The Anthologist

Apr 26, 2011 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

Yes, hello! Take a seat - that one, please. No, just shove that stuff on the ground somewhere, it's just books and papers. Have some tea. Well, since you ask, not too bad - not too bad at all. This? Oh yes, it looks terrible doesn't it, I should have changed my shirt. It's all from this little scratch here, see? Doesn't look like much but there was a lot of blood. Well, I picked up this lovely little cat you see, and it just kind of reached out and took a chunk out of me. Just a pretty little ca...more Yes, hello! Take a seat - that one, please. No, just shove that stuff on the ground somewhere, it's just books and papers. Have some tea. Well, since you ask, not too bad - not too bad at all. This? Oh yes, it looks terrible doesn't it, I should have changed my shirt. It's all from this little scratch here, see? Doesn't look like much but there was a lot of blood. Well, I picked up this lovely little cat you see, and it just kind of reached out and took a chunk out of me. Just a pretty little cat called Windows that lives next door. Now if you wished you could call that a metaphor for a great part of my experience of life, yes, ha ha. It looks so lovely and you reach towards it and then it takes a chunk out of your face. But no, I'm not complaining. Oh that? No, I haven't written a single word of it - and let me confess to you quite candidly _ I have no intention of doing so either! There, what do you say to that? Well, I've thought of a great new idea. This is the thing, right - I've just been sitting around with a tape recorder - this one here - and burbling out random observations about poetry and life and whatnot, and how rhyme has been evicted from modern poetry and how dismal that is. And how dismal I am. Yes, I know, that part of it is made up - I'm in character! I've assumed the character of someone I could have been if The Mezzanine hadn't been a smash hit. A relative smash hit, that is. I would have been the guy I'm pretending to be in this monologue I'm doing. I've already got a whole box of tapes of all of this rambling stuff. Ah well, you see, this is my great idea - I thought that I'd just send them all off to my editor at Simon and Schuster and say here you are - and she'll get some perky graduate to type it all up, and then voila! New novel by Nicholson Baker! Yes, all very Warhol. Well, that's true, that's true, but when they interview me I'm going to say No, this was a tough novel to write, every word, every verbal infelicity, every tedious non-sequitor was thought through with a brow furrowed by the uttermost of aesthetic necessity. No, they'll lap it up. No, no, that's unkind, it's not money for old rope, how vulgar you can be. I'm throwing in all sorts of cute and interesting stuff about poetry, so you get the idea you're learning something amidst all the guff. No, there's no story. It won't be that kind of book. It won't end up being filmed with jeff Bridges. Ha, can you imagine - starring Jeff Bridges as "The Anthologist"! Ah look - see here? This tape's coming to an end. Oh no, I'll use this one too - everything is grist to this ever-grinding mill. Yes, it'll go in the box with all the rest. No, we'll edit you out. The whole thing will be a slightly dull monologue. Yes, not exactly Shakes

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Aug 13, 2011 Nancy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Well, this may be the most delightful book I have read this year.

Paul Chowder's life isn't going particularly well. Sometime poet and current anthologist, he is struggling to write an intro to his anthology of poetry, Only Rhyme. But his chronic procrastinating has left him without a girlfriend, without cash, and, it sometimes seems, without hope. Paul longs to win Roz back by completing the intro, but instead he seems to spend a lot of time sitting on his driveway in a plastic chair.

But Paul i...more Well, this may be the most delightful book I have read this year.

Paul Chowder's life isn't going particularly well. Sometime poet and current anthologist, he is struggling to write an intro to his anthology of poetry, Only Rhyme. But his chronic procrastinating has left him without a girlfriend, without cash, and, it sometimes seems, without hope. Paul longs to win Roz back by completing the intro, but instead he seems to spend a lot of time sitting on his driveway in a plastic chair.

But Paul is not your ordinary embittered failure. In fact, he is neither embittered nor a failure - just a genuinely kind and sincere fella who still gets pretty wound up when he's talking about poetry. His first-person narrative is funny, humble, sweet, and rambling - because he can't talk long without telling you something pretty neat about poetry, about meter, about enjambment or Edgar Allen Poe or Swinburne or what a good idea it is to to dance about in waltz steps to iambic pentameter.

Nicholson Baker (really? That's really his name?) has a marvelous gift for putting words together in such a perfect way that you think they must have been born to be placed just so. I loved this: "Let's have a look at this poem. Here it is, going down. You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space...All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good."

Or this: "When I look at the lives of the poets, I understand what's wrong with me. They were willing to make the sacrifices that I'm not willing to make. They were so tortured, so messed up.

"I'm only a little messed up. I'm tortured to the point where I don't sleep very well sometimes, and I don't answer mail as I should. Sometimes I feel a languor of spirit when I get an email asking me to do something. Also, I've run up significant credit-card debt. But that's not real self-torture."

