The Mezzanine - by Nicholson Baker (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"A seriously funny book."--Salman Rushdie

"It pulverized me."--Hernan Diaz

An elegant new edition of Nicholson Baker's stunning and highly influential first novel, a witty and boundlessly inventive homage to the profound, neglected details of everyday working life

The Mezzanine is a novel told through one man's ride up an escalator in the office building where he works. In the hands of Nicholson Baker, the bestselling and award-winning author of Vox and The Anthologist, this journey is transformed into a stylistically dazzling reappraisal of the objects and rituals of our lives. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one's shoes, Baker at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. His sharp storytelling and existential humor bring clarity to the odd angles of the ordinary.

Since its first publication in 1988, this novel has become a perennial favorite of readers and writers looking to better understand our uncanny everyday, and has become a cult classic of modern literature. In less than 150 brilliant pages, The Mezzanine manages to wryly interrogate the logic of modernity, celebrate the strange reality of life in the 1980s, and express something of the profundity of human existence.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Mezzanine

One of Time Out's 1,000 Books to Change Your Life
One of The New York Times' "22 Funniest Novels Since Catch-22"

"Wonderfully readable, in fact gripping, with surprising bursts of recognition, humor and wonder."--Washington Post

"The Mezzanine is as enjoyable, brilliant, and, ahem, Proustian as anything you'll read this year . . . Off-kilter and relentlessly perceptive . . . The result, while reading, is a delightful sense of déjà pensé, and, after the book is closed, a residual heightened awareness, a feeling that we've been paying more attention to the world than we thought."--NPR

"A very funny book . . . Its 135 pages probably contain more insight into life as we live it today than anything currently on the bestseller list."--New York Times

"The Mezzanine is as sure-footed an exploration of late-capitalist office life as The Pale King, but what manifests as ballooning boredom in Wallace's IRS agents is everted into a fascination with the microscopic in Baker's cubicle drone . . . [with] awesome descriptive firepower, formidable vocabulary, unrepentant garrulousness, and occasional indulgence in de Quincy-style footnotes."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"A celebration . . . The Mezzanine sings praises to seemingly humdrum minutiae, with especially keen-eyed attention given to the mechanical marvels of modern life . . . All these miniatures are dexterously and wittily delineated, and now and then, engineering a little miracle of blended exactitude and fancy, he manages to bring an everyday (and hence unnoticed) object into so pristine a focus that we see it as though for the first time."--New York Review of Books

"In the course of Baker's novel, idle musings accrue into indulgent, lavishly layered perceptions of everyday objects eventually become an ode to the infinite richness of even the most mundane phenomena. Howie may be isolated, but through his own scrupulous attention he is returned to the world's wild openness."--New Yorker

"Few books can have devoted such detailed attention to their events, and found such exquisite pleasure there . . . Of course it's funny: such finely wrought consideration of what we'd usually only begin to notice at the far periphery of perception. But the fun is also in the heartfelt precision with which it's delivered."--Guardian

"[Baker] perfected a style of hyper-attentive prose that was both of a piece with the old New Yorker's editorial tenor and an exception to it--a style that pushed creative renderings of everyday detail so far that the familiar took on strange, ecstatic hues . . . The Mezzanine is a slim book of Proust-like protensity."--Slate

"Anyone who knows me knows I'll never stop recommending this novel about a guy buying milk and shoelaces and working in a cubicle. The deceptive simplicity of The Mezzanine reveals the beauty of human experience in the mundane details. While scene and detail provide external verisimilitude for so much good writing, the map of the narrator's thoughts in this novel feels so lifelike, yet also, oddly, so soothing, that it makes one glad to be alive, even in a cubicle."--Literary Hub

"A modern Proust . . . With its enjoyably digressive footnotes, this short but hugely inventive novel helped point the way for the audacious styles of writers such as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace."--Guardian

