embers of obsession

a box of matches by nicholson baker(chatto & windus, (pounds) 10)

IN two previous books, Double Fold and The Size Of Thoughts, Nicholson Baker did everyone a favour by fearlessly investigating the murky world of libraries. With messianic fervour and the forensic attention to detail that is his copyright, he pulverised a generation of librarians for pulping hard copies of newspapers in favour of microfilm and composed a battle hymn to the indispensability of card catalogues. It led to Baker being dubbed "the Erin Brockovich of the library world". In his own way, and in his peculiar theatre of operation, he made as much of an impact as Woodward and Bernstein with their Watergate revelations.

Baker is a man obsessed, writing at length about the things most of us barely give a second thought, such as lunch hours, afternoon naps, and telephone sex. In U And I, he managed to chisel a whole book out of his admiration and envy of John Updike, even though he had only met his hero once and had read just a few of his books. Like Andy Warhol, he seems intent on stopping time, or at least slowing it down, the more closely to chart its passing. Like Proust, he realises time in language, imbuing everyday objects and humdrum experience with microscopic significance. It is a method that is simultaneously deadly serious and hilariously funny and, on the evidence of his latest book, A Box Of Matches, profoundly moving.

A Box Of Matches is labelled a novel, which stretches even that elastic term. In length it is short, just 180 dinky and generously spaced pages. The narrator is a man in his 40s called Emmett who lives with his wife Claire and their two children, Phoebe and Henry, in Maine. Emmett is a freelance editor of medical textbooks, who has taken to rising while it is still dark. Day by day, he logs his thoughts as he lights the fire or brews a cup of coffee. He writes limpidly, Pooterishly, invariably opening with a Pepysian "Good morning" and stating the exact time. Then he digresses.

The tone is mordant, elegiac, that of an apparently decent, simple man making his way in life. The difference between Emmett and an ordinary Joe, however, is the way he writes, which is reminiscent of Thoreau or EB White after he retreated from New York to Maine. "You have to make a fire in dark: it must become its own source of light," Emmett writes. "In fact you have to do as much in the dark as possible, including prepare the coffee, because when you turn on the light, your limbic system is hauled into the waking world, and you don't want that."

As he works his way through a box of matches, Emmett illuminates his history and personality. He reads Robert Service's poem, The Men That Don't Fit In, and loves to listen to James Taylor. Thanks to his grandfather - "a great snorer", as well as the author of Fungal Diseases In Humans - he was one of the few teenagers who could spell "rhinoentomophthoromycosis". Once, he tipped a cup of root beer into his good briefcase and used some foul language. He's glad there are 52 weeks in the year - "it seems like the right number" - and finds interesting the "congruity" with a pack of cards. He shaves off his beard because it's too white then grows it back again because the sight of him beardless shocks Claire, who has never known him clean- shaven. He notes the price of oranges and muses on the efficacy of toilet plungers. Everything fascinates him in equal measure; he is unjudgemental to a fault.

In any other hands, A Box Of Matches would reek of tedium or pretension but Baker's realisation of the nondescript is hypnotic. "I just laid a Quaker Oats container on the fire, which had burned down to a dim red glow," he writes. "The cylinder flamed, blindingly, and the Quaker in the black hat, smiling, was engulfed. What is left now looks like some war-blackened martello tower on a distant coast."

It's as if Joyce has been transposed to Maine and Stephen Dedalus has become a family man, more worried about hose organisers and how to deal with a colony of ants than becoming an artist. As daylight comes up, nothing much happens, no big events or major traumas. Emmett is Everyman, bobbing on a stream of consciousness, desperate to hang on to the moment, loving his children and his wife and their adopted duck.

This is a novel without a plot, consisting of 33 chapters which flare like matches, then expire. Emmett is an eccentric who invents suicidal fantasies to send himself to sleep. There are hints of depression and hypochondria but nothing too terrible to worry about. As Emmett says: "I can't die: I have to be able to check whether, for example, the proportion of wildflowers to grass seeds is too rich and must be adjusted down."

He can find the meaning of life in an envelope. He can "get to know" a dish by washing it. All human life is here, in this wonderful book, in the state of Maine on a cold winter's morning before the sun rises.

Copyright 2003 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.