Paul's passion for poetry keeps this narration from sinking into greyness; it stays funny, lively, and fascinating throughout, until I wanted nothing more than for Paul to win back his short, loving, generous Roz - and finish that damned intro. Plus, he healed a long-standing wound in me by pointing out that iambic pentameter is not on five beats, but six or three, WHICH I TRIED TO TELL MY ENGLISH TEACHER IN HIGH SCHOOL (but she wouldn't listen.) Lovely, lovely book. And the cover is beautiful, too.(less)

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Oct 04, 2009 Ruth rated it 5 of 5 stars

Take one measure of writer’s block, add an equal measure of a longtime lover lost, mix in the mind of an intelligent self-deprecating, funny, out-of-sorts and out-of-fashion poet and get one of the best books I’ve read this year. It helps if you like poetry. There are a lot of references to poets and poetry gossip. But it’s all written with such ease and grace that the nonpoetry reader can still just sail through. Sad, funny, and wonderful.

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Apr 13, 2011 Courtney Johnston rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-about-books, borrowed, extraordinary, fiction, poetry

A washed-up middle-aged poet who has recently lost his girlfriend through his chronic inability to finish the introduction to the poetry anthology he's meant to be assembling (which will - if he can get it out - rescue rhyming poetry from the clutches of free verse) should not be such good company.

But right from the opening line ("Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know.") I fell for Paul Chowder. Nicholson plays Chowder as both artful and artless. We are...more

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May 07, 2013 Lisa Houlihan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novel, bookclub, male

Delightful. I love the title of the anthology the titular character is struggling to write: Only Rhyme, like Forster��s ��Only Connect.�� I love the prose written as if by a poet, who says one book makes him ��think of the sound of someone closing the door of a well-cared-for pale blue Infiniti on a late-summer evening in the gravel overflow parking lot of a beach hotel that once been painted by Gretchen Dow Simpson.�� I love that his surname is Chowder and he says that ��people are going...more

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May 14, 2013 Derek Smith rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is more about poetry than a novel of character and events. The story is slight. Paul Chowder has been dumped by his girlfriend because he is so ineffectual. He will do anything rather than get down to writing the introduction to a poetry anthology, paid work. He does chores, he shops, he paints for his neighbour and tells us lots about poetry. In fact, he lectures us – and for me, as a writer of poetry, I wanted to argue with him as he is so very definite. For Paul rhyming poetry with solid...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Greg Morrison rated it 1 of 5 stars

I read an advance reader's copy of this book, which seemed free of error, except for a long mark wandering off the end of the name "Basho."

The Anthologist reminded me a great deal of a much more successful work: Flaubert's Parrot. In that book, Julian Barnes writes the story of an English doctor who reveals his own life via his obsession with Flaubert (and in particular Madame Bovary). There, you read Flaubertian trivia - favorite cigars, slang, animals he loved or even mentioned in letters. Eve...more I read an advance reader's copy of this book, which seemed free of error, except for a long mark wandering off the end of the name "Basho."

The Anthologist reminded me a great deal of a much more successful work: Flaubert's Parrot. In that book, Julian Barnes writes the story of an English doctor who reveals his own life via his obsession with Flaubert (and in particular Madame Bovary). There, you read Flaubertian trivia - favorite cigars, slang, animals he loved or even mentioned in letters. Eventually this trivia about a great writer coalesces into the unhappy facts of a doctor's life.

And before that, isn't Flaubert's Parrot a weaker version of Pale Fire? And wasn't Pale Fire just a curlicue on The Life of Samuel Johnson?

This tedious digressionizing is something like the experience of reading The Anthologist. I tired of the precious protagonist, especially when it became clear that he was a mouthpiece for Nicholson Baker's opinions. It reminds me of Billy Collins, a poet who is somewhat aggressively ignored in this book, in favor of lyric poets like Teasdale and Bishop. I've always thought Billy Collins was fatuously "in love" with the "commonplace, everyday" experiences of life - bringing no animation or thought to quotidian life, just narrating it with an empty-headed, near-pantheistic delight. But perhaps I'm being unfair.

Anyway, basically, the narrator tries to edit a poetry anthology, sustains a fairly pedestrian theory of poetic meter, moans over his girlfriend who has left him (of course) because he's a dawdling failure (of course). He finds time to complain about rhyming poems and the non-poems of contemporary free verse, which he calls, preciously, "plums." This is the Writer-Academic as Hamlet - lacking vigor enough to impress his lady & keep her; anxious that a usurper (Ezra Pound, et al.) has overthrown the rightful rulers of poetry (Swinburne, Tennyson, Teasdale); singing and performing antics to get his writing going. And all the while, if only he wasn't such a braniac focused on his poetry meters and he could just get down to life, y'know, he'd be fine. Perhaps if he enjoyed those blueberries he's always picking, or if he could get down to composing those plums he claims he's got carrying in his head - but then, for Hamlet, the ripeness is all.
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Nov 16, 2012 Ben Thurley rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Anthologist is the gentle and sadly comic story of Paul Chowder, a minor poet and critic, and his attempt to write a foreword for a poetry anthology, gain control of his life and restore a relationship with his girlfriend, Roz. Paul's narration is gentle and reflective, humorous and self-deprecating. It ambles and occasionally bounces, and sometimes leads us to a 'slough of despond' as we wonder, with the narrator, whether he will ever get himself together to the point of finishing the damn...more The Anthologist is the gentle and sadly comic story of Paul Chowder, a minor poet and critic, and his attempt to write a foreword for a poetry anthology, gain control of his life and restore a relationship with his girlfriend, Roz. Paul's narration is gentle and reflective, humorous and self-deprecating. It ambles and occasionally bounces, and sometimes leads us to a 'slough of despond' as we wonder, with the narrator, whether he will ever get himself together to the point of finishing the damn foreword and getting the girl (back).