"A book about the mind electrically at odds with vacancy and repose; about the astonishing turbulence in the little grey cells of little grey people like you, and me, and Howie . . . I congratulate Mr. Baker on a brilliant performance."--London Review of Books

"An innovative, intimate novel, The Mezzanine helps us recognize the thoughts we share with others, fostering a sense of belonging, and the ways we see things differently, fostering a sense of identity."--Los Angeles Times

"A few months ago, I read Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine for the first time. It pulverized me. This short novel (the narrator humbly calls it an "opusculum"), narrating a man's journey on an escalator from the ground floor to the mezzanine, is one of the most beautiful reflections I've ever encountered on how we dwell in time, on how transcendence may be found in the mundane, on how we gradually become the sum of our habits, on how difference and repetition are inextricably entangled. Formally, it's unlike any other novel I've ever read. Stylistically, it's perfection."--Hernan Diaz, New York Times

"A constant delight . . . among the year's best."--Boston Globe

"Brilliant . . . The Mezzanine is like a literary snow globe . . . The footnotes capture the interrupted nature of attention, as well as the enjoyment of giving over to wonder . . . Readers are propelled forward by the sheer pleasure of reading."--Ploughshares

"[Baker] has been praised, widely and enthusiastically, for his style, humor, originality, and empathy . . . He has a Dutch-painterly reverence for everyday rituals and objects--a belief that they will start to glow with significance if we only pay close enough attention . . . What's disguised by Baker's cheerful tone, however, is his passionately sustained conviction that we should honor the details of our lives rather than getting carried away by projections and abstractions."--Paris Review

"Hugely inventive . . . Baker is brilliant."--Observer

"There is a dazzling, energetic propulsion to Baker's prose, which pays an anthropological level of interest to the smallest interactions . . . Everything is a potential madeleine."--Times Literary Supplement

"Baker's irresistibly readable short novel presents the quirky and often hilarious inner life of a thoroughly modern office worker . . . Through the elegant manipulation of time, and sharp, defining memories of childhood, the narrator dissects each item of apparent cultural flotsam with the thoroughness of a prosaic, though wacky, technical manual. The rambling 'footnotes' alone are worth the price of this cheerfully original novel."--Publishers Weekly

"Baker's remarkable first novel, The Mezzanine, published in 1988, combined scholarly footnotes, impossibly minute hyperdescription, and gee-whiz sincerity, innovations that Wallace's Infinite Jest would help standardize a decade later . . . [Baker] marries a postmodernist elasticity of form to a realist curiosity about the vicissitudes of everyday life."--Nation

"A very funny, enjoyable novel."--Library Journal

"The Mezzanine's ambitions are as grand as its obsessions are small, and out of that disparity comes a refined and engaging chatter strung about great jokes. . . Andy Warhol would have loved this book: he would have bought 2,000 copies just for a laugh. Everybody else should make do with just the one."--Independent

"The Mezzanine is a coming-of-age novel, and arguably one of the best . . . This is what makes The Mezzanine both (i.) deeply funny and (ii.) oddly reassuring: it's hard to think of any example in the vast archives of literature that so effortlessly characterize those half-thoughts we all have when our mind starts to wander . . . The Mezzanine finds Howie at a frustrating loose-end moment of his life, but it is still a life filled privately with joy, and there's something hopeful to be taken from it."--Granta

"A dense, luminous delight . . . The novel is gentle--the central conflict, if there is one, is a broken shoelace--but deeply funny, and somehow also wise . . . It includes some of the finest dissections of corporate rituals, performances, and intimacies I've encountered . . . It is also surprisingly moving."--Anna Wiener, New Yorker

About the Author

Nicholson Baker has written eighteen books, including Vox, The Anthologist, Human Smoke, and Baseless--also an art book, The World on Sunday, in collaboration with his wife Margaret Brentano. Several of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and he has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Herman Hesse Prize. Baker and his wife live on the Penobscot River in Maine.