads: books that can be read while dozing off (to help dozing off). The other can be read on trains: potboilers, thrillers, etc.
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Feb 02, 2011 Sam rated it 4 of 5 stars

A good primer on form fitting function? The medium is the massage? A love letter to corporate culture? A tightrope walk on the line of irony?
I feel lucky that I read Baker's later work before I read this one, because his narrative voice - hyper-aware, stylistically playful, over-the-top - seems more human when he's writing about sex. Considering that the reveries in the Mezzanine are about such civilization-defining ephemera as a paper coffee cups and plastic soda straws, there's considerably le...more

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Apr 05, 2010 Matthew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: hilarious

The complexities of office buildings and appliances often tempt authors to outrage, but Baker is only too glad to describe them exhaustively and with complete cheerfulness.

There is something admirable about this, it reminded me of childhood when I would examine the devices of the modern city with wonder instead of frustration and disapproval. It is possible that his worshipful attention to the details is a sort of criticism of the way we live, but the tone of the prose is so innocent and funny t...more

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Dec 29, 2009 Robin Cicchetti rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

One afternoon, just prior to leaving the office for his lunch break, a nameless protagonist breaks his shoelace. This novella is about the one hour lunch break during which the lace is replaced, and so much less. The escalator in the office mezzanine serves as the central motif as our anti-hero, a modern-day Leopold Bloom, reflects on every mundane aspect of office life. Memories and factoids about everything from milk bottles, paper towels and the history of the towel dispenser to analysis of t...more

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Oct 21, 2012 Maximilian Klein rated it 4 of 5 stars

For the hypercritical analyst of minutiae. This book is the ultimate snapshot of the human mind, and it's full unabridged activity during escalator rides. With Baker's attitudes of appreciating mechanical designs, I couldn't agree more. At times Baker is simply describing to you the machinery of soap dispenser, in the way that we have all amassed it's physical workings but were never told. This is Baker fully unfolding each thought, at each point in history, with each acknowledged bias, of publi...more

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Dec 26, 2011 Liam Guilar rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The book is endorsed by that well known writer of hilarity, Salman Rushdie, "A Seriously funny book." which may be a joke in itself.
It reminds me of being trapped at a table with someone who is determined to share their detailed and intricate memories of shoes and after the chairs have begun to bleed with boredom, and the cutlery has got up and walked away, some part of the brain dissolves and you find yourself in an hallucinatory space where the worst thing that can happen. the thing you dread...more

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Sep 21, 2011 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

This was Baker's first novel, and though I haven't read anything subsequent, I can hardly believe he's topped this (though reviews of his current sex-romp seem to suggest otherwise). Baker manages to turn the most mundane experiences into the profound, and vice versa, in this slim little, highly-footnoted (do the footnotes exceed the text itself?) novel. A book where the present action takes place entirely over the course of a ride up an escalator hardly deserves to be as brilliant as this one....more

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About Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, his writings focus on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. His unconventional novels deal with topics such as voyeurism and planned assassination, and they generally de-emphasize narrative in favor of intense character work. Baker's enthusiasts appreciate his ability...more

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Quotes from The Mezzanine

“The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.” — 10 people liked it

“Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber.” — 8 people liked it

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