Baker is just a brilliant writer, really deftly putting language at his service. There are so many diverting and gorgeous reflections on rhyme and metre that if I was teaching a course on poetry, I'd probably want to start by having students read this. For example,

The four-beat line is the soul of English poetry.

People are going to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They’re going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter! The centrality of the five-stress line! Because “pent” is five in Babylonian, and five is the humber of fingers on your hand, and five is the number of slices of American cheese you can eat in one sitting. They’re going to talk to you about Chaucer and about blank verse – which is another confusing term – and all this so called prosody they’re going to shovel at you. And sure – fine – you can handle it. You’re up to whatever mind-forged shrivelments they’re going to dish out that day. But just remember (a) that the word “prosody” isn’t an appealing word, and (b) that pentamter is an import from France. And French is a whole different language. The real basis is this walking rhythm right here.

Woops – dropped my Sharpie.
Right here: One – two – three – four. “Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill. We think so then, we thought so still.

I love that this clarity, this crunchy, combative prose – "mind-forged shrivelments" – can come from such a downbeat narrator. It's what gives you hope that this passion for poetry and poets could lead to a breakthrough in the more prosaic matters of work and relationships. This is a gorgeous little novel, and has been a sign-post to some poets I've quite enjoyed too.(less)

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Oct 29, 2012 Roberta rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book. Oh my God, this book. I'd like to say I have no words, but we all know that's a rare occasion, indeed.

I picked this up for something to read on the plane to Atlanta this weekend, kind of on the fly while replacing my copy of Vox. It was there, the cover was gorgeous, and it was Baker. Sold. I started reading it at work the day I bought it...

...and I'm pretty sure that Baker was speaking directly to me personally circa 2009 when he wrote this. (Never mind that it was already published...more This book. Oh my God, this book. I'd like to say I have no words, but we all know that's a rare occasion, indeed.

I picked this up for something to read on the plane to Atlanta this weekend, kind of on the fly while replacing my copy of Vox. It was there, the cover was gorgeous, and it was Baker. Sold. I started reading it at work the day I bought it...

...and I'm pretty sure that Baker was speaking directly to me personally circa 2009 when he wrote this. (Never mind that it was already published then.) I don't know that I would have cared about this book as much had I found it in 2009, but Paul, the main character, was listening to the music I was listening to (he references Alex Dezen/The Damnwells and Ray LaMontagne specifically in the text) and grappling with writer's block and trying to find a purpose as the world slowly unravels just like I was at that point in time (Before College, so to speak).

This is one I will read over and over. It's something of a guidebook to poetry (I TOLD you guys that lyrics and poetry are essentially the same, and that part of what makes songs interesting is what they do with the line breaks, and that if you know how to listen for it, you can HEAR the line breaks and enjambment!) as well as a direct poke to the temple to get you writing again. It's a love story (Baker's stringing beads again, which took me back to Vox) and yet...it's as much a love story with writing and poetry as is with Paul's ex-girlfriend.

I just...I can't put into words how badly I needed to read this book at this juncture in my life. I finished it today and promptly signed up for NaNoWriMo because I realized what I need right now more than anything is to WRITE, and I'm not happy if I'm not writing, and quite frankly, this semester is acutely lacking on the writing front, and that's probably why I'm not happy...

...and once again, Baker has a knack for making me remember why I love what I do with a candid honesty that resonates, and he just plain makes me HAPPY even when he's being all weird and Nicholson Baker and...

Yeah, okay, I'm fangirling. I'm done now. Miss me? *LOL*(less)

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Oct 15, 2012 Libbie Hawker rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction, poetry

Okay, I admit it. I really didn't like this book at first. I found the narrative to be distracting and gimmicky with its forced "look how charming I am! Aren't I charming?" feel. (I am using charming because I hate the Q-word and avoid it at all costs.) I was fully prepared to hate this one, to rip into it when I finally finished it and got to write my review.

To my surprise, somewhere around the middle I realized the distracting gimmick was all part of a brilliant master plan, and I found myself...more Okay, I admit it. I really didn't like this book at first. I found the narrative to be distracting and gimmicky with its forced "look how charming I am! Aren't I charming?" feel. (I am using charming because I hate the Q-word and avoid it at all costs.) I was fully prepared to hate this one, to rip into it when I finally finished it and got to write my review.

To my surprise, somewhere around the middle I realized the distracting gimmick was all part of a brilliant master plan, and I found myself rather reluctantly in love with this book.

The only thing that stumps me is why so many people who don't write love it. If I weren't a writer, if I didn't recognize the agonized compulsion of procrastination all throughout this book, the destructive terror of deadlines, the self-loathing and the self-loving, I would hate it. It would have continued to drive me nuts at full speed and I would have eventually set the damn thing on fire. Readers who are not also writers, what the hell is the draw to The Anthologist? It seems to me the special and awful experience of total creative stumped-ness, even when one is losing everything due to being creatively stumped, is such a unique experience to those who work in the creative field. And yet pretty much everybody on the planet loves this book. We're not all writers or painters or underwater basketweavers. What gives?

