Easily one of the strangest books I've come across. It's nominally a novel, it even says so on the cover. But there are very few elements herein that you would associate with a novel, such as characters or an identifiable plot. Well, there is a minor plot, I suppose: the narrator is taking an escalator to his office on the mezzanine and notices that he has a broken shoelace. That's about it. This very minimal plot structure serves mostly as a jumping off point for the narrator's many (many many many) mental expeditions into just about any topic you could think of. His makeshift shoelace repair reminds him of the nine or so life-changing, time-saving adjustments he's made in his life thus far, all of which are neatly enumerated and described in painstaking, obsessive detail. He discourses at length on the phenomenon that causes men to say "oop!" instead of "oops!" and on men that will display their whistling virtuosity in the office bathroom, but nowhere else. Riding the escalator, he becomes fascinated at how the custodian cleans the escalator railing— by standing on one of the stairs and dragging a wet rag across it as he rides up. Later, he is somehow reminded of how much his life has changed since the advent of the paper milk carton to replace bottles. You, the reader, are dumbstruck at how much observational detail Baker can wring out of something as mundane as a milk carton, and how he is able to make such huge discursive leaps of topic. Footnotes abound, and often span several pages as he describes the minutiae of some other detail that is only tangentially related to the main detail he's describing. If this sounds like an indulgent literary conceit to you, you're probably right. But any perceived wankiness is forgiven and forgotten as most of it is actually pretty interesting and funny to read. Baker has a unique talent for describing the most unremarkable things in life —such as the unique pleasure derived from the refilling a stapler with staples— with aplomb and dry wit, and he is evidently well aware of his preternatural fixations on the things that go unnoticed by most people. Reading something like this, you often find yourself saying, "Yeah, I enjoy such-and-such mundane task too, but I guess I never really noticed how satisfying I find it." You also often find yourself forgetting that you're reading a novel. Indeed, it reads much more like the journal scribblings of a park-bench obsessive-compulsive outcast, and the first-person narrative doesn't do much to dissuade you of that notion. You also start to suspect that this novel is in fact autobiographical, and that perhaps the skeletal plot is only there to mask the fact that Baker is revealing his true nature. Perhaps not surprisingly, Baker's literary style is often described as Seinfeldian. But the fact that this book predates the Seinfeld show by about four years both invalidates that comparison and confirms the unsullied uniqueness of this work. And besides, the format and mainstream appeal of Seinfeld would have been highly compromised if they ever endeavored to pursue something like refilling a stapler with even 1/100th of the detail Baker does. Moreover, Seinfeld's oeuvre had much more to do with social or interpersonal weirdness than with the finer points of the simple, ineffable pleasures one can find in everyday life. So it turns out that the Seinfeld comparison is wholly inaccurate, and just serves to illustrate how starved we are for a cultural reference to describe something that goes into exacting detail about things that aren't talked about much. David Foster Wallace might be a more contemporary point of reference, if only for the footnote fetishism and obsessively detailed descriptions, but then, I've never read any of DFW's novels (only his essays), so this is just a guess. For readers who dig intriguing literary experimentation and don't mind a little bit of writerly self-indulgence, I highly recommend The Mezzanine. Like Vonnegut, Richard Powers, and David Foster Wallace, you're constantly rewarded for paying close attention to the little literary flourishes and nuances. But if you require an exciting plot or identifiable characters in your fiction, I'd imagine you'd just find Baker's schtick pretty irritating. Postscript: around the time I was reading The Mezzanine, I was reading an issue of Newsweek in a hospital waiting room, and learned that Nicholson Baker's latest endeavor is a book in which the dialogue consists of two men plotting to assassinate President Bush. Christ, the guy's got cojones!