The Mezzanine
by Nicholson Baker
The recap
Almost nothing happens in Nicholson Baker's first novel, and that is exactly the point. Howie, a young office worker, is riding an escalator back up to the mezzanine of his building at the end of his lunch hour, having just bought a new pair of shoelaces. The whole book unfolds inside that brief ride, or rather inside his head, as he turns over the small marvels of modern life: why a shoelace frays when it does, the engineering of milk cartons, the satisfaction of perforated paper, the evolution of the plastic straw. Much of the thinking spills into footnotes, some of which swallow most of a page, while a paperback of Marcus Aurelius sits in his hand like a quiet joke about meditation. Baker's attention is so exact that ordinary objects begin to glow. It is a novel made almost entirely of digressions, a comedy of noticing that turns a lunch break into an epic of the overlooked, and it changes the way an escalator feels forever after.
Why read it
For readers who love language for its own sake and anyone whose mind wanders into the hidden design of everyday things.
Fun facts
- 01
The Mezzanine was Nicholson Baker's first novel.
- 02
The office building and its escalator draw on Baker's memories of Midtown Plaza in Rochester, New York.
- 03
Near the end of the book comes a multi-page footnote on the subject of footnotes themselves.
- 04
Early reviews split sharply: Kirkus found it numbingly dull, while The New York Review of Books praised how it makes everyday objects look new.