Talking purely about the charming book itself, let me say that I loved the way narrator Paul Chowder imagines these fantastical interactions with dead poets. And although I am making a conscious effort to study and write more poetry (I am convinced that poetry makes writers better at all forms of writing, from novels to essays), I don't know enough about the history of poetry to know whether some of the characterizations and facts were true or pure inventions on Nicholson Baker's part. Did some of these intense romantic relationships really happen between famous poets, or was it another fictional mirage, as in Chowder's fancy of bumping into Poe (or whoever it was) at the bead store? And I must know, was Ezra Pound really as big a prick as Baker/Chowder made him out to be? (I hope he was. Pound was a fellow native of Idaho, and we need a blush of badassery in the Gem State.)

While the book was mostly "talky" and clipped in its narrative style, contributing to my initial dislike of it, it had occasional moments of pure loveliness that left me weak in the knees. Entangled in the distraction and the avoidance of things that must be done and must be discussed were rare moments of pure sight and feeling that really showed what Nicholson Baker is capable of:

Yes, I sometimes have terrifying dreams in which a cat I've never seen before attacks a mouse and bites it and bites it, until I can hear its tiny neck make a popping sound. I pull the cat gently away and I take my shirt off and ball it up, and I prop the hurt mouse up against a balled-up shirt, and the mouse turns into a wan woman who talks to me in a laborious cheerful whisper in her brokenness. I want her to live. She says: "It's just impossible for me to live after what I've been through with that cat."

Oh, plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself. I want everything to be all right.

Beautiful. And so right, and so true to the writing/writer experience.

More that just speaks so directly to the writer's particular experience:

I wish I were happy in a disciplined way. Happy in a nondespairing way. I wish that I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing poetry. But I'm not sure I can. I've published poems, yes. That much is beyond question. And for a while I was pleased with the poems that I published. I felt that I understood why people write poetry. I understood the whole communal activity of writing and reviewing and extracting quotes to go on the paperback. "Moss has arrived, with next to no luggage, at mastery." Being part of the interfaith blurb universe.

And now it's like I'm on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way old aluminum ladders have that texture, that kind of not-too-appealing roughness of texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I'm clinging to this telescoping ladder that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below. I don't know how I got here. It's a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing, rung by rung. I see Jorie Graham, I see Billy Collins, I see Ted Kooser. They're all clinging to the ladder, too. And above them, I see Auden, Kunitz. Whoa, way up there. Samuel Daniel. Sara Teasdale. Herrick. Tiny figures, clambering, climbing. The wind comes over, whssssew, and it's cold, and the ladder vibrates, and I feel very exposed and high up. Off to the side there's Helen Vendler, in her trusty dirigible, filming our ascent. And I look down, and there are many people behind me. They're hurrying up to where I am. They're twenty-three-year-old energetic climbing creatures in their anoraks and goggles, and I'm trying to keep climbing. But my hands are cold and going numb. My arms are tired to tremblement. It's freezing, and it's lonely, and there's nobody to talk to. And what if I just let go? What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just -- fffshhhooooow. Let go.

Would that be such a bad thing?

The whole book speaks so directly to all the specific fears that accompany writing. Running out of ideas. Running out of time. Running out of good words. Becoming irrelevant, obsolete. Even the setting is pitch-perfect; Chowder is trying to compile his print anthology of rhyming poetry (itself seen as an archaic form) at a time when ebooks are on the rise; as he sits in his rustic barn, avoiding writing his intro, his life is sprinkled with gadgets and technology that remind the writer-reader that the Kindle is just around the corner for Chowder and his nagging editor, that in another moment it's all going to change again and everybody will be thrown back into the agony of worrying about obsolescence and creative survival. It's a marvelously subtle book where every individual element of storycraft plays together in just the right way.

Well worth reading, if only for the fact that it reminds all of us, writer-readers and reader-readers, to notice and remember and celebrate the best moment of each day, like the branches on the windshield, like the booming rests.(less)

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Jun 28, 2012 Marc Nash rated it 4 of 5 stars

While interested in artistic creativity depicted in fiction, I normally shun books that are specifically about writing and the writing process. But Nicholson Baker is far too of a subtle writer to deal in tired old tropes. Although not always, since his previous fiction "Checkpoint" was a searing and not terribly subtle tale of two men discussing the killing of George Bush so enraged was one of them by the Iraq War. Baker's early novels such as "The Mezzanine" were forensic studies in detail, of...more While interested in artistic creativity depicted in fiction, I normally shun books that are specifically about writing and the writing process. But Nicholson Baker is far too of a subtle writer to deal in tired old tropes. Although not always, since his previous fiction "Checkpoint" was a searing and not terribly subtle tale of two men discussing the killing of George Bush so enraged was one of them by the Iraq War. Baker's early novels such as "The Mezzanine" were forensic studies in detail, of buildings, decor and small technologies such as milk cartons and hot air blowers in cloakrooms. Very male in other words. But this book is far more gentle, even though it absolutely forms an inquiry into poesies; that creative touchstone at the heart of all human imaginative outpourings.

