The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

The best books are the ones that can read your mind

I learned about Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine during a writing class. The title was mentioned by a classmate as handouts about narrative time circulated the room. This classmate told the class about the narrator in the book, how on his way to work, he simply rides an escalator through a mezzanine further into an office building. This description sold the book short, because as interesting as it might sound to have one man’s escalator ride fill an entire novel, it was far too easy for me to minimize whatever the book’s accomplishments could be by assuming I already knew exactly what it was (Escalator ride, a novel about).

My classmate’s description didn’t mention the lengths the narrator would go to when recounting in excruciating detail (not cliche to use that phrase here) what can only be described as the stuff of life. 

Stuff, in this sense, is literally stuff: shoelaces, plastic straws, ice-cube trays, milk, paper towel—not excluding the maintenance workers, milkmen and cashiers who distribute the stuff—and also the figurative stuff of life: reading, small talk, existential dread (“Job, should I quit?”), childhood memories, human behaviour in the workplace, in public washrooms, while standing in line, and, yes, while riding an escalator. 

That phrase in quotes/parentheses in the previous sentence refers to an index in the book titled Subject of Thought where the narrator sorts his thoughts by “periodicity,” a unit of measure he's created to illustrate the recurring nature of his thoughts.

Back in my writing class, that brief description of The Mezzanine also didn’t mention the sentences; the sharp, expounding, workhorse sentences of varying lengths, zig-zagging their way across each page. The same brain responsible for extracting the excruciating details from the literal and figurative stuff of life had clearly put an equal amount of labor—excruciating care—into the construction of each sentence. I can’t think of any reason as to why a reader might feel anything other than satisfaction while reading them.

And, finally, the footnotes, also curiously absent from my classmate’s description, as the use of footnotes in The Mezzanine almost automatically differentiates the novel from many others. Novels can be—and are—about anything, including the mundane (comes with the territory), but few novels make use of footnotes. 

I have to admit here I find footnotes to be a drag. I don’t like scanning to the bottom of a page to read an additional paragraph or paragraphs before jumping back to the original text. I’ve read other novels with footnotes and can appreciate why they are used but often find myself impatient with idea. What good is it to be forced to move around so haphazardly? Footnotes feel like a kind of marketing ploy or writerly grandstanding, as if the text isn’t enough. (I also don’t care for prologues; if it’s important, call it chapter one. [Maybe get rid of the prologue and chapters altogether!]).

Of course, this idea of footnotes depends on how a reader might engage with the book—if the text within the footnotes is necessary to the narrative, then the inclusion of their contents in the original text, and not as extra text, wouldn’t much change the reader’s understanding of the story; we are reading words on a page, from beginning to end, after all. 

However, if there exists an experience of the footnoted book where a reader might not engage with the footnotes (as one might be so inclined to do—or not do—like when reading a textbook) and the text within the footnotes is considered to be lesser text, then the experience of the book is open to a great deal of interpretation, or misunderstanding, as well as the risk of sacrificing the story for the form. I’m not sure a writer would consider the footnoted text to be lesser text; it doesn’t feel right.

(Since writing whatever this piece of writing is, I have read Baker’s U and I which is no different in prose style or narrative voice from The Mezzanine—though it is nonfiction—and his digressions are just as lengthy and analytical as the ones in The Mezzanine. For me, all that differed, as a reader, was an uninterrupted linear reading experience.)

But there are few things I love more (in life) than when a work connects a story to the form of a story—content meeting form, form meeting content. 

While reading The Mezzanine, as I begrudgingly followed the superscript numbers and strained to read every footnote, I found the use of footnotes as the scaffolding of the novel itself to feel true enough to the story: from the first page, the narrator paints himself as neurotic and obsessed with detail. So of course a book about (or written by) this particular character would contain footnotes. Seems like a no-brainer! And yet, I needed more, in my mind, to justify the decision.

Then it happened, quite suddenly, the moment I was all in on Baker’s use of footnotes. In a moment of high-minded self-awareness the narrator references the use of footnotes in the text, which, for me, broke a narrative wall and pulled me closer toward the idea of the novel. And it doesn’t come until later, almost at the end, when the narrator, as if knowing what I was thinking—mere moments before mentioning the “luxuriant incidentalism of the footnotes” no less—tells us his problem, in general, with reading books, “...you always had to pick up again at the very thing that made you stop reading… .”

Isn’t that the truth? Especially so when reading The Mezzanine. I guess the best books are the ones that can read your mind, whether you know it or not. As for my classmate’s description, it probably could have used a footnote.