We're all a little crazy...

Nicholson Baker’s debut novel, follows Howie, a ‘typical’ office worker in a mall. The entirety of the book occurs while Howie is riding the escalator to the mezzanine, where his office is located. The plot of the book is defined, but does not follow a typical narrative arc. Instead, we follow the random tangents and digressions of Howie reminiscing on his lunch break to purchase new shoe laces and various food items and of his entire past life. As readers of his documented lunch break—almost like a personal journal—we often question Howie’s sanity and normalcy. His tendencies to hyper-fixate on ordinary, mundane details of daily life force us to confront the fact that Howie might not be just an average office worker. However, to his coworkers and those around him, he is a perfectly normal, pleasant, and somewhat forgettable person.

Many would argue that Howie has a loose screw, but actually, his mind is just an unfiltered notebook for all the distracting and off-topic thoughts that we all quietly harbor but have learned to suppress. Rather than being ‘a little off,’ Howie embodies the curious and creative urges that defined us as children. Howie isn’t abnormal for taking the time to notice how everyday things work and feel; he is just the narrator who was brave enough to stand up and acknowledge that life only becomes interesting when you notice the uninteresting.

One of my favorite passages in the book comes from Howie enlightening us of his 8 major advances in his life. On page 20-21, he describes his realization that sweeping is actually fun. Not only does this passage reflect the observant nature of Howie, it also captured a feeling I had never thought to articulate. He describes each action in such unusual language: for example he says, “I found that the act of sweeping around the legs of the chair and the casters of the stereo cabinet and the corners of the bookcase, outlining them with my curving broom-strokes, as if I were putting each chair leg and caster and doorjamb in quotation marks, made me see these familiar features of my room with freshened receptivity” (Baker). His original approach to depicting scenes like this are truly representative of a child’s mind. In describing L.’s favorite part of sweeping, Howie paints a picture of a “ruler-edged” gray line, diminishing in its thickness towards nothingness, but never actually disappearing, almost like a function slowly approaching an asymptote (this is MY metaphor NOT Howie’s).

In encountering Bob Leary on the escalator platform, Howie realizes that if he steps onto the up-escalator, would have to endure a painfully-awkward interaction with Bob. To avoid this, Howie pulls one of the most ridiculous maneuvers: he physically jabs the air above him with his index finger, pantomiming a sudden epiphany popping into his head, and spins to walk away in another direction. As hilarious as it is to imagine this scene, I have to admit that I am guilty of doing very similar things to avoid even just an acknowledgement of acquaintanceship. I have pretended to receive notifications on my phone to look away, dramatically slowed down my cadence to avoid an encounter, and sometimes dramatically pretending to have lost an important item, and briskly stripping my backpack off in an attempt to find said item.

Through the novel, there are many more instances where Howie’s inner monologue felt almost painfully similar to my own. Granted, there are also many descriptions and experiences that I could have never imagined in a million years. Yet even in those descriptions, I can understand the unshielded curiosity behind each seed of thought. In this novel, Howie delineates the line between childhood and adulthood: you become a "true adult" only when the total number of your adult thoughts outweigh your child thoughts (Baker 54-59), however the childhood curiosity of Howie does not seem to dwindle. At the end of the day, Howie is not an eccentric anomaly or awkward freak; he is the embodiment of the certain craziness that we all have, reminding us to defamiliarize the normal.

Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine. Grove Press, 2010.