Paul Chowder is a middling poet, commissioned to compile an anthology and write its introductory essay. He is blocked. He invokes the deities of the form. He propounds rhyme and metre over free verse. He lectures and pontificates to the reader on how poetry works and doesn't work. So didactic is he, at one point he even gets out a whiteboard and sharpie pens and takes them out into nature in an attempt to write his intro and yet stay true to poetry's inspirations. And this represents the delicious duality woven throughout the weft of this book. How the mundane both drags down and yet transforms the sublime and how that feeds into the lyrical.

Paul will ramble about some domestic focal point, but then incisively bring it back to the poetry under scrutiny with one line counterpointing it. And inversely, he can be holding forth about Ezra Pound or Louise Bogan and then cut them off at the knees with some remark about the mouse he has loose in his kitchen, or the difficulty of finding real bristled brooms rather than plastic ones (echoing his early books' obsessiveness). And that pretty much is the whole book. It's like sitting on a beach as the tide comes in, gently rolling over the shore and back out again, as each meander through poetry, creativity and the banal (we can't use the word prosaic, since this is about verse) laps at our feet with a fetching playfulness.

There are some very cutting lines in among Chowder's musings: "Death is the only health insurance" and "defining me as an anthologist - i.e. as a lost soul who turned in despair to the publishing of other people's work". The book is an utterly charming treat, so light and easy compared to Baker's other, quite intense works. The only criticism I have is that some of the didacticism about poetry itself had me skimming through those sections, partly because it's not my field and also most of the American poets referenced were unknown to me. But even with that, the book was an complete pleasure. A paean to procrastination in the form of one Paul Chowder. Did he ever get his introduction written? Read and find out.
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Mar 05, 2012 Megan rated it 3 of 5 stars

I've been trying really hard to read a coulpe chapters of books before actually purchasing them. The problem is, I'm not the kind of reader for whom the first couple of chapters gets the job done. Sure, I have discarded a few books that didn't read well or that turned out to be about werewolves (a higher percentage than you'd hope), but in the first couple of chapters of a book, I'm apparently reading for an interesting voice and words that hit me where it counts, but when I read a whole book, I...more

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Jan 16, 2012 Cynthia Harrison rated it 5 of 5 stars

When I read a review of Nicholson Baker‘s latest novel, I knew it was my kind of book. The main character is a poet. With writer’s block.

That was enough to get me to buy the book, and wow did I have fun reading it. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I laughed so much with a book. I’ve never read Baker before, but he’s funny. And smart. And he gets so many things just right: about teaching, about writing, about poetry.

Not that his character is a font of wisdom. Exactly the opposite, really...more

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Aug 23, 2011 Sabra Embury rated it 4 of 5 stars

Rhyming is the genius's version of the crossword puzzle--when it's good. When it's bad it's intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented.

That's from chapter 4 of the Anthologist, my favorite chapter which emphasizes the link between the link between depression and the concocting of poetry. Also...

Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.

Another zinger is in chapter 8:

...spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a wh

...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Christopher F. added it

In my opinion, nothing Nicholson Baker has done gets less than five stars, so I'm hardly the one to ask. This one is a welcome return, after lots of shorter and nonfiction contributions, to something resembling his original and best style: not quite the brilliantly fanatical miniaturism of Room Temperature, The Mezzanine, or The Fermata—which is sort of to Updike what Jimi Hendrix is to Elmore James—but the brutally honest, free-flowing, and painfully vulnerable writerliness of "U and I." He's s...more

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Jul 03, 2011 Emily Simnitt rated it 4 of 5 stars

I loved this sweet, funny book about poetry and writer's block! Five reasons:

In one section, the main character writes about how poetry's importance in any given life waxes and wanes, with most people getting full up in high school or college English. I think it's time for me to make poetry wax strong in my life again (15 years after the last flowering).

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Elizabeth Bishop....this book reminded me.

The moments from the narrator's life were poignant, particulary a s...more

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May 09, 2011 Holly Troup rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read several of Nicholson Baker's books many years ago, and, to be frank, I found his stream -of-consciousness style tedious, bogged down in minutiae so that it resembled the mind-workings of the self-absorbed who feel compelled to tweet, text, e-mail and blog their every thought, every sensation.
However, in THE ANTHOLOGIST, Nicholson Baker's style serves the story well.
Paul Chowder, the narrator of the story, longs for the passionate, suicidal depression of the Great Poets, but his crisis is...more

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Apr 25, 2011 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was given this title by a friend who thought I might like the book. He, apparently, is a huge fan of Baker. While I was delighted for someone to share a book with me when it usually works in reverse, in truth, the book languished on my bedside table for months. I just wasn't sure that a book about poetry could possibly engage me the way I like to be engaged with a great novel. Feeling guilty pressure about returning the book to its rightful owner, I decided I couldn't really put it off any lon...more I was given this title by a friend who thought I might like the book. He, apparently, is a huge fan of Baker. While I was delighted for someone to share a book with me when it usually works in reverse, in truth, the book languished on my bedside table for months. I just wasn't sure that a book about poetry could possibly engage me the way I like to be engaged with a great novel. Feeling guilty pressure about returning the book to its rightful owner, I decided I couldn't really put it off any longer. I promised myself to give it a good go with no commitment to finishing it. I am quite happy to report that I was completely wrong in my original prognosis! There is something deceptively charming and disarming about The Anthologist. I read it straight through in a day and felt satisfied in the end with the novel's resolution and my devotion to it.

