Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406190145
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: E4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by DAN GRIBBIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I should have been prepared for the type of book that Nicholson Baker offers in his latest novel, "The Fermata."
With Quality Paperback Book Club deciding to include a special edition of "The Story of O" in its monthly catalog, it's obvious that chic porn is coming of age in the mass market. Baker's previous novel "Vox" established him as hot, marketable property. It's a slick transcription of an artfully obscene phone conversation, an extended 900-call masturbatory fantasy burning at both ends. Random House must have been ecstatic to find Baker willing to stick to the formula in producing "The Fermata."
The novel that resulted is an oversexed adolescent's dream. The cleverly contrived symbol on the dust-jacket cover is, at the same time, a peering eye and a half-exposed breast, but this book requires no furtive thumbing through to find the hot pages on which the protagonist, Arno Strine, is manipulating or describing genitalia ~ male or female, organic or artificial. Trying to find a page on which he is not doing one of the above would be the challenge.
I'm sounding prudish. Culturally retrograde. Blind to the subtle nuances of postmodernist decadence. Let me pause, then, to go on record as a staunch, even awestruck admirer of Nicholson Baker's talent. He is a marvelous writer. Reading "The Fermata" is like going to hear Itzak Perlman and finding him in a mood to do Oscar Brand. Fun for a while, but hardly the greatest use of his talent. You hope to catch him on a better day.
The best passages in "The Fermata" are short, delightful dissertations on subjects as various as the effect of wearing contact lenses and the well-developed sense that women have of being admired from behind (in what\ Arno Strine calls their "dorsal space").
Stylistically brilliant, Baker packs more sheer linguistic power into a\ paragraph than any writer I've encountered. Robert Coover comes close. More\ about him in a moment.
What is so disappointing about "The Fermata" is that it is the fictional\ equivalent of a one-joke film. Arno Strine has supposedly discovered, in the\ fourth grade, that through various means (which tend to come and go as he\ matures), he can stop time for the rest of the world while leaving himself\ free to take a stroll, catch up on his work, and peek up a few skirts before\ snapping his fingers to put the world back into motion. What would you do if you had this power? An intriguing question, and Baker's account of Arno's\ development and exploration of his unique power offers an occasional\ illuminating perspective.
But the novel ends up focusing almost exclusively on sexual gratification,\ largely onanistic, a subject on which it delivers an explosion of pornographic\ energy which largely prevents it from touching other dimensions of the human condition on any meaningful level.
There is, on the other hand, a good deal of remarkable technical experimentation going on ~ the area in which Baker's work begs comparison with Robert Coover's. Both writers are capable of marvelous narrative "tours de force," manipulating point of view with dizzying brilliance.
My ultimate theory about what goes awry in "The Fermata" is that Baker is a control freak who is intrigued by the idea that he can tittle us into reading the soft-core concoctions of his would-be pornographer Arno. The joke is on us, presumably, if we consent to keep reading through chapters that consist entirely of pornographic stories that Arno has written so that he can stop time and plant them where unsuspecting women will find them.
Perhaps it would be fair to turn Baker's trick on the reader back on him. Arno's ability to stop time is an interesting premise in its reflection on the timebound human condition, but his obsession with sex does raise a question about the time that Baker himself spent writing this book. As the creator of Arno's pornography (he prefers to call it "rotting"), Baker may well see himself as a fictional pioneer, spending his writing time extending the range of awareness about our fantasizing, voyeuristic selves.
I suspect that "The Fermata reflects less lofty ambitions. Granted, a fellow has to make a living, but I still have a hard time believing that rotting away with Arno represents the best use of Nicholson Baker's time.
\ Dan Gribbin teaches literature and film at Ferrum College. He is fiction editor of "Artemis."
by CNB