1/30/2024 0 Comments Avowed by the moonlight novelAlthough often associated with microscopy, Baker’s aesthetic actually has more to do with temporal expansion than spatial enlargement. Traveling Sprinkler continues a Baker tradition of introducing conceits (the phone-sex conversation, the time stoppage, the portal to a sexual fantasyland) that evoke his own distinctive artistic process. And as in other Baker novels, the author’s learning is worn lightly, refracted through the unassuming (and less incisive) words of a narrator who does not imagine that, for all his arcane knowledge and strong convictions, he is any smarter or wiser than his readers. He lives in aching intimacy with the past, but is fascinated by the mechanical and aesthetic idiosyncrasies of the very newest machinery. Chowder harbors a deep discontent about the state of the world, but seems to like virtually all of its inhabitants. Chowder harbors a deep discontent about the state of the world, but seems to like virtually all of its inhabitants.īaker’s faithful will find themselves in familiar territory with Traveling Sprinkler, whose chatty protagonist exhibits the trademark paradoxical qualities of so many previous Baker narrators. The exercise succeeds better, on the other hand, as a glimpse into Nicholson Baker’s own method, capturing part of what makes Baker, with his gifts for digressive sensory descriptions of memories, so good at writing fiction. His distended reconstruction of the recollected bottom of a swimming pool would seem to epitomize how poorly suited this earnest poet is to the art of songwriting. The diving expedition continues, summoning a torrent of images (“a pale pink piece of chewing gum, the very same piece of pink baby-Jesus gum I’d seen at the drinking fountain at school”), recollections of snorkeling in Greece with his grandparents, and associated hypotheses about Minoan Crete and Plato’s Atlantis.Īt the close of the exercise, which has wildly exceeded its allotted 10 minutes, Chowder is no closer to his elusive hit song. As he plunges beneath the surface, memories of early swim instruction emerge, but before he arrives at his destination the timer rings. Early one morning, he sets the alarm on his iPhone for 10 minutes and proceeds to dive, as instructed, toward an imaginary object, attending dutifully to “how it affects all seven of your senses, including your organic sense and your kinesthetic sense.”įrom his bed, Chowder returns to the swimming pool at the YMCA day camp of his youth, stretching to reach the drain at the bottom of the pool. Having already purchased a guitar, lessons, a 49-key MIDI keyboard, Logic music software, and a $700 stereophonic microphone, Chowder consults an e-book that promises to help him write lyrics through a series of mental diving exercises. Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s new novel, Traveling Sprinkler, wants badly to compose a pop song.
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