Paul Chowder is a middle aged man who is quite obsessed and extraordinarily knowledgeable about poetry. It seems he has been a poet of some regard at various times in his life but has failed to achieve his unfulfilled potential or the lasting permanence he hopes. Poet Laureate it seems will not be appended to his name. This middle age malaise has left him beached without motivation, inspiration, or inclination to do the simplest of jobs let alone to write the introduction to an anthology of poetry he has collected and selected so carefully. He worries he isn't depressed enough or long suffering enough to merit the honorarium of being called a poet. Entwined among the stream of conscious yet rather erudite ramblings about meter, rhyme, rhythm, and poetic sensibilities, is the story of Paul's failed relationship and the slow winding down of a career. It is this story that I found so entrancing and charming. Paul is not a fastidious man in his attention to details, including relationships with real people. But he is nonetheless a very relatable character under the skilled pen of Baker who manages to create a very ordinary everyman as an underdog protagonist. What might seem pitiable or pitiful is instead humorous and fetching. His helplessness over the malaise is all encompassing until all at once, it isn't and the story marches on to its cheerful resolution.

If I am being honest, some of the poetry explanations made little sense to me, as I am not a huge fan of poetry, (dare I say it?)but I enjoyed reading the snippets of poems and the biographical glimpses into the private lives of the poets for whom Chowder has equal parts regard, esteem, and disdain. I also appreciated the fact that Baker sneakily disguised the poetic forms within his own prose. When Chowder goes on about Haiku and its near ruinous effect on his elementary-school mind and poetic sensibilities, I found it hilarious that Baker was writing haiku in the telling of it! And this is but one example. Clearly, Baker has a love affair going on with poetry himself and he manages it in a very clever and capable way. Overall, a delightful read; in spite of or because of the poetry I can't say for sure but worthwhile in the end.(less)

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Mar 24, 2011 Bennet rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels-stories

Paul Chowder is trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming verse, but he’s having a hard time getting started. The result of his fitful struggles is The Anthologist, a brilliantly funny and exquisite love story about poetry. (from the cover blurb)

It’s also a love story about his amiable but ambivalent and sad break-up with girlfriend Roz, which is prompted by Paul’s procrastinating.

Reading his meandering and rueful narrative is like listening to an old friend go on about som...more Paul Chowder is trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming verse, but he’s having a hard time getting started. The result of his fitful struggles is The Anthologist, a brilliantly funny and exquisite love story about poetry. (from the cover blurb)

It’s also a love story about his amiable but ambivalent and sad break-up with girlfriend Roz, which is prompted by Paul’s procrastinating.

Reading his meandering and rueful narrative is like listening to an old friend go on about something perplexing and dear because it’s his turn, and you’re reminded why he’s an old friend, because you still get the same jokes and ask many of the same questions, and he’s endeared himself to you in a hundred ways even though he occasionally gets on your last nerve, and you totally understand why his girlfriend moved out. You also continue learning about poetry, because that is his thing and it always comes up. Life according to poetry could be the book’s subtitle.

“I always secretly want it to rhyme,” Paul says. “Don’t you?” And you realize you do, and then rhyme as metaphor and motif takes off.

He goes on: “People have been struggling over this idea that rhyme is artificial and unnatural for hundreds and hundreds of years. And meanwhile poem after poem gets written that people really want to listen to. And a lot of those poems rhyme. Imagine what would have happened if Campion had succeeded in his effort to fuss and scold rhyme out of existence and banish it from English poetry. Four hundred years of pretend Greek and Latin meters is what we would have had, instead of Marvell, and Dryden, and Cole Porter, and Christina Rossetti, and Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rogers and Hart, and Wendy Cope, and Auden, and John Lennon, and John Hiatt, and Irving Berlin, and Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein, and Charles Causley, and Keats, and Paul Simon, and et cetera, and so on. Whole floors of libraries could be filled with poems that we would not have had.”

In the process of procrastinating and ruminating, Paul fumbles through the day to day, occasionally experiencing imaginary encounters with poets in rote places (like meeting Edgar Allen Poe at the Laundromat), and actual encounters with girlfriend Roz when they reconnect to bathe their dog, Smacko, or bring over chicken soup, or mow the lawn – the sort of mundane stuff that Nicholson Baker so masterfully makes interesting and even profound.

Even when reading about poetic technicalities like meter and enjambment (complete with chalkboard graphics), I remained completely engaged, and if given the chance would have snuggled up with the cat by the fire to read the whole thing in one go, and in the end totally thought Roz should move back in.

