Musings on the Way From Lunch

READING The Mezzanine is like discovering late at night at a sixth-grade sleep-over party that everyone dreams of their legs being unable to carry them away from a pursuer.

More like an expanded Andy Rooney monologue than a novel, The Mezzanine shows that the seemingly inconsequential details of life are actually universal.

The Mezzanine

By Nicholson Baker

New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

$15.95

Extraordinary in its simplicity, the book's plot recounts the author's lunch hour, as he muses on the escalator back to work. Although a routine lunch hour, Baker has a lot to think about on his way to the mezzanine where his office is located. How he breaks two shoelaces in two days, goes to lunch, buys new shoelaces and stops to read the Penguin Classic edition of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations:

Who bought this kind of book? I wondered. People like me, sporadic self-improvers, on lunch hours? Or only students? Or cabbies, wanting something to surprise their fares with, a book to wave in front of the Plexiglass? I had often wondered whether Penguin made money selling these paperbacks.

Although the book's narration consists solely of thoughts during the ride, the results are a fascinating--if sometimes tedious--look at the origins and uses of the objects and habits most take for granted.

In one chapter, for example, Baker laments the switch from paper drinking straws--which somehow anchored themselves to the bottom of soda cans--to plastic ones--which always seem to float out of the can. Is this progress, he asks.

Baker even picks apart the layout of a CVS drug-store. He addresses not only the physical set-up, but also the veiled meaning of the various products--"things were for sale whose use demanded nudity and privacy."

THE Mezzanine seems a virtual dictionary of questions of popular culture--who thought to wrinkle up the aluminum foil on the top of Jiffy-Pop popcorn pans? Why do men have trouble urinating in public bathrooms? Why do store clerks bag purchases that could be carried more easily by themselves? And why, after several years, do Baker's two shoelaces break within a day of each other?

Baker understands that these topics are trivial (they make for great dining-hall conversation), but they are fascinating nonetheless.

Luckily, Baker seldom searches for deeper meaning in his mental meanderings. The appeal of seeing one's own life reflected in these ruminations ("I've thought about that too!") allows them to stand by themselves--without contrived morals or conclusions.

Yet this format could lead to the "when I was little" syndrome--explaining everything in terms of childhood experience. And Baker addresses this potential problem head-on. He writes that he turns "something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something soupier, less precise, more falsely exotic than it really was."

With this explanation, Baker pleads that what could be a flaw in his narration is actually a quirk of memory.

In the end, however, the endless ponderances become tedious and listlike. Like the Borscht Belt comedian who prefaces each joke with "Did you ever notice how..." or "Don't you hate it when...," Baker's reflections sometimes seem forced.

Small, single-spaced footnotes that permeate the text--some for pages at a time--do little to aid the book's flow.

The placement of text in these footnotes appears arbitrary. Topics discussed in the footnotes are just as tangential as the those in the body of the text: Baker might as well have written the whole book in footnotes.

If read in small doses, however, The Mezzanine is comical, incisive and painfully truthful. Readers may not change their philosophy, but they will never look at the CVS store in the Square in the same way.