Nicholson Baker may well be the most unpredictable writer working today. To take a random sampling of his output, which is the only kind of sampling his output permits, he has dissected his obsession with John Updike (U & I: A True Story); written a phone-sex novelization (Vox) that was given as a gift by the twentieth century’s most infamous intern to her boss; and condemned Churchill’s prosecution of the war against Germany (Human Smoke). His shifting interests resemble the trivial pursuit called a “Wikirace,” wherein participants try to get from, say, “ukelele” to “stem cell research” in the fewest possible Wikipedia links.
It is thus not at all surprising that Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist, is about a mid-list poet called Paul Chowder who is too ineffectual even to complete the introduction to his forthcoming anthology of formal verse, Only Rhyme.[1] After all, why wouldn’t Baker make a lateral move from an appalling piece of historical revisionism to a delightful and moving meditation on procrastination, failure, and poetry? And why wouldn’t Baker take as his protagonist a man driven to distraction by subjects great and small—though, in this case, mostly small?
The Anthologist is a rambling monologue, and it sounds marvelously, not to mention uncomfortably, like a contemporary poet. “What a juicy word that is, ‘divulge,’” says Paul on page one, “Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.” This