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Feb 26, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 5 of 5 stars

Paul Chowder is a minor poet and a perennial procrastinator. Although recognized at one time for a few brilliant poems, he has waned from the public eye. He is given the opportunity to resurrect his name and his bank account by writing an introduction to an anthology of poems, but he dawdles and delays the project. Paul spends his days reflecting on his career; the recent departure of his girlfriend, Roz (who left him due to his dilatory ways); the need to organize his office; his neighbors; and...more Paul Chowder is a minor poet and a perennial procrastinator. Although recognized at one time for a few brilliant poems, he has waned from the public eye. He is given the opportunity to resurrect his name and his bank account by writing an introduction to an anthology of poems, but he dawdles and delays the project. Paul spends his days reflecting on his career; the recent departure of his girlfriend, Roz (who left him due to his dilatory ways); the need to organize his office; his neighbors; and the mundane. He provides a stunning and critical analysis of select poetry and other poets, but continually fails to write his introduction. He waxes whimsically on the suicides of depressed poets, such as Sarah Teasdale and Vachal Lindsay, and vilifies Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot for their antisemitism. He makes a tidy space near his pillow for the poetry of Mary Oliver, who he cherishes.

To rhyme or not to rhyme? He probes and ponders the fine points of meter and the minutiae of quotidian distractions, and continually obstructs his own forward momentum. He resorts to lengthy rambling and self-flagellation, yet his constant need for approval is disarming. This story is narrated like a memoir written by a rueful humorist teaching us the power of verse. It is a droll and touching examination of a consummate lyric scholar who happens to be a stubborn boondoggler.

I came away from this book with a renewed vigor and love for verse. Through Paul's extolling of meter and rhyme, his preoccupation with the definition of iambic pentameter, and the virtues of almost every aspect of verse, I received a revitalized education on the art and aesthetics of poetry. He contemplates the meaning of various poems without dislodging the reader's own sense of discovery. He leads you to the brink, but you get the satisfaction of plumbing the poignancy with him. It never comes off as pompous. His fertile eloquence, as he shares his shuddering love of the immediacy of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "The Fish," left me breathless and aroused--a poem that never had any particular effect on me before.

Baker's protagonist expounds on what Horace really meant by "carpe diem." That sentiment, according to Paul, has been misinterpreted for years, yet the veneration of those two words and its permanence in our culture is dependent on its very misconception. That notable paradox, and the fecundity of Bishop's poem, typify the fetching delight of this novel. The Anthologist is brimming with poetic enchantment. The loitering, melancholy journey of Paul Chowder and his sublime salvation through meter and verse is smart, beguiling, and tenderly irresistible. (less)

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Feb 21, 2011 Nathan rated it 5 of 5 stars

A book of fiction is like a long car trip, where you're trapped with these characters for the journey. You hope that something makes the journey interesting: the characters, their conversation, or the incidents along the way. Some novels have the distinct feeling of a slow car journey through unchanging landscape with the dullest companions on earth. Not "The Anthologist", where the narrator (Paul Chowder) is such an interesting chap that we can't help but find the time has flown by.

He's a poet,...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Fred Moramarco rated it 3 of 5 stars

The plot of The Anthologist is minimal. Paul Chowder, a minor,some might say, failed, poet is working on an anthology of rhymed poetry and has a writer's block when it comes to completing the Introduction. He lives with a woman named Roz, and she is upset by his constant procrastination. So upset that she moves out, and that's pretty much what happens in the novel when it comes to plot. But Baker, via Chowder, tells us what we're in for instead of a lot of plotted action on the very first page:

H...more

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Jan 12, 2011 Adele Ward rated it 5 of 5 stars

Paul Chowder I Love You

Sadly Paul Chowder only exists in Nicholson Baker’s latest novel 'The Anthologist', which was more like finding a soul-mate to me than finding a good read. Baker’s main characters tend to have obsessions which he follows with the attention to detail their own compulsions drive them to focus on. But Chowder is a little different to the anti-heroes of previous controversial novels who gained Baker a massive following by displaying the power to freeze women and remove their c...more

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Jan 07, 2011 Jayaprakash Satyamurthy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Oct 21, 2010 Vivian Valvano rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is very clever and frequently amusing short novel. First-person narrator Paul is an American poet (!) and failed college poetry teacher who is trying to write an introduction his edited anthology of rhyming poems, ONLY RHYME, but he suffers from severe writer's block, not to mention some obvious symptoms of undiagnosed anxiety/possibly a bit of depression. Woebegone Paul takes us on summer's journey through his half-baked efforts, his doing anything and everything to avoid actually sitting...more

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Aug 15, 2010 Lobstergirl rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I approached The Anthologist warily, not exactly being a fan of Mr. Baker, or of the idea of fiction focused on poetry. And indeed I nearly ditched the book after 30 pages, unsure if I wanted to read an entire book about a, well, kind of loser - a guy whose girlfriend has just left him because he can't make himself write a 40 page introduction to a poetry anthology, who has no income, and who seems content having a mouse live behind the control panel of his stove. Truth be told I read the book b...more

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Mar 30, 2010 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature

When he's at his best, as he is here, Baker can make a claim to being a sort of American Mini-Nabokov: smart, clever, witty, insightful, and eager to teach.

Paul Chowder, the book's narrator, is a hard-luck unemployed schlub of a poet and professor who's procrastinating writing the overdue introduction to an anthology of poetry he's edited. Instead of writing the introduction, which his publisher is waiting impatiently for, he narrates this book, which ends up being a fantastic (if occasionally...more

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Feb 27, 2010 Kerfe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, poetry

I didn't just like this book, I enjoyed it. Start many things, never finish? Use distraction to keep from doing what I need to do? Hands working on one task, mind totally in another location? I identified; I sympathized. I laughed.

While he procrastinates, Paul performs useful tasks (like cleaning his office, walking the dog, mowing the lawn) and holds an inner conversation on poetry and rhyme, with side meditations on the downward spiral and mundane rhythms of his daily life. Though not really w...more

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Dec 31, 2009 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Would-be scriveners, versifiers and garret-dwellers of all stripes

Recommended to Alan by: Previous work by the author

Paul Chowder, the first-person protagonist of this breezy novel, has some significant things to say about the mechanics of poetry and its place in modern culture—you'll learn a lot here, most of it painlessly—but he is having desperate difficulty saying them in a coherent, linear fashion.

Consider this sequence, a paragraph-and-a-half, from early in the novel (p.55):

"Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a great line in a poem, wha

...more Paul Chowder, the first-person protagonist of this breezy novel, has some significant things to say about the mechanics of poetry and its place in modern culture—you'll learn a lot here, most of it painlessly—but he is having desperate difficulty saying them in a coherent, linear fashion.

Consider this sequence, a paragraph-and-a-half, from early in the novel (p.55):

"Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what's the first thing you do? You can't help it. Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping—there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries in meter. When you're an adult, you don't sob quite that way. But when you're a little kid, you go, "Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih." You actually cry in a duple meter.

"Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. (emphasis mine—APS) We've got to face that. And if that's true, do we want to give drugs so that people won't weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die."

That's good stuff, that is, evocative and observant even if debatable—and there's a lot more where that came from. The problem for Paul is that there are lots of other things, too. Digressions and hallucinations and discursions on lawn mowers and the nailing down of floors... Paul's endlessly capable of distracting himself from his task. Which is bad, because he's been commissioned to write the introduction to a poetry anthology, a forum where he pretty much has to be focused in order to get paid, and his editor is getting anxious. His writer's block has even started to affect his personal life—it's led to (or at least is the pretext for) the departure of his beloved girlfriend Roz.

The book itself, the physical object, is an entertaining package: graphically rich, with tunes and scanned lines of poetry breaking up the text. Yet it doesn't feel lightweight—there are no tricks played with the margins or font sizes. This is a full-sized, full-fledged book from a mature writer, and although I found it a quick read, 'twas a good one.(less)

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Oct 24, 2009 Christine rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is a plum. Nicholson Baker has written a totally amazing book that everyone should rush out and buy…immediately. I do not say these things lightly.

Let me start again, to give this book its just review. Is it possible for a book to be better than any graduate poetry seminar and still be hilarious? Yes, and the book that accomplished that is “The Anthologist.” It’s an unlikely combination, but when completed (to borrow a back-of-the-book blurb writer’s analogy) it’s like having witnesse...more This book is a plum. Nicholson Baker has written a totally amazing book that everyone should rush out and buy…immediately. I do not say these things lightly.

Let me start again, to give this book its just review. Is it possible for a book to be better than any graduate poetry seminar and still be hilarious? Yes, and the book that accomplished that is “The Anthologist.” It’s an unlikely combination, but when completed (to borrow a back-of-the-book blurb writer’s analogy) it’s like having witnessed a magic trick. Just how did Baker do that? Just how did he take his readers deep into the heart of the world of poetry and make it so idiosyncratic and entertaining all at the same time?

This novel begins with Paul Chowder, an unlikely hero in any case. Paul’s got two problems: One, he’s supposed to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry, and he’s plagued by writer’s block. He can’t even muster up any energy to write a flying spoon poem (despite an inch-thick folder of ideas). Paul’s second problem is his girlfriend, Roz, who’s just left him because she can’t take the non-writing any longer.

Then there is the ever daunting realization that the world is full of struggling poets, and he’s not getting any younger. He’s hanging on by a thread, living off his credit card and spending his days cleaning his office. He’s had poems published, he taught university English and quit. He’s a man of the world, but he lives in his own head most of the time.

To give just a small taste of this delicious novel, here’s his reaction to not seeing his poem in “The New Yorker” yet again:

“And I’ll flip through the new issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it’ll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I’m a poem, I’m a poem. No, you’re not! You’re an imposter, you’re a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.”

There are endless diatribes on poets, poetry, and the insider’s game of getting poetry published. There’s the battle between rhyme and free verse. There’s Paul smashing up his fingers as he slips on the stairs or cuts up bread.

It’s all mixed together like the first salad of summer, with just picked vegetables from the garden. It’s delicious and satisfying and when you are done with the book, you realize that it was actually good for you too. (Don’t tell anyone but there’s an endless amount of scholarly knowledge in there.) Yet the reason to buy this book (did I say immediately?) is that you are unlikely to find such a wonderful treasure of a novel elsewhere, a book that will perk up your reading hours, that will make you laugh and shake your head, and root for the unlikeliest of poetic heroes, Paul Chowder.

Don’t miss it.

(